NetBSD Lifecycle: End Of Life And Support Status
Last updated on January 23, 2024
NetBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system. It is extremely small, making it very scalable; from being used in servers to embedded systems. It supports many architectures and system types.
Support status guide
End of life (EOL) is the end of a product’s useful life. When a product reaches the end of its life cycle, the manufacturer no longer supports it. The following table explains the different phases of a product’s lifecycle. Testing status is when the product is initially released and EOL is when product support is no longer offered. The time between these two points is the support timeframe.
Testing
The software is not yet publicly available. It is in testing phase i.e., alpha, beta, release preview etc.
Active
The software is actively supported by the vendor.
Phasing Out
The software will soon reach its end of life. You need to look for upgrade or migration options. The software will automatically go into phasing out status 2 months before end of life.
End Of Life
The software is no longer supported by the vendor. You need to make sure your system and environment are safe.
Version
Released
Active Support
Security Support
(14 February 2022)
(17 July 2018)
(14 February 2022)
(25 September 2015)
(17 July 2018)
(30 June 2020)
(17 October 2012)
(25 September 2015)
(17 August 2018)
(29 April 2009)
(17 October 2012)
(25 October 2015)
A new major version of NetBSD is released every 2 to 3 years, and a minor update is released also every 6-12 months.
A NetBSD version is typically supported 1 month after the next second major update. This means that when version “N” is released, the NetBSD version (N-2) loses support almost a month later.
The developers of NetBSD offer support for the following 3 branches of NetBSD, all of which are provided with bug fixes and security patches at any given time:
- NetBSD-current: Offers daily snapshots of the development source code tree.
- Latest Major Release: This channel releases the latest stable major version of NetBSD.
- Prior Major Release: The previous major release of NetBSD or the second-last latest version.
EOLs
