Mastodawn

Okay, folks, gather 'round, because you are not going to believe this one. My friend who is working at NASA told me this confidential news , but i can finally spill the beans: NASA is officially running NetBSD.

Yeah, you heard that right. Turns out, when you need an OS that can literally run on a potato *and* survive the vacuum of space without a hiccup, you do not mess around. They have been working under wraps with their deep space division on something they are calling "AstroBSD."

Apparently, the Perseverance rover on Mars? Yeah, it is not just taking pretty pictures; it is crunching data with a custom NetBSD kernel.

This just proves what foundation has been saying forever: "Of course it runs NetBSD!" From your ancient router to a rover on another planet.

#NetBSD #NASA #AstroBSD #AprilFools #OpenSource #Portability #MarsRover #SpaceTech #GeekHumor

Marios E 2d ago

@jaypatelani I used FreeBSD for many years and only recently got into NetBSD. I got to say that so far I am loving it and it is currently my daily driver !!!

Ra (Freyja) (it/its)𒀭𒈹𒍠𒊩 2d ago

@jaypatelani thank you for tagging this as not true because I would have actually believed that except no, there's no NetBSD BSP for the BAE RAD750 and friends afaik. I think that runs VXWorks?

Michael Richardson 1d ago

@freya @jaypatelani Yeah, so we (NetBSD ML) heard 20+ years ago that NASA was using the NetBSD fork of the 4BSD network stack. Replacing the 1990-era VxWorks fork of the 4BSD network stack.

48kRAM but with parity 1d ago

@jaypatelani I'd love to read more about this. Are they planning to publish any papers?

do check hashtags in post and today's date

48kRAM but with parity 1d ago

@jaypatelani right. Some locations begin making the internet useless today before others. Sigh

@jaypatelani Time zones create latency in realization of news on the first day of April 😂

scrottie (he/him/them)1d ago

@jaypatelani I started using NetBSD at version 0.9 and eventually stopped now many years ago because of instability... I may need to give it another go!

𝐩fᵣ 1d ago

@scrottie @jaypatelani all I ask for is better wifi chip and trackpad support for laptops

Karl Auerbach 1d ago

@jaypatelani I heard some stories that the Mars rovers were running my (Epilogue Technology) SNMP agent/server code - but with Wind River's OS. I do not know whether this is true or not.

@karlauerbach it's true till 02042026

@jaypatelani this one almost got me