NetBSD/i386 1.3

NetBSD/i386 1.3 is the sixth formal release of NetBSD/i386.
NetBSD 1.3.3 is a patch release which should be used in preference to NetBSD 1.3.

Charles Hannum and Frank van der Linden are the maintainers of NetBSD/i386.

Supported Hardware

NetBSD/i386 1.3 runs on ISA (AT-Bus), EISA, PCI, and VL-bus systems with 386-family processors, with or without math coprocessors. It does NOT support MCA systems, such as some IBM PS/2 systems. The minimal configuration is said to require 4M of RAM and 50M of disk space, though we do not know of anyone running with a system quite this minimal today. To install the entire system requires much more disk space (the unpacked binary distribution, without sources, requires at least 65M without counting space needed for swap space, etc), and to run X or compile the system, more RAM is recommended. (4M of RAM will actually allow you to run X and/or compile, but it won't be speedy. Note that until you have around 16M of RAM, getting more RAM is more important than getting a faster CPU.)

Supported devices include:

• Floppy controllers.
• MFM, ESDI, IDE, and RLL hard disk controllers.
• SCSI host adapters:
  • Adaptec AHA-154xA, -B, -C, and -CF
  • Adaptec AHA-174x
  • Adaptec AIC-6260 and AIC-6360 based boards, including the Adaptec AHA-152x, Adaptec AHA-1460 (PCMCIA), and the SoundBlaster SCSI host adapter. (Note that you cannot boot from these boards if they do not have a boot ROM; only the AHA-152x and motherboards using this chip are likely to be bootable, consequently.)
  • Adaptec AHA-2x4x[U][W] cards and some onboard PCI designs using the AIC78X0 chip.
  • Adaptec AHA-3940[U][W] cards [b]
  • BusLogic 54x (Adaptec AHA-154x clones)
  • BusLogic 445, 74x, 9xx (But not the new "FlashPoint" series of BusLogic SCSI adapters)
  • Qlogic ISP [12]0x0 SCSI/FibreChannel boards
  • Seagate/Future Domain ISA SCSI adapter cards, including
    • ST01/02
    • Future Domain TMC-885
    • Future Domain TMC-950
  • Symbios Logic (NCR) 53C8xx-based PCI SCSI host adapters:
    • Acculogic PCIpport
    • ASUS SC-200 (requires NCR BIOS on motherboard to boot from disks)
    • ASUS SC-2875
    • ASUS SP3[G] motherboard onboard SCSI
    • DEC Celebris XL/590 onboard SCSI
    • Diamond FirePort 40
    • Lomas Data SCSI adapters
    • NCR/SYM 8125 (and its many clones; be careful, some of these cards have a jumper to set the PCI interrupt; leave it on INT A!)
    • Promise DC540 (a particularly common OEM model of the SYM 8125)
    • Tyan Yorktown
  • Ultrastor 14f, 34f, and (possibly) 24f
  • Western Digital WD7000 SCSI and TMC-7000 host adapters (ISA cards only)
• MDA, CGA, VGA, SVGA, and HGC Display Adapters. (Note that not all of the display adapters NetBSD/i386 can work with are supported by X. See the XFree86 Documentation for more information.)
• Serial ports:
  • 8250/16450-based ports
  • 16550/16650/16750-based ports
  • AST-style 4-port serial cards
  • BOCA 8-port serial cards
  • IBM PC-RT 4-port serial cards
  • Single-port Hayes ESP serial cards
  • Cyclades Cyclom-Y serial cards
• Parallel ports.
• Ethernet adapters:
  • AMD LANCE and PCnet-based ISA Ethernet adapters, including:
    • Novell NE1500T
    • Novell NE2100
    • Kingston 21xx
  • AMD PCnet-based PCI Ethernet adapters, including:
    • Addtron AE-350
    • BOCALANcard/PCI
    • SVEC FD0455
    • X/Lan Add-On Adapter
    • IBM #13H9237 PCI Ethernet Adapter
  • AT&T StarLAN 10, EN100, and StarLAN Fiber
  • 3Com ISA Ethernet adapters:
    • 3Com 3c501
    • 3Com 3c503
    • 3Com 3c505
    • 3Com 3c507
    • 3Com 3c509
  • 3Com EISA Ethernet adapters:
    • 3Com 3c579
  • 3Com PCI Ethernet adapters:
    • 3Com 3c590
    • 3Com 3c595
    • 3Com 3c900
    • 3Com 3c905 (but not 3c905B)
  • 3Com PCMCIA Ethernet adapters:
    • 3Com 3c562
    • 3Com 3c589
  • Digital DC21x4x-based PCI Ethernet adapters, including:
    • Cogent EM1X0, EM960 (a.k.a. Adaptec ANA-69XX)
    • Cogent EM964 [b]
    • Cogent EM4XX [b]
    • Compex Readylink PCI
    • DANPEX EN-9400P3
    • Digital Celebris GL, GLST on-board ethernet
    • Digital (DEC) PCI Ethernet/Fast Ethernet adapters (all)
    • JCIS Condor JC1260
    • Linksys PCI Fast Ethernet
    • SMC EtherPower 10, 10/100 (PCI only!)
    • SMC EtherPower^2 [b]
    • SVEC PN0455
    • SVEC FD1000-TP
    • Znyx ZX34X
  • Digital EtherWORKS III ISA adapters (DE203/DE204/DE205)
  • Digital DEPCM-BA (PCMCIA) and DE305 (ISA) NE2000-compat. cards
  • BICC Isolan [not recently tested]
  • Fujitsu MB86960A/MB86965A based cards:
    • Fujitsu FMV-180 series
    • Allied-Telesis AT1700 series
    • Allied-Telesis RE2000 series
  • Intel EtherExpress 16
  • Intel EtherExpress PRO/10
  • Intel EtherExpress 100 Fast Ethernet adapters
  • Novell NE1000, NE2000 (ISA, PCI, PCMCIA, ISA PnP)
  • SMC/WD 8003, 8013, and the SMC "Elite16" ISA boards
  • SMC/WD 8216 (the SMC "Elite16 Ultra" ISA boards)
  • SMC91C9x-based boards (ISA and PCMCIA)
  • Texas Instruments ThunderLAN based ethernet boards:
    • Compaq Netelligent 10/100 TX
    • Compaq ProLiant Integrated Netelligent 10/100 TX
    • Compaq Netelligent 10 T (untested)
    • Compaq Integrated NetFlex 3/P
    • Compaq NetFlex 3/P w/ BNC (untested)
    • Compaq NetFlex 3/P (untested)
    • Compaq Dual Port Netelligent 10/100 TX (untested)
    • Compaq Deskpro 4000 5233MMX (untested)
    • Texas Instruments TravelMate 5000 series laptop docking station Ethernet board
• FDDI adapters:
  • Digital DEFPA PCI FDDI adapters
  • Digital DEFEA EISA FDDI adapters
• Tape drives:
  • Most SCSI tape drives
  • QIC-02 and QIC-36 format (Archive- and Wangtek- compatible) tape drives
• CD-ROM drives:
  • Non-IDE Mitsumi CD-ROM drives [Note: The Mitsumi driver device probe is known to cause trouble with several devices!]
  • Most SCSI CD-ROM drives
  • Most ATAPI CD-ROM drives. [ Note: Some low-priced IDE CDROM drives are known for being not or not fully ATAPI compliant, and thus requires some hack (generally an entry to a quirk table) to work with NetBSD.]
• Mice:
  • "Logitech"-style bus mice
  • "Microsoft"-style bus mice
  • "PS/2"-style mice
  • Serial mice (no kernel support necessary)
  Sound Cards:
  • SoundBlaster, SoundBlaster Pro, SoundBlaster 16
  • Gravis Ultrasound and Ultrasound Max
  • Personal Sound System
  • Windows Sound System
  • ProAudio Spectrum
  • Gravis Ultrasound Plug&Play
• Game Ports (Joysticks).
• Miscellaneous:
  • Advanced power management (APM)

Support for devices marked with "[b]" requires BIOS support for PCI-PCI bridging on your motherboard. Most reasonably modern Pentium motherboards have this support, or can acquire it via a BIOS upgrade.

Hardware the we do NOT currently support, but get many questions about:

• AMD PCscsi SCSI host adapters (though the PCnet portion of the PCnet-SCSI works fine)
• Multiprocessor Pentium and Pentium Pro systems. (Though they should run fine using one processor only.)
• NCR 5380-based SCSI host adapters.
• PCI WD-7000 SCSI host adapters.
• QIC-40 and QIC-80 tape drives. (Those are the tape drives that connect to the floppy disk controller.)

If you're interested in installing NetBSD/i386 1.3, you should look at the installation notes. If you have any problem with installing X you should check the XFree86 Documentation.

There are various NetBSD mailing lists, including an i386 specific port-i386.

To obtain NetBSD/i386: via CD-ROM, an ftp mirror near you, or direct from ftp.NetBSD.org.

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