wg / wireguard usability on NetBSD

[Matthias Petermann <matthias%d2ux.net@localhost>]

Dear NetBSD community,

first of all, happy new year to everyone on the list. I hope 2026 has 
started well for you.

With the turn of the year, I have set myself a personal agenda to deepen 
my understanding of the systems I rely on, especially in areas where I 
care about long-term robustness, clarity, and explainability. In that 
spirit, I recently took a closer look at WireGuard on NetBSD.

The motivation is fairly practical: I am in the process of setting up a 
small “family VPN” for geographically distributed, encrypted backups and 
occasional administrative access. My initial approach used a consumer 
router (a Fritz!Box), but I ran into repeated usability and transparency 
issues due to its GUI-driven configuration and somewhat opaque behavior. 
That experience pushed me to look for a solution where I can reason 
about the entire stack end to end.

Naturally, NetBSD seemed like a very good fit for this goal.

I have successfully experimented with the wg driver and basic setups 
(point-to-point and gateway scenarios), and overall the implementation 
behaves cleanly and predictably. However, while reading the sources and 
commit history, I noticed that the last significant commit appears to be 
around two years old, and I could only find very few recent experience 
reports or discussions from users running WireGuard on NetBSD in practice.

This leads me to a simple but important question for planning purposes:

Is support for the WireGuard protocol via the wg driver considered a 
priority within NetBSD?

Is this subsystem actively maintained, even if changes are infrequent?

I fully understand that “working and stable” does not necessarily imply 
frequent commits, and I am not asking for timelines or guarantees. I am 
mainly trying to understand whether the current state reflects a mature, 
low-churn subsystem, or whether WireGuard support is effectively in 
maintenance mode with limited future attention.

Any insight from developers or users with longer-term experience would 
be greatly appreciated.

Thank you for your time, and best regards,
Matthias

--
Für alle, die digitale Systeme verstehen und gestalten wollen:
jede Woche neue Beiträge zu Architektur, Souveränität und Systemdesign.
👉https://www.petermann-digital.de/blog