ea1abz%gmail.com@localhost (Ramiro Aceves) writes:
"/boot/kernel.img is what the RPI firmware regularly loads. You still
need (a similar) /netbsd for some NetBSD tools."
There are programs that traditionally peek into the kernel to read out
some internal data structures. These use /netbsd or /dev/ksyms to read
kernel symbols to find the data.
For most but not all of these programs, there are now sysctl interfaces
to retrieve the data, at least partially.
The /dev/ksyms interface requires to load the kernel symbols into
memory when booting. On very small systems, that might be wasteful
and then /netbsd is the only thing left.
One exception is also kernel debugging with gdb. gdb needs access to
the proper netbsd kernel file (and better the debug information too).