Hi Brad! Welcome.

NetBSD kernel development comes in two flavors: Machine Independent (MI),
and Machine Dependent (MD).

MI development is done, as the name implies, in a machine independent
fashion, so that all ports can take advantage of it. Of course, not all
ports have UVM yet, because there are some MD dependencies (essentially,
MMU (pmap) API code that needs to be there to support UVM); sometimes MI
developments require MD changes - these take a while, depending on
complexity the the available time of the right people, to propagate.
Strictly MI developments propagate immediately - we're all building off the
exact same kernel source tree for the MI parts.

MD development tends to fall into two categories: device drivers, and
additional machines in the same platform family, e.g. sun4d, sun4u. There
are never enough people to do everything that needs to be done: new
drivers, optimization of existing drivers, and so on. We're actually helped
a lot by the fact that we have a MI "chip" and "bus" layer system, which
means that there is a single driver for the AMD Am7990 (LANCE), Zilog 8530
SCC, and the NCR 5380 SBC, for example. Improve the chip driver, and all
ports that have that chip win. Industry-wide use of chips like that help us
tremendously.

I'd say there are areas where NetBSD is apparently not progressing as fast
as Linux (MP or SMP, for example). However, I'd also say that there is more
careful thought and design going into NetBSD than Linux. There are also
areas where NetBSD is making progress in a quiet (or even secretive)
fashion that won't be seen until it's committed to the source tree, and
subsequently released.

So far as I can tell, OpenBSD is (NetBSD + Theo deRaadt + IPsec). There
seems to be some interchange between NetBSD and OpenBSD, but not as much,
given the history, as between NetBSD and FreeBSD (or BSDI) where relations
are more cordial and professional. I'm not sure if either Linux/sparc or
NetBSD are tracking each other...

I've been using NetBSD/sparc in production on my own hardware for over a
year now. I love it. Paul Kranenburg, the portmaster, has been doing an
excellent job, and I've been helping where I feel competent to do that.

So, really, what sort of development were you most interested in?

	Erik <fair@clock.org>