NetBSD Standards Conformance

NetBSD tries to conform to important industry standards like POSIX and Standard C. No efforts have been made to conform to X/Open Spec 1170, since we believe that codifying the superset of all API's all the way back to Version 7 is not the right way to make a standard.

POSIX (Portable Operating Systems Interface) is the name used by group of standards sponsored by the IEEE that define a standard API for UNIX-like operating systems. POSIX.1 (IEEE Std1003.1-1990) standardizes the API for C. POSIX.2 (IEEE Std1003.2-1992) standardizes the Shell and Utilities. Other POSIX standards cover Ada and Fortran bindings, real time extensions, conformance testing, etc.

NetBSD is extremely close to being POSIX.1 compliant. There are a few nits we know about: some we plan to fix, and others we plan to ignore until a future revision of POSIX.1 ``fixes'' them for us.

People who use or distribute other free operating systems sometimes claim that their OS is POSIX or Standard C compliant. These claims are almost guaranteed to be false. To our knowledge, none of the freely redistributable operating systems have been certified to be POSIX or Standard C compliant. Nor are they likely to be so, since certification is quite expensive. We believe that NetBSD is closer to POSIX and Standard C compliance than any other freely redistributable operating system.


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