After several months of preparation, the first ports (hppa, sparc and sparc64) have switched their compiler to gcc version 4.8 today. Amd64 and i386 should follow soon.

Work is ongoing to bring this modern toolchain to all other ports too (most of them already work, but some more testing will be done). If you want to try it, just add -V HAVE_GCC=48 to the build.sh invocation.

Note that in parallel clang is available as an alternative option for a few architectures already (i386, amd64, arm, and sparc64), but needs more testing and debugging at least on some of them (e.g. the sparc64 kernel does not boot).

For a project with diverse hardware support like NetBSD, all toolchain updates are a big pain - so a big THANK YOU! to everyone involved; in no particular order Christos Zoulas, matthew green, Nick Hudson, Tohru Nishimura, Frank Wille (and myself).

In 2009 the playstation2 port was removed from the NetBSD sources, since it had not been compilable for months and no modern enough compiler was available.

Due to a strange series of events the code changes needed to support the (slightly unusual) MIPS CPU used in the playstation2 had never been merged into gcc nor binutils mainline. Only recently this has been fixed. Unfortunately the changes have not been pulled up to the gcc 4.8.3 branch (which is available in NetBSD-current), so an external toolchain from pkgsrc is needed for the playstation2.

To install this toolchain, use a pkgsrc-current checkout and cd to cross/gcc-mips-current, then do "make install" - that is all.

Work is in progress to bring the old code up to -current. Hopefully a bootable NetBSD-current kernel will be available soon.