NetBSD is still routinely tested on 486s and old Vaxen, and developed on ARM SBCs or Pinebooks. It helps keep the code base light and efficient. The latest min

NetBSD is still routinely tested on 486s and old Vaxen, and developed on ARM SBCs or Pinebooks. It helps keep the code base light and efficient. The latest minimal kernel will still boot on 4MB of memory on 32 bits machines, although it will take more than that to be usable. Unfortunately NetBSD can only do so much considering the sad state of the Linux ecosystem. GCC has become so big it won't self host on most platform, making cross compilation mandatory for them. Switching to PCC would be a solution, but a lot of software won't compile with PCC and obviously their maintainers couldn't care less. Then you have the newer behemoths like Rust and Go. Once they start creeping in some majors projects like GCC or OpenSSL, a lot of machines will turn into e-waste, and the resource requirements will climb even further.