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- Hubert

- Hubert

Indeed, I recall a "showdown" between NetBSD and FreeBSD where the [stupid] reviewer left WITNESS and all the debugging symbols in the kernel of FreeBSD, then proclaimed loudly that the performance sucked. Well, forgive me for being realistic here, but the reviewer was in need of percussive maitenance with the size 10 clue stick.

Well in this showdown, WITNESS and debugging was disabled in FreeBSD, and NetBSD still beat it handily in most things. What was the "showdown" that you recalled?

Now, some of these folks may have a point in certain circumstances such as tightly controlled benchmarks but, please, let's retain a little objectivity. So there's arguing on the lists. So what? It was ever thus. I give you COLA as an example of what "advocacy" does for an OS and rest my case.

Err.. what does it do for an OS? There are very few if any trolls on the serious Linux development lists, so I guess COLA is doing a pretty good magnet to filter out all the idiots.

IMHO, Scott could do with a knock from the size 5 clue-stick, too. Rebutting these claims lends credence to them and tends to encourage folks to engage in mindless discussions (like this one) instead of doing what the BSDs do best: Just work. Let's just concentrate on getting things working and leave this style of "advocacy" for the Linux distros, eh?

How about you just don't worry your pretty head about Linux at all, eh? For fuck's sake why does every BSD zealot have to bring up Linux all the time. It is really damn annoying. Enough with Linux. This is a FreeBSD thread, got it? Unless you are going to make an objective technical comparison of the two, just shut the hell up and leave the uninformed, biased, anecdotal crap that spews out of your ass in the toilet where it belongs.

The new version of the BSD license states the opposite

The new version of the BSD license states the opposite

NetBSD is now the fastest BSD of all. It is much faster than FreeBSD according to every benchmark. FreeBSD 5.3 is actually slower than than plain old turtle OpenBSD. (FreeBSD 5.3 is even slower than FreeBSD 4.11, of all things!)

...seriously though, I find no reason to move away from NetBSD...also, I used Slackware before to switching over to NetBSD.

What's your problem? I said initial support, which is true: http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20050121_142 7

And I was already aware of those 'problems', but if every time something like that came up the whole project was abandoned, do you think any of the projects would be where they are?

And it's not trolling to say FreeBSD is losing its lustre. That's actually entirely true. It's not dead yet, and it might recover, but in the mean time, there are much better alternatives to running FreeBSD 5. NetBSD 2 is one, DragonFly is another, hell even Linux has been more stable lately. I also said all of these things MUCH earlier than that benchmark was released, it just happens to support the argument.

Why do you have to call any observation which puts one project ahead of another a troll? It doesn't even look like you read what I said.

Check this out for speed benchmarks.
You can't rely on old assumptions anymore.

DragonFly is making huge advances. Sweeping changes are being made all the time that make DragonFly easier to maintain and more scalable, but performance is still good on a uniprocessor system, and stability is much the same as FreeBSD4 (which was the last FreeBSD release which actually worked). When the giant lock comes off, FreeBSD likely won't be able to hang with them. The upcoming multicore processors will just make things worse. FreeBSD6 is following the same path as FreeBSD5. If things keep going the same way, FreeBSD7 will have to be a DragonFly fork, just to stay relevant.

But will anyone care? FreeBSD is hemorrhaging developers. Right now, if the right three or four developers left, there wouldn't be enough detailed knowledge about the kernel workings to maintain the kernel without a long learning period that the FreeBSD project can't afford. Furthermore, how many of those developers will want to keep working on FreeBSD when it's just a DragonFly fork? DragonFly is positioned to replace FreeBSD, as well as fill niches that no BSD has filled before. Why would anyone want to work on FreeBSD, either as a DragonFly fork or as an obviously non-viable kernel model?

FreeBSD was nice, and is nice; I'm using RELENG_5 now, but shortly DragonFly will have a lot of its features in place, and I'll be moving to it. There are many others like me, ready to swap once DragonFly is ready, and you'd better believe that's trouble for FreeBSD.

DragonFly is making huge advances. Sweeping changes are being made all the time that make DragonFly easier to maintain and more scalable, but performance is still good on a uniprocessor system, and stability is much the same as FreeBSD4 (which was the last FreeBSD release which actually worked). When the giant lock comes off, FreeBSD likely won't be able to hang with them. The upcoming multicore processors will just make things worse. FreeBSD6 is following the same path as FreeBSD5. If things keep going the same way, FreeBSD7 will have to be a DragonFly fork, just to stay relevant.

But will anyone care? FreeBSD is hemorrhaging developers. Right now, if the right three or four developers left, there wouldn't be enough detailed knowledge about the kernel workings to maintain the kernel without a long learning period that the FreeBSD project can't afford. Furthermore, how many of those developers will want to keep working on FreeBSD when it's just a DragonFly fork? DragonFly is positioned to replace FreeBSD, as well as fill niches that no BSD has filled before. Why would anyone want to work on FreeBSD, either as a DragonFly fork or as an obviously non-viable kernel model?

FreeBSD was nice, and is nice; I'm using RELENG_5 now, but shortly DragonFly will have a lot of its features in place, and I'll be moving to it. There are many others like me, ready to swap once DragonFly is ready, and you'd better believe that's trouble for FreeBSD.

pkgsrc us a source-based packaging system that works on MacOS X, Linux and many other operating systems (even Windows, with SFU).

More information:

http://www.pkgsrc.org/
http://www.feyrer.de/Texts/Own/21c3-pkgsrc-slides. pdf

also gets pretty soundly demolished by NetBSD in basic performance measurements too. http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/gmcgarry/

This paper presents a suite of benchmarks and results for comparing the performance of these operating systems. The benchmarks target core operating system functionality, server scalability and thread implementation. These benchmarks are useful server-based criteria for demanding applications such as loaded webservers, databases, and voice-over-IP (VoIP) media relays. The results indicate that NetBSD has surpassed FreeBSD in performance on nearly every benchmark and is poised to grab the title of the best operating system for the server environment.''

Full paper: http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/gmcgarry/

It doesn't do everything (not by any means). All it does is give you bit-for-bit clones and images of a complete hard drive or partition, including empty space. But it does what it does in a simple, easy, trouble-free manner.

This is going to be somewhat unpopular, I know, especially with all you flaming BSD zealots out there, but I feel it has to be said.

Uh.. I really don't see "flaming BSD zealots", I just see FUD-spreading GNU/trolls. But.. whatever. Shoot.

The simple truth that nobody here will seem to accept is that BSD simply can not possibly move to the forefront of the Free Software / Open Source movement.

Care to explain why?
Moreover: if BSD did, the academical and technical aspect of Open Source software would finally prevail over the political anti-proprietary crusade. That would be a Good Thing, IMHO.

At present, Linux is favoured because many corporations (IBM, Novell, etc) are using it to fight the Microsoft monopoly. But as soon as the monopoly ends (as soon as possible, I hope) the market wouldn't benefit any more from a communistic anti-proprietary crusade.

The second it is, Microsoft (or IBM or Sun or whoever the Evil Empire of the Day is) will simply rip it off and create their own, which will sell to the PHB crowd like hotcakes. If (when?) this happens, all of everyone's hard work will be undone.

1) Nobody can "rip off" any BSD code. You can *use* it, but you can't claim it's your own, and you *must* give proper credits to the author. The only ones having trouble to grasp this simple concept (or, I should say, the only ones actually *stealing* code) seem to be some GPL programmers.
2) Microsoft won't certainly be the only one to *use* BSD code. Its competitors do it as well, and the smaller they are, the more benefit they can draw out of it. Apple uses BSD code extensively. Linux can use it too, of course - again, as long as proper credits are given.
BSD, if anything, is *contributing* to the end of the Microsoft monopoly.
3) "All of everyone's hard work" will be *acknowledged*, not "undone".
Some people seem to have trouble to understand that not every Open Source programmer is out on a crusade against proprietary software...

But, entirely separately, if we want to reach an OSS-dominant situation at any point,

...and who the h**l gives a f**k? Seriously. As far as I can understand, BSD are devoted to technical excellence, not to communistic politics.

it is imperative that we stop duplicating our efforts and immediately focus on one project.

1) People can focus on the same project only if they have the same objectives, I don't think this is the case.
2) If you really wanna avoid duplicated efforts, start by looking at the myriads of gnu/linux distributions out there...

We cannot afford to have BSD bleeding developers and code away from Linux (which has far more momentum behind it), likewise for KDE and GNOME, and so on.

Ehm... BSD is older than Linux. So, Linux would be the one sucking away developers and code... but I don't think this is the case - again: *different objectives*.. BSD has an academical spirit, Linux is loaded with politics.

Moves like this strike me as attempts to split up and hamstring the Open Source effort, and I don't like the smell of this one bit.

Wow, that's really gross..
Do you like the smell of the FUD that you GNU people are spreading over BSD??

Oh, I forgot: basically, what you say is "Yeah, it's a disgusting thing to do, but it's for a good cause".
This calls for a mandatory question: where would you GNU people draw the line between what is legitimate to do in the name of your "cause" and wha

The disk cloning tool included in the CD, g4l, looks like a ripoff of g4u, right down to the variable names.
No credit is given to the author of g4u, and he isn't very happy about the situation. More details on his web site.
To me, it seems to set a very poor example when the open source community engages in such blatant intellectual property rights violations.

Well, it seems some GNU advocates don't respect other licenses either, as seen here, so to each its own.

.. maybe because he's lame even at *copying* stuff? :-D

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4l.html

I wanted to mod up this post. I can't, so I quoted it. :)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

What's particularly vile is the fact that the "author" of g4l (the ripoff) keeps hiding behind anonimity - ..it's a *very big* AC. :)

GPL people are welcome to import BSD code: actually, they really should do it.
Of course, provided they learn to give proper credits.

And since there have been cases where GPL programmers *stole* BSD code (here), let me add that the BSD code is *not* public domain. So, even who "copies" it, must give proper credits to the author (here's the BSD license, for reference).

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

...<snip>...

He subsequently links to http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4l.html for an analysis of this infringement.

- Hubert

Read the full story at my web page, http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/g4l.html.

- Hubert

At least they asked, unlike what happened in this case

Turbo Smorgreff

From the site:

g4u ("ghost for unix") is a NetBSD-based bootfloppy/CD-ROM that allows easy cloning of PC harddisks to deploy a common setup on a number of PCs using FTP."

http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

(I'm not the author or anything, but I find it a useful addition to my toolbox)

Even better to make a ghost image of a good install, and then restore it whenever you need to.

- Hubert

The guy could of used g4u and saved himself a lot of time. It's a open source ghost like program. It doesn't do partition resizing yet but for lab installs of 20 identical machines it works great. But like others have said, he really needs to push the admin into giving him some sort of budget for imaging... sheesh

Check out g4u for deploying your render machines - it's a image based disk cloning tool that uses DHCP and FTP and which doesn't care what you run on your clients. (g4u itself is based on NetBSD, but that doesn't matter for the application).

I've used g4u to setup a ~50 node video rendering cluster, see my webpage on the Regensburg Marathon Cluster.

Enjoy!

- Hubert

Check out g4u for deploying your render machines - it's a image based disk cloning tool that uses DHCP and FTP and which doesn't care what you run on your clients. (g4u itself is based on NetBSD, but that doesn't matter for the application).

I've used g4u to setup a ~50 node video rendering cluster, see my webpage on the Regensburg Marathon Cluster.

Enjoy!

- Hubert

g4u (short for Ghost for Unix) just uses dd to make copies, but is in a nice bootable floppy form that makes it very easy to use. I highly recommend it.

The submitter is right in saying that g4u only using ftp, but why is that a problem? Just keep one ftp server running for image deployment. It doesn't use anonymous ftp, you can specify the account to use. Just don't have it accessible to the internet and you are fine.

I have been shocked at the wide range of NIC cards g4u has been able to detect and use. The latest Compaq EVOs (blech) that we have around here have a new intel nic card that gives me all kinds of problems in Linux. I have not found a distro yet that will auto-detect it on install, but g4u does just fine.

It also lets you copy just one partition at a time.

It boots from a floppy or a CD so there is no software to install.

Best of all, it is FREE!

I have never had it crash on me, and the only time I have had a deployment not work is when copying to a drive that is smaller than the image.

The only downside that I have found is that both image creation and deployment take longer than ghost does, but for me it is well worth it.

• Partimage
• Udpcast
• G4U
• ...

And with these kinds of application, the OS which it uses is of no concern anyways: these tools usually come with their own bootdisk, and there is absolutely no problem to duplicate a Windows partition using a Unix based tool!

in japan and it seems like america is still asleep and in a good mood so I'll search for you.....
I thought I read once that ghost creates its own partition and then boots to that and downloads the image. So booting a minimal install of linux mightn't be much different...so.... Ghost for Unix
Something called system imager
A thread about ghost alternatives for linux
cluster cloner
cluster cloner
tired of a href'n:
http://www.microwerks.net/~hugo/about/about.html
http://www.jpartner.com/documentation/platform/lin ux/ghost2.htm
http://216.239.57.104/search?q=cache:4-QzyNsabRYJ: xpt.sourceforge.net/techdocs/linuxdisk/Tools/linux disk09.000.html+ghost+linux&hl=en&start=5&ie=UTF-8
dunno if any of those help or not

I've had good results with G4U, a free NetBSD based boot floppy imaging system. Total requirements are nice-- 1 floppy or CDROM, 1 ftp server, 1 dhcp server. We cloned my kids whole school quite quickly using this system and I've had good results on a laptop as well.

There's Ghost for Unix (g4u) which was covered in this this Slashdot article.

If it's a regular Windows installation on an NTFS disk you can still install Linux by resizing. You can use either Partition Magick or the first disk of the Mandrake 9.1 set to resize the NTFS disk. Make sure to defrag the NTFS partition from within Windows first before doing this procedure or else the contents will be destroyed.

The problem seems to be that the image is the size of the disk so reinstallation of Windows, once Linux is already installed, will overwrite all partitions. It's just a complete disk image on the DVD. One workaround is to do the Windows installation, install Linux, use something like g4u to create a copy of your disk.

Or, use dd from the Linux partition to copy the Windows image once it's all installed.

Not that I've used it extensively yet (maybe someone else has) but Ghost 4 Unix (g4u) will do a bit for bit copy just like Ghost for Windows does, difference being that it is freeware and backs up to any ftp server with the appropriate credentials added. I think I'll go ahead and try it a little more this weekend actually.

Here is a link to g4u.

Cliff

During the Munich IETF 1997(?) I used rdist (part of Irix) to copy files from one machine to 40 others, as someone thought NFS was not an option.

When I had a set of (permanently running...) Unix workstations last, I used sh for-loops and ssh to run commands.

During another cluster project I was happy to use NFS to share files, and used rsh over ssh as it was ways faster.

Oh, and if you ever need to render mpegs from jpegs, check out the UCB's excellent "mpeg_encode", which does all the load balancing on a set of machines all by itself. Yumm!

- Hubert

Yeah, I've looked through the LFS and BLFS online documentation, and I was curious... are there any directions out there on how to make it a usable/deployable distrobution?? I guess I could use g4u to copy the harddrive image to iso.. but i would rather not.

see my report.

check out the report on our NetBSD cluster which would easily scale to many nodes.

It's just a question of proper application software, and OS doesn't really matter - I can't understand all this fuzz about Linux. *shrug*

In Netbsd there is a perl script to reconfigure a kernel to just compile in the hardware that you have. It is really handy to be able to just type perl adjustkernel GENERIC > MYKERNEL and have the correct hardware selected. I sat at my desk and `configured' the hardware for a kernel recompile in Netbsd in less than five seconds. Try that with Linux. I can code, I've looked at the Linux source code, but I have better things to do than try and remember whether the 5 year webserver that is sitting at work has a pci bus or not. Netbsd has this, why doesn't Linux?

>I will absolutely bail on DriveImage the first chance I get.

Click us now.

For NetBSD to be portable to all the various platforms, it has to abstract the properties of these platforms, and provide interfaces between machine dependent and machine independent code, so that not every port to a new platform results in copying the whole code, and modifying it until it works on the platform, as that would give you a lot of code redundancy.

Instead, NetBSD does a (IMHO) pretty good job to avoid code redundancy, and with abstract interfaces for bus-access, DMA etc., it's amazing to see lots of code written once, and running on platforms of either endianness, CPU, bus structure, etc.

NetBSD currently runs on 44 different hardware platforms, and 12 different CPUs. If you think adding a new one is "just" a port, you miss something.

If you feel bored, you can read a bit more about what makes an operating system here.

- Hubert

--
Forget Napster. Why not really break the law?

- Hubert