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NetBSD 1.5ZB
Dahan writes: "I just saw that the development branch of NetBSD is now at version 1.5ZB. A change log is available for those interested. Note that although the title of the page says it's a list of changes from NetBSD 1.5 to 1.6, NetBSD 1.6 is not out yet--the page lists changes that will be in 1.6 whenever it's released. (And when will that be? "When it's ready," of course.) Standard caution about not running development kernels on mission-critical systems applies, although I've been running 1.5ZA on my DEC^H^H^HCompaq Alpha PC164 web/mail/DNS/whatever server for a few months now, and it's been great. And for those of you used to the Linux version numbering scheme and are wondering what all these letters mean, here's an explanation of NetBSD's version numbering."
Not entirely clear what you're asking. We implement POSIX pthreads (the really good version of that, which uses scheduler activations, is on a branch pending the cut of 1.6 -- it will be integrated into -current shortly.)
Anyway, pthreads, which is pretty much the Unix standard, has a set of mechanisms available for synchronizing the multiple threads.
Inter-process communication between threads, processes, etc. happens pretty much the way you want it to -- message passing via sockets, shared memory, whatever you like. It is pretty much the way any POSIX style system works.
The advantages of NetBSD are not primarily in the API, which it shares with most POSIX systems, but in the license and the quality of the implementation.
As someone involved in NetBSD release engineering, I'm guessing 1.6 is going to branch "soon", likely within weeks (though no promises.)
Our hope is to pick up the pace of releases now that we have a lot more infrastructure for doing fast release engineering. A lot of that was developed only in the last six months.
Theo de Raadt is the FOUNDER and LEADER of the OpenBSD project. He was kicked out of the NetBSD (for which he was also a founder) for what they said were "behavioral" problems (which is somewhat true, but it was really more politics). So you may have real life experience (wow, so important you had to BOLD) with all those UNIXes, but he has real life experience CODING them.
Second, that isn't the real Theo. He didn't even spell the name right. Its Theo de Raadt, not Theo DeRaadt.
Thirdly, OpenBSD is just as good at what it does as Net/FreeBSD. Bind, Apache, and almost everything else compile just as fine on OpenBSD as they do on Net/FreeBSD and Linux. As for "comfortable"...well....thats a matter of opinion. NetBSD tries to port to everything first and works on other projects second (theres nothing wrong with it, its just what they do). OpenBSD works more on the practical side. You'll never see an (official) dreamcast port simply because it not practical for what OpenBSD does. Lets not also forget that the OpenBSD's "anal-retentive" security policy has brought us free versions of SSH. Also, just because freeBSD doesn't have other ports, doesn't mean its not portable. They just chose to focus on two architectures for what they see as practicality.
You are right on one thing. That was just another /. whiner kiddie.
Er, you seem to be confusing userland and kernel threads. The two are not connected. The way you implement pthreads in users space and whether you have a preemptable kernel and such aren't connected at all.
In terms of pthreads, NetBSD has chosen the approach used in Solaris, Digital Unix (now Tru64) etc. of using Scheduler Activations. On an MP system, two threads will indeed run on different processors if you like.
It is true that NetBSD does not yet have a preemptable kernel and that our SMP support is not incredibly stunning yet. We're working hard to fix that.
Nope.
You do what I did the first time I installed NetBSD. It was my old Toshiba Laptop, which doesn't have a CD drive.
I copied the files onto another box with an NFS server running and used a boot disk to install over NFS. There are other network methods of installing. A CD-ROM is just a handy bandwidth boosting method of distributing a lot of binaries and tarballs.
You're not going to tell me there isn't networking available on the PDP-11 are you?