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."

Comments

Re:NetBSD stopped being useful once I forked OpenB

[Snowfox]

Frankly, I think that NetBSD has reached its endgame. There are only so many platforms you can port to until you have it running on your toaster. And frankly, I think its unprofessional to let things like SMP support or a decent packaging system slide while focusing on porting to platform after deficient platform.

When comparing BSDs, extreme portability is the one thing that's always listed with NetBSD's positive assets. Being able to port quickly is indeed a valuable thing when bootstrapping new or custom hardware, and if NetBSD is uniquely positioned in this regard, it's got some value yet.

Out of curiosity, how real is this advantage? Are there things that make NetBSD more portable than OpenBSD?

Re:NetBSD stopped being useful once I forked OpenB

[perry]

I presume that someone is just forging Theo's name as I doubt Theo would be foolish enough to put up a post like that.

However, just to set the record straight, I will point out that:

0) NetBSD is very much alive and vibrant. If you look at the sheer number of commits per day to the NetBSD tree, one will see that pretty quickly. There are a lot of NetBSD developers and users, and the developers are very active.
1) Multi-platform portability is pretty damn useful in the embedded systems world. Maybe running on a StrongARM or a low power MIPS design isn't interesting to you, but it is very interesting to people building things like routers and set top boxes. We pay our bills at Wasabi thanks to this. How many platforms will we ultimately port to? Well, people keep paying Wasabi to port to new things, and there are people outside of Wasabi doing NetBSD ports, too. As long as people keep designing new computers, I don't think NetBSD will stop adding ports.
2) NetBSD is successful enough in terms of design wins to support our company fairly nicely. It is also successful enough in terms of developer resources that I'm proud to say we've got a damn good operating system and it keeps getting better all time. There are a couple hundred very good engineers who commit to the NetBSD tree, and a cast of thousands submitting patches and updates.
3) Generally speaking, the OpenBSD guys are smart and nice people -- I get along with a lot of them very well. Guys like Todd, Niels and Angelos (to name a few) are fine engineers and I have plenty of respect for them.