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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."
Anybody care to explain the NetBSD threading model in 60 words or less?
Specifically, for concurrency, is there a default inter-thread communication protocol or is it standard synchronization events? Our company has the OS under consideration.
Out of curiosity, how real is this advantage? Are there things that make NetBSD more portable than OpenBSD?
Theo,
I think you're here bashing NetBSD because you can't handle the competition. If you were truely confident in your position that "NetBSD has reached its endgame" you wouldn't need to preach to the Slashdot community, you would just sit quietly and wait. Instead you're here bashing NetBSD since, in my opinion, you're AFRAID to lose.
For all your talk of security, your product seems to have just as many holes, or more, as anyone else's product. While you're busy beating your... chest, NetBSD is busy beating OpenBSD.
You won't make ISO images available apparently because you don't want to lose your only source of income. Meanwhile NetBSD makes ISO images available for many ports, and also creates ISO images of tons of prebuilt packages for NetBSD/i386. How is that for competition?
Oh, and I think I even coined the term "OpenBSD" for you. Look it up on the original NetBSD (port-sparc) mailing lists if you don't believe me.
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.
When moving between Linux distributions or Free/OpenBSD architectures, there is always an adjustment period where you must learn the intricacies of the new environment. Not so with NetBSD.
- NetBSD works exactly the same, whether you run it on an old Atari ST or a 2GHz Pentium 4.
- Linux works slightly differently on every platform, because the core operating system tools aren't perfectly portable from architecture to architecture. There is also a different set of distros available for each platform, which adds to the confusion of moving from, say, an old PPro workhorse to an IBM RS4000 workstation.
- FreeBSD is not portable at all, and the two platforms it does support (x86 and alpha) are so horribly different in so many ways that FreeBSD/x86 and FreeBSD/alpha may as well be different operating systems.
- OpenBSD may be nearly as portable as NetBSD, but it's nowhere near as comfortable. The anal-retentive "security first" philosophy forces the user to jump through an incessant number of hoops to get anything done. The only reason OpenBSD is secure is because you can't do anything with it. I have no idea what the authors were thinking when they wrote it.
I bet you're just another whining Slashdot teenage kiddy, and that you've never had a real job in your life. You talk about OpenBSD and NetBSD as if you wrote them! I hope for your sake you're not this full of yourself in real life.Loneliness is a power that we possess to give or take away forever
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.
While a fine beginners troll, you missed some finer points. Theo DeRaadt isn't this polite, for one. Secondly, the real Mr DeRaadt would probably PGP sign even a slashdot post. And thirdly, since OpenBSD also lacks SMP support, I really don't think he'd be attracting attention to the fact.
But, I mean, not bad - and I eagerly await future works.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
uhm, was sed broken when you posted this?
making sure to notify slashdot that just because there are lists of changes on a web site IT ISNT OUT, because frankly we've already gone through fake posts like that before. They expect money by subscriptions yet they cant even check story authenticy. Disturbing.
Man, can't you even spell your own name right?! It's Theo de Raadt, not Theo DeRaadt.
Good job though. Plenty of folks can now consider themselves trolled.
NetBSD's got a very nice rc (startup) system; as opposed to the monolithic (Open|Free)BSD approach, NetBSD's is a highly modular dependancy based model; no more giving scripts esoteric names like "000.wibble" to try to get it executed before "001.wobble"; just add a dependency in wobble on wibble and the rc system will make sure wibble is executed first.
There's an interesting PDF paper on the design and implimentation, some conciderably more terse and less interesting official documentation and a Daemon News article, and for those uber geeks, the CVS repository where you can compare with the other BSD's.
You'll note FreeBSD -CURRENT is looking at adopting it, while Open sticks with the tried and tested BSD4.4-type setup
If NetBSD is so obsolete, why are other projects like say, FreeBSD importing NetBSD code? Oh, and they are intending to use the NetBSD startup rc scripts too... How's that for an 'obsolete' system?
Ah well, you are probably a troll and an imposter... Back to getting a make build done on my rickety SparcStations... I just upgraded them to 1.5ZA... And those things aren't speed demons... Now I can do it all again.. Sheesh :-)
Only if you do not consider MacOS to be a *BSD.
DEC [doh] ^H^H^H Compaq [doh] ^H^H^H^H^H^H HP
I'm sure NetBSD does the same?
Seriously. I installed it. Set up everything I want and use from my linux drive. I love how clean the directory structure is compared to linux. I really want to use it exlusively for a couple months and see how I like it. I've written and compiled programs on it. But I can't for the life of me get it to mount a ext2 partition. Yes, I recompiled the kernel with ext2fs support. I ended up just burning everything that I wanted from linux on a cdrw, mounting it under FreeBSD and thought that I would be able to work it out. But all my ogg files are in three different ext2fs partitions. I need to have access to those. Until I can get FreeBSD to do this, I can't use it. And that's a shame to me. One of my partitions is /dev/hdb3 under linux. I tried every combination I could find under mailing lists and web pages. /dev/wda2s3 or whatever (this was a couple weeks ago and I can't remember now). Nothing worked. And I got very frustrated with the whole thing. Maybe I'll check back in a year or so and see how it's progressed.
Maybe you could dump a few i960 evaluation boards/single board computer with the necessary documentation on some NetBSD developers or invent a clever way how you do virtual memory on CPUs without MMU...
I'm talking about SERIOUS stuff like IPv6 multicast routing, Alternative queuing etc. True, you need the KAME patch, but at least it is there.
Linux (even with USAGI patches) doesn't even do IPv6 multicast routing.
There is even a project on Sourceforge for Netbsd to support XCAST(+), which is the main reason why I am using netbsd as the router OS for my thesis project.
(Xcast is a method of multicasting a packet to a FEW destinations, unlike standard multicasting using multicast trees with rendez-vous points which can flood whole networks)
I love linux, and when you know linux moving to Netbsd can sometimes be a little awkward. Linux is just so much more userfriendly.
Suggestions: 1) tell your mom (er - i meant 'customer') that it's SUPPOSED to look like that.. the "readable arcane text all over da place" instead of familiar Start Button does *not* expose secret information 2) anything you 'hack' will ever be a patchwork, for you will not understand the difference 'tween hard- and soft-ware. you don't know that "hacking" (generally) doesn't refer to cutting out cardboard "GUI with Secure Widget Technology" so that mom and little sis don't have to see those ugly internal details... 3) i like your trolls! got no pointers there.. not top notch, of course, but funny in a delinquent canine fashion :O)
BTW what is an 'encrytion' and how does one add that to the Pentium architecture? I'd like your input on a project i'm buildin too if you don't mind ..
--you have been trolled--