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NetBSD 1.6 Has Been Branched

Posted by Hemos on from the sigmarril dept.

jschauma writes "Following Todd Vierlings announcement to the current-users Mailinglist, the NetBSD 1.6 Release Process has begun. This means not only that 1.6 has been branched off the cvs-tree, but also that daily snapshots will soon be available. Changes from 1.5 to 1.6 are listed here. A brief announcement including a best-case scenario release timetable is available from here. Whooot."

2 of 68 comments (clear)

  1. Re: Native threading library ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    No native threading yet. There is the nathanw_sa
    branch to -current, which implements scheduler
    activations to come up with a native thread
    implementation. It's worth checking out
    doc/BRANCHES (e.g. cvsweb:
    http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/doc/B RANCHES?r ev=1.38&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&only_wit h_tag=HEAD) and
    read the pointers nathanw has put in that file
    to understand the difference between this implementation,
    what Linux initially chose, and user threading libs
    like e.g. gnu pth.

    IIrc, there was this question somewhen on current-users ML, too, and ppl have said
    that it's likely there will be a new release (be it 1.7 or 2.0 or whatever) after quite short time
    (compared to previous releases) which will merge
    nathanw_sa and sommerfeld_i386_mp to both get
    i386 MP support into it as well as the native
    thread library.

    Hth

  2. Re:any reason for slow releases by LizardKing · · Score: 4, Informative

    I don't know about FreeBSD, but OpenBSD follows a six monthly release cycle fairly rigidly, giving the developers a target for adding new features and stabilising them. It must also provide a crude way to estimate revenue, as CD sales obviously peak around the time of a release.

    NetBSD has some different goals to the other BSD's. Correctness of the implementation of any new feature is valued highly, leading to a conservative development process. The SMP implementation is a good example - the NetBSD developers want to get it right, by comparison the Linux philosophy calls for early release of potentially buggy code. The Linux principle is that exposure to a wide audience will shake out bugs quickly. NetBSD relies on the fact that the most of the "audience" don't have the skill to fix bugs or even provide meaningful feedback. We could argue about which approach is best until the cows come home, but that's the way it is.

    So in conclusion, NetBSD is released at a leisurely pace but this shouldn't be taken as a relection of how much development is going on.

    Chris