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NetBSD-Current Gets SMP
MobyTurbo writes "NetBSD-current for the i386 architecture now has SMP. (It used to be that only FreeBSD had this feature among the free BSDs.) See the announcement
on the current-users mailing list."
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When will the Dreamcast Port get it?
I really want to try this out on my quad-proc Dreamcast.
</sarcasm>
Arrogance is Confidence which lacks integrity. -- me
According the the summary at the top, it's FreeBSD that has it and OpenBSD doesn't.
call me crazy, but i could really care less about smp. i would wager the wide majority of smp systems fall into 2 categories:
1) unnecessarily powerful servers
2) unnecessarily powerful home braggart systems
database servers? sure. heavily loaded web servers? sure. file servers? NO. desktops? NO.
at least the scsi bigots will actually net some measurable performance increases if they drop some money on a 15k drive.
i sincerely hope openbsd continues to focus on OTHER things like openssh - you know, that thing you probably use every day of your life on your non-smp machine?. since most openbsd boxes are used as edge devices, the only big need for processing horespower is in crypto...
and that problem can be solved by purchasing a hifn-based pci crypto accellerator for $90 from soekris.com, thanks to openbsd's excellent hardware crypto accelerator support.
once you get past the crotch-grabbing aspect, low-end smp is not what most of the world would have you believe it is. high-end smp will likely get replaced by clustering of commodity hardware.
I wonder if this means OpenBSD will soon have SMP capability? Anyone have any thoughts? Inside information?
Co-founder and designer at Music Nearby: http://musicnearby.com
I guess it depends on what sort of enterprise application you are talking about. I am building a commercial router/content filtering system for corporations using NetBSD and am *very* happy with it.
NetBSD is small, robust, and fast. Creating customized installation media is a breeze and the networking code is fast (okay, I haven't benchmarked it against any of the 2.4 Linux kernels, but it *seems* faster). Hell, my full ISO to install NetBSD and all of the other supporting software is approximately 100MB, and that's with quite a bit of extra stuff thrown in, like the development tools, etc...
The one place that NetBSD needs some help is with the installation process ("you mean I need to know the geometry of my drive???!" and "what do you mean sshd isn't started by default from rc.conf???") but even that is easily overcome by creating simplified installation floppies.
As a recent convert to NetBSD (from FreeBSD from Linux), I have to say that I am very pleased with the NetBSD product... adding support for SMP can only make it better.
Note that while the i386 port just got SMP support, other ports have had it for a while. NetBSD/macppc got it in August, NetBSD/sparc got it over a year ago, etc.
Now BSD can die twice as fast!
(Note to moderators: Not a troll - just an sad attempt at humour. I'm writing this from my FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE box...)
...but it's being eaten...by some...Linux or something...
Of course this is NET-BSD not BSD. FreeBSD I believe has had SMP support for a while now. FreeBSD is more like Darwin / Mac OS X than NetBSD. Also they are referring to the i386 which is way different from Mac which uses the motorola processor.
NetBSD runs on just about all processors out there, does Mac OS X? No and neither does FreeBSD. That is what the whole NetBSD project is about. Mac OS X is about a pretty gui on the foundations of UNIX / BSD. Kinda about time someone did what Mac did, but then again about a year before Apple announced their plans of OS X I suggested that someone put a nice GUI on UNIX. Guess what. They listened and now everyone is really taking to Mac.
Only 'flamers' flame!
As for journaling filesystems, NetBSD, alone among the BSDs, already offers one; though I'm not sure how mature it is. (The 1.6 release notes say that it's more stable now.) However, soft updates offer many of the advantages of the additional stability journaling filesystems bring. The main reason why journaling filesystems are sutch a big deal on Linux is because ext2 is such an unstable file system, especially with asyncronous metadata, compared to the Berkeley Unix FFS BSD uses. If you don't have asyncronous metadata, yet have the rest asynronous, the whole advantage of redundant metadata storage disappears as I understand it. Of course, you don't have to fsck most of the time with a journaled filesystem; this is the only advantage remaining. In my mind though it is, in practice rather than as a brag, for important 24/7 servers to recover more fast after a power outage; but if you need that kind of availability you should have a power genererator or at least a UPS to deal with the power outage in the first place.
I assume you're joking, since Debian is non-profit. NetBSD is owned by the NetBSD foundation, it's also non-profit, though Wasabi and others do manage to run businesses based on it. (After all, it has the Abbie Hoffman of software licenses - the BSD license, "Steal This Code".Hmm... Time to scour off the netbsd-current@ mailinglists again for answers...
When people on slashdot speak of BSD, they tend to mean the post 386BSD derivatives. That was the "Free" OS that sprung NetBSD and FreeBSD. Then OpenBSD branched from NetBSD. Until fairly recently, none of these were SMP capable. For a while, only FreeBSD was SMP capable, now it looks like the "Free" BSDs (386BSD derived) are all rounding out, and starting to overlap in scope. FreeBSD now runs on non x86 hardware, and NetBSD now runs SMP. OpenBSD has various groups bringing SMP (mostly from NetBSD work) and NetBSD/FreeBSD are reincorporating OpenBSD code-audit correction. On the whole, it is a very pleasing situation.
Now MacOS, which runs on top of Darwin, has a slightly different heritage. It comes from BSD, but I believe it derives from a pre-386BSD branch (although they have incorporated many imporvements from NetBSD, then FreeBSD). It probably it pretty directly decended from LITES, a BSD "personality" which ran ontop of the MACH microkernel. That doesn't necessarily mean that LITES or Darwin is a Microkernel system - rather, they are a "single server" - a single kernel hosted ontop of the MACH subsystems. This means it takes advantage of MACH VM architecture, and probably MACH hardware drivers, but it doesn't take advantage of MACH message passing or other mk technologies.
Much like Windows NT was designed as a microkernel, they ended up defeating the micrkernel architecture to preserve system performance, without wasting previous effort. In this case, the previous effort was from NeXTSTEP, which also ran ontop of MACH. Then Apple incorporated updates to MACH (2.5 to 3.0) IIRC, BSD (4.3 to 4.4) and OpenStep... and every other technology that came since.
There is much more info to google for, but I believe I have thorougly answered your question. Just remember, there is traditional BSD (usually referring to BSD4.4, as opposed to AT&T SYSV) and there is Post-UCB unencumbered BSD (usually 386BSD derived legally unencumbered forks under a "BSD" style Free Software license).
OpenBSD has never had SMP, and if you read any of the OpenBSD mailing lists, you will see that it is not a priority to have SMP. And there is no battle for BSD supremacy; the BSDs peacefully coexist, each standing on its own merits.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
I have to assume you're speaking facetiously in the voice of a Linux advocate, right? Because in the spirit of free software, people use what works best, and if that happens to be NetBSD instead of Linux, then so be it; there is nothing to be sad or worry over.
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.