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NetBSD 1.6.2 Released

Posted by timothy on from the my-god-it's-full-of-archs dept.

kairi writes "NetBSD 1.6.2 has just been released, supporting over 40 architectures. See the release announcement! Be sure to use one of the many mirrors when you grab your ISO!" MobyTurbo adds "A preliminary source of bittorrents has been announced on the NetBSD users mailing list."

7 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Dedication by JustinXB · · Score: 5, Interesting
    http://netbsd.org/Releases/formal-1.6/NetBSD-1.6.2 .html

    "Dedication
    The NetBSD Foundation would like to dedicate the NetBSD 1.6.2 release to the memory of Erik Reid, who went missing and is presumed dead in a sailing accident on 18 February 2004. Erik's contributions to NetBSD included work on support for SGI MIPS R4000, integrating XFree86 Direct Rendering Interface (DRI), and managing the build lab. His death came as a shock, and he will be greatly missed by all of us. May he rest in peace. "

    Just thought I'd point it out.

  2. Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? by MarcQuadra · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Alright, I've got a hankering to build 1.6.2 from scratch for my Mac Quadra (25MHz 68040), but I KNOW building the whole thing would take weeks.

    Is there an emulator for my x86 box that would allow me to get this done faster? BasiliskII can emulate my Mac much faster than it really is.

    I'm sure this is a problem on a lot of the 40 architectures, some of them are way old and limited to the sub-100MHz range. Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.

    Also, is there a way to build the whole distribution via gcc-3.3.x? I'd like to see how well it performs against the gcc2-built system I used a while ago.

    --
    "Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails
    1. Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? by JustinXB · · Score: 3, Interesting

      You can cross-compile anything with NetBSD. I've never done, there are some instructions on the website though.

    2. Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? by saintlupus · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Alright, I've got a hankering to build 1.6.2 from scratch for my Mac Quadra (25MHz 68040), but I KNOW building the whole thing would take weeks.

      It's really not all that bad. The first Unix box I ever had was a Quadra 700 running NetBSD -- the code base is _really_ tight. You could probably build the whole thing from scratch in a couple of days.

      I know, that might sound like a lot, but it's a hell of a lot faster than a Sparc IPC can compile gcc from source. Don't ask me why I know that.

      --saint

    3. Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? by Permission+Denied · · Score: 3, Interesting
      Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.

      Cross-compiling not so bad.

      I did exactly this for a slew of old Macs that I turned into useful machines by putting Linux on them. Compiling a 2.2 series Linux kernel would take a few days on the machines themselves, so I set up a cross-compiler on a fast machine.

      The Linux kernel was easy to compile and move over, but userspace things were more difficult to compile as they tried to link to the wrong libraries (or perhaps the problem was that "make install" would never work since the library would end up in /lib on target machine and needed to be configured as such, but it needed to be in /opt/mac-cross/lib on cross compiler machine). Most documentation for setting up cross compilation is aimed at OS/compiler/embedded developers who build mostly static binaries and don't need to compile and link large sources with dependencies like gtk, so I don't know if many people do this.

      I don't remember how I solved this (maybe chroot + hard links + copying stuff from target) so it must not have been too difficult. NetBSD has an nice integrated build system for everything, so this should be much easier for you (Linux was a third choice, NetBSD and OpenBSD had problems on those machines).

      Go ahead and set up the cross compiler. It will take some reading and tweaking, but you'll save time in the end. I, at least, think it's far more elegant than using an emulator. Good luck.

    4. Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? by T-Punkt · · Score: 3, Interesting

      > I'm sure this is a problem on a lot of the 40 architectures, some of them are way old and limited
      > to the sub-100MHz range
      Nowadays the release binaries for most platforms except i386 are crosscompiled.

      > Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.
      Not with NetBSD (well, most platforms. There may be a few, which are not using the build.sh system).

      Since the NetBSD build process bootstraps by building first a set of tools (make, binutils, compilers etc) and then uses this set to build the system.All you need is a bourne-shell compatible shell and a C/C++ compiler.That's why you can use a - say - solaris/sparc system to compile NetBSD/pmax.See the file BUILDING in the top directory of the source tree.

  3. Re:Geez by Endive4Ever · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just installed 1.6.1 on my four-way PPro box (IBM PC Server 704) but have discovered I'm going to need to build NetBSD-current to get SMP support for it. I was hoping they'd finally merged SMP into the release branch, but maybe that's a 1.7 thing. This is a minor incremental release.

    Being as I have a well-maintained near-complete mirror of the 'distfiles' source tarballs for the Pkgsrc tree local now ('make mirror-distfile' is your friend for overnight bandwidth burning), I can't see ever moving to any other OS for main use. I have all the source for everything for almost any type of box I put into service.

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