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NetBSD 2.0 Release Engineering Process Underway
jschauma writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD Release
Engineering team has announced that the Release Engineering process for
the much awaited NetBSD 2.0 release
has begun! At this time, the expected final release is scheduled for the end
of May 2004. Please see James' message to the netbsd-announce
mailinglist for details."
I've been running NetBSD -current (a bit like running Debian unstable for all you Linux types) since a little before the scheduler activations were merged in last year. I'd stuck with stable releases before that, but switched as -current got around some quirks in my oddball laptop that stable didn't.
My intial experiences with scheduler activations (which has a pthread compatible library layered on top of it), were a bit disappointing. Complex applications like Mozilla and some other desktop applications broke, as they relied on less than POSIX compliant features in certain other OS'es. Once those wrinkles were ironed out, -current became as rock solid as the stable releases.
The only thing NetBSD lacks once 2.0 is released is an ALSA compatability layer. Having read the scant, poorly written documentation on the ALSA website I'm at a loss to see what it really has that OSS doesn't, but that seems to be what Linux based MIDI and audio apps are migrating to.
Chris
There's a good chance it does work with your USB wifi adapter. I don't own any myself, but I've noticed plenty of discussions about them on the NetBSD mailing lists (mostly people adding quirks for more esoteric devices from what I recall).
There should be a list of supported devices on the NetBSD website, although stuff that's only in -current may not be listed yet. If so, then you could either take a look at the GENERIC kernel config file, or ask on one of the excellent mailing lists.
Chris
If only there were a native pkg for OpenOffice (recent - the earlier port did not work at all under -current for me).
The Linux binary package of OpenOffice runs perfectly on my laptop, as does the Linux version of Sun's JDK 1.4.2_04. If you've not tried running stuff under Linux emulation before, then give it a whirl. I run Java and the NetBeans IDE on a 256Mb NetBSD laptop where it is totally usable. On my desktop machine (same RAM, similar CPU), it crawls under Linux.
In short, Linux emulation under NetBSD seems to be far more resource friendly than running native under Linux. Performance isn't noticably different, and anecdotal evidence suggests it's actually faster.
Chris
Not sure what your getting at. I assume you're talking about comparisons between Scheduler Activations and the plethora of scheduler algorithms available for Linux. NetBSD's SA is not a conventional scheduler in the "new, expermental one every week" Linux sense. They are a sophisticated system that allows layering of higher level abstractions like POSIX threads.
Chris