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NetBSD Quarterly Status Report
An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD's Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most
important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided
to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports
on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the
activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is
now available online."
I, for one, am looking forward to the upcoming NetBSD 2.0 release. Just installed NetBSD-current on a new four-way server and it's running great with SMP. Looks like the 2.0 release is scheduled in the next several months.
resigned
I'm glad that NetBSD seems to have a strong roadmap that is going somewhere soon. Since I've started fiddling with FreeBSD, I've thought that NetBSD didn't have the drive and commitment that FreeBSD did. Bully for them, putting out an optimistic showing for v 2.0. I wonder what the new logo will be.
If you're thinking of deploying Open Source solutions in your company, hopefully this unbiased and detailed guide will help!
Unbiased? So you say.
Detailed? You have got to be kidding me. That read like a review of the latest Duke Nukem, from some crappy gamer mag. I'm surprised you didn't give FreeBSD 2 Bullets and Linux 9 Bullets.
People say that this Unix should be used because it is most supported, etc. But in reality, what any Unix needs is good admin. Whether a Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux or BSD is being taken care of, chances are that there have been customizations that require a good local admin. He rarely needs this support you talk of. FreeBSD is very reliable on the hardware that you would want to run servers on.
I'll take FreeBSD with a good admin, over Fedora with a good admin, any day.
How far will you get with Fedora, when the problem arises from one of your in-house perl scripts? Local knowledge with a consistent system wins every time.
The "good admin" is your local knowledge, and FreeBSD is your consistent system.
PS, regarding OEM driver support, OEM support even in Linux, is proving to be poor quality. The OEM's might know their hardware and Windows very well, but how well do they know Linux for example? I'll continue to choose hardware based on how well it is documented. That is where the real support is in OSS.
The new port Xen virtual machine monitor for i386 sure looks interesting. The guest OS has to be ported to the Xen architecture, though.
Why is it that every time something happens in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, et al. communities (or, at least, when it gets on slashdot) some Linux zealot (AC) has to go touting the problems of FreeBSD (note only one)? ALL OSes have problems! IMHO, all of the BSD derivatives (NetBSD for me) suck less than any of the other 73(!) OSes I've ever tried. Also, this wasn't even about FreeBSD: I hate it when people like you treat the BSDs as if they're all the same, with FreeBSD being the ringleader and the only one with commercial support (ever hear of Wasabi Systems?). If you don't like the BSDs, why would you waste your time on BSD slashdot? Do you seriously think you're going to magically make us care?
Now, I, like most other hackers, am a libertarian in most ways: I believe you have the right to express an opinion. But seriously, what the hell are you trying to prove? Mod me flamebait if you will, but I for one am tired of all the supposedly-unbiased BSD-against-Linux crap. This is not meant to offent anyone (besides the parent AC), but really, why can't Linux and BSD users just stop pissing each other off?
*Storms away*
PS: I do use Linux (Debian and Slack at school, at home I run a multiboot system with 4 different Linuxes and 9 other systems) on occasion and find them nice for some things (like good binary packages).
PPS: Debian has many packages (and is a good all-around distro), but I'll need to see some lists *without* virtual packages, dummy packages, meta packages, stubs, and a zillion different libraries that are normally bundled with their respective reverse-dependancies before I will believe that FreeBSD's collection isn't larger. Also, Woody still has less than FreeBSD, and you really shouldn't (at least, I wouldn't) use Sid on a server
-Bruce
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|\|3+85D: f0r t3h r3a1 133+ h4x0r5!!!!!1 Those who know will attest! They will agree! They already use it! They will not use annoying hacker-esque stereotypes!
When I first saw your post, I thought you where just another Slashdot troll, and did not reply. If it was not a troll, then I must say that your reasons and methology is superficial. I would not trust your jugdement based upon this, nor should your managers.
Regrettably, however, there is truth in a lot of what you say. There was a time when FreeBSD was clearly a superior solution to Linux in every department, but today Linux has better SMP support, far better hardware support, and better software support too. FreeBSD 5.x is still not really "stable", 4.x is very stable but has lagging hardware support and poor SMP and threading, and the linuxulator can handle most but not all Linux binaries.
As for NetBSD, some of the above applies to it too. Its hardware support is often a bit better than FreeBSD (or even Linux -- NetBSD was the first free OS to have USB support, for example). But the smallness of its userbase means it will always lag linux in some hardware support and some usability aspects at the very least.
Nevertheless, after a year or so with Linux, I switched back to BSD (specifically, to DragonFly, a FreeBSD fork). Why? For the learning experience. The BSDs take their documentation seriously: not just commands and function names, but entire kernel subsystems are carefully documented in the manpages. And the source code is much cleaner. These things didn't matter to me earlier but I'm doing more and more programming now and find BSD a much nicer environment. You also learn a lot lurking on the lists. The linux kernel list is just too chaotic for me, this is not my primary focus in life. FreeBSD has the sense to use separate lists for separate topics (-current, -stable, -hackers, -mobile, -arch, -hardware, and most crucially -chat for the "offtopic" stuff), and DragonFly is still small enough that its lists are quite clean.
First, you don't counter ANY of the points raised; instead, you compare FreeBSD with Fedora. If you'd read the post properly, you'd see that the author also dismisses Fedora. He/she talks about Debian, so your point is completely moot.
No, actually I did read the post. Debian is easy to take care of (when all goes smoothly) but does not provide the support that the enterprise expects, which Fedora does.
Second, you say that a good FreeBSD admin will beat a bad Linux admin. Well, duh. A good Windows admin will beat a bad FreeBSD admin too.
Read it again, fuckwit. Talk about, "If you'd read the post properly"! I said, "I'll take FreeBSD with a good admin, over Fedora with a good admin, any day".
Amazing. The BSD zealots STILL can't refute the strenghts of Linux, instead opting to hand-wave their way out of the argument. Sheesh!
You need to improve your comprehension skills. I do not refute the strengths of Linux, in fact I have deployed more Debian Linux than BSD. My point is, that ANY Unix system that requires daily admin, also requires a good admin, since the "support" you get from ANY Unix is not enough to cover the weaknesses of a lesser admin. Where a good admin is on the job, a consistent platform shines. FreeBSD is consistent and Debian is too for that matter. I happen to prefer FreeBSD for systems that I use every day and Debian for systems which I only attend every now and then.
OK, so here are the points and my stance on them (it might shock you to know that I might not actually disagree with all of them):
Performance
Single CPU server: FreeBSD just edged ahead of Linux on this one.
A pretty generic statement. Hardly detailed.
Multi CPU server: With kernel 2.6, Linux performed considerably better than both FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.2.1. The updated SMP code and revised scheduler have worked wonders here, so 1 for Linux.
True. For now.
Desktop: Linux 2.6 is much faster than either FreeBSD, particularly when the system is heavily loaded. Application start times are slightly better, while responsiveness is remarkably superior to FreeBSD. Another 1 for Linux.
There have been times, when I've been compiling a BSD kernel in the background and completely forgot. I noticed no difference in responsiveness while the CPU is regularly near 100% occupancy and only slight delays with IDE disks when they are thrashing.
Stability
Linux distributions vary greatly in terms of stability, with Mandrake Linux and Fedora Core aiming for bleeding-edge desktop features, while Slackware and Debian put great emphasis on stability. FreeBSD is indeed a reliable OS, but the smaller development and testing community puts it behind Linux
FreeBSD behind Linux on stability? Garbage. They are both very close, assuming we're talking about the Linux kernel at it's best and not gcc optimized to hell by some distro that gives up stability for marginal performance gains.
I see FreeBSD as being slightly more stable than Linux, but this is only my subjective opinion.
additionally, there are more full-time Linux developers working with commercial companies on hardware support and core component testing.
Yes and I have done my fair share in the past. I've since moved over to the very clean BSD's and I'm no longer under NDA.
Commercial hardware companies fall into a few major categories. 1. Full documentation of hardware or driver source. 2. NDA documentation of hardware, resulting in binary only drivers or a mixture of some binary and source. 3. No support at all, reverse engineering required.
I don't really want to buy anything from 3 or 2. At least 2 can sometimes give the BSD developers a head start and some leads with some Linux code. With 1, BSD developers can either write their own driver from documentation or port from Linux driver source.
So, that point is moot.
Our Debian and Sla