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NetBSD 2.0 Status Report
Daniel de Kok writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team has sent a report covering the status of the NetBSD 2.0 branch to the netbsd-announce mailinglist. The report contains a schedule for the release cycle, and a list of 2.0-specific bugs that need to be closed. This is still a good time to help us making this the best NetBSD release ever, by trying out the latest snapshots, and reporting bugs."
Wow, so far all posts here were trolls. Where's the mods now ? Can't Slashdot create a special filter for the BSD section ?
I found it interesting that most of the bugs in the 2.0 branch were with IP Filter.
2.0 has many new stuff, like newer compiler GCC3 (1.6 had GCC2), native threads library, SMP, this is just new stuff, what everybody else has too
I was also hoping to get OpenBSD's packet filter but it's not there :(
Of course, one should not wait but download 2.0_BETA immediately from releng.netbsd.org ;)
That poor, poor, server...it's already sluggish. But then again, CVS isn't much better.
Two days ago I compiled NetBSD 2 on Slackware Linux and created bootable release CD (no X, ~112MB). Then I sucessfully installed it at home on qemu.
Is there any other OS with mobility like this?
If you're finding that the GENERIC kernel is too bloated, then the quick fix is to create a custom kernel usung the adjustkernel script. This parses the output of dmesg, and creates a custom kernel config file with only the devices found on your machine enabled.
On my laptop, I was able to pare the kernel down to 1.8Mb. Not such a big deal on a machine with 512Mb of RAM, but it's useful on something like my Vax which only has 24Mb.
FreeBSD makes all devices without a hitch. I even have sound working on it! Something I can't say about RedHat or any of the other 'user-friendly' Linux distros.
I could say the same of OpenBSD. Granted, it is an old (AMD K5) machine. I would expect NetBSD and FreeBSD to do the same.
The slow pace of recent releases is down to the amount of work going into NetBSD 2.0. This will feature decent SMP support and high performance threading using Scheduler Activations. The improvements in performance compared to the 1.6 branch are extraordinary, and unlike Linux, where reecnt work has been aimed at improved performance on high end hardware, the NetBSD improvements are generally applicable to all classes of machines.
It's actually quite amusing to see NetBSD development labelled as "slow" compared to OpenBSD. The reverse is very much true, as Open takes from Net far more than Net takes in return. For example, the rapid implementation of SMP support in Open was due to Net having done most of the work already.
The NetBSD developers are also not very vocal about what they're working on. In the Linux world, we have things like Kernel Traffic picking over the minutiae of mailing list activity. There's also the massive preponderance of "Linux branded" press coverage, which gives an emphasis to goings on that are fairly peripheral to the Linux kernel (GNOME and KDE for example). The only real way to get a feel for what's going on in the NetBSD world is to study the CVS logs - not something that many people aside from the developers would do.
"[...] the NetBSD improvements are generally applicable to all classes of machines."
It's good to see people still caring about older hardware; DragonFlyBSD developers (Note: not Matt Dillon or anyone incredibly highup) basically wrote off the idea of supporting anything other than new hardware when I was talking to them. That's silly practice, in my opinion, and I hope that's not the mantra of the higher up developers, but I digress.
"It's actually quite amusing to see NetBSD development labelled as "slow" compared to OpenBSD."
OpenBSD seems to be making a lot of non-kernel additions, such as OpenNTPd/OpenSSH/implementing X.org/and the such. It's too bad these two groups can't see eye-to-eye, or we'd have one heck of an OS... portable, secure, innovative, etc. Although, OpenBSD code is portable due to it's heritage, it doesn't take advantage of it like NetBSD.
I've always been a fan of NetBSD, and thought it was a lot cleaner and better developed OS, imho. Theo's antics are, personally, enough to shy me away from using it.
www.netbsd.org has been working fine for me recently. I've been consulting the pkgsrc pages frequently this week, and the last, and have not noticed any problems.
Do you perhaps have a browser with (possibly broken) IPv6 support, but no connection to the 6-bone?
www.netbsd.org is slightly unusual in that it has a AAAA DNS record (IPv6 address) as well as a A record (IPv4 address). I recall seeing some older Mozilla builds that tried to contact www.netbsd.org over IPv6 and failed to fall back to using IPv4. When I looked into it it seemed to be a "known problem" in the Mozilla bug tracking database and I haven't seen this behaviour recently, so I assumed that it was fixed.
Does a numeric IPv4 address work for you?
http://204.152.184.116/
No, I'm afraid not.
I've tried with Firefox 0.8, as well as links and lynx, but no luck. I've tried from this, and 3 other boxes on my home network, including the firewall itself.
I'm able to ping them, as well as nmap and see the open ports.
nmap www.netbsd.org
Starting nmap 3.50 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-07-31 01:03 PDT
Interesting ports on www.netbsd.org (204.152.184.116):
(The 1651 ports scanned but not shown below are in state: closed)
PORT STATE SERVICE
22/tcp open ssh
25/tcp open smtp
80/tcp open http
165/tcp open xns-courier
871/tcp open supfilesrv
1984/tcp open bigbrother
2022/tcp open down
3306/tcp open mysql
Nmap run completed -- 1 IP address (1 host up) scanned in 17.843 seconds
In fact, I'm able to SSH there (although I get rejected immediately after accepting their key, as it requires a valid public-key, no passwords).
Alas, everything but HTTP works. Perhaps their load-balancing system may be continually directing me to a backend server that's down?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Oops *blush*
Yeah I'm willing to give it a try. I've always liked NetBSD's philosophy better than FreeBSD's.
Besides...
"Congratulations, NetBSD! NetBSD now has better scalability than FreeBSD." http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/#netbsd2
We'll see. I may like it better. Or not. Never know.