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NetBSD Goodies: 2.0 RC1 Tagged, New pkgsrc Branch
jschauma writes "The NetBSD Releng Team has announced that the first Release Candidate for NetBSD 2.0 (ie NetBSD-2.0_RC1) has been tagged. This is a major milestone in the much anticipated release of NetBSD 2.0: from now on, any pullups must address some form of show-stopping issue to even be considered. The NetBSD Project encourages all users to test the binary snapshots that will soon be available on the release engineering ftp server. If no pullups are necessary, then the 2.0 release should
occur around the middle of October. Any fixes resulting in pullups will cause a second RC cycle to begin and add approximately 1-2 weeks more to the timeline."
Further, "The NetBSD Packages team announced that a new
pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch was created, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc trunk is now over. This branch, which includes a total of 4959
actively-maintained and supported packages, deprecates the last stable pkgsrc
branch (pkgsrc-2004Q2); all maintenance will take place on this new pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch. Please see our online documentation of the NetBSD Packages Collection for details."
FreeBSD only supports sparc64 aka UltraSPARC not the earlier sparc chips. NetBSD seems to have the best support for both sparc32 and sparc64, with Linux distros in a close second only because they don't all seem to be updated as often, except debian which is your best bet for linux on a sparc. OpenBSD's sparc support is excellent except for SMP which hopefully will come sometime, it just doesn't seem to be much of a priority.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
I have a few 2.0_BETA machines doing NAT and running squid - I rebuilt one after the ipf 4.1.3 update (couple of weeks ago-ish) and NAT stopped working properly - for example, a webpage that pushed the user through from http to https would never get to the https page. The was other odd brokenness with NAT too, but this one stood out for the users :/
I moved the machine back to a build a couple weeks before that, before the 4.1.3 update - no problems so far. (Nothing else changed on the machines, though I did try a squid update to the latest in pkgsrc, no help). ipfstat looks fine, too...
I can't really help debug this with this machine as I need it working working 100% of the time. However if anyone has suggestions, I will consider them.
Having said that, the 2.0_BETA machines I have at home (running a build with 4.1.3 in it) do not have this problem. Quite odd.
Note, when I say "rebuild" above I am keeping userland and kernel in sync (crucial when something like ipf is updated anyway), plus etcupdate-ing.
I'm running -current on sparc, vax and i386. I also thought about putting it onto my NeXTstation, but I'd miss NeXTstep too much.
FFS2 is not totally trustable yet, although I do use it on my laptop. As for SMP, it now works on a number of ports including i386. I'm sure I also saw someone mention that it could spin up a second processor on an SMP Vax(!) machine. On the more popular SMP ports (i386, sparc, sparc64) the SMP support actually *uses* the extra processors as well as recognising them.
The other big feature in NetBSD 2.0 is the native threading support. This is based on scheduler activations, which is far more scalable than more common threading implementations. It took a while to get stable, but has uncovered numerous bugs in multithreaded applications. This is because the pthread implementation that sits on top of scheduler activations was quite exacting in it's conformance to the POSIX specification. This meant that sloppy thread programming that was acceptable on other platforms showed up more readily on NetBSD.
The only outstanding issue that I ahve with thr release candidates is that gdb seems to be a bit flaky. This may be a problem with missing support for SA threading, but it's not something that I have any time to look into.
OpenBSD has ported the SMP work from NetBSD, giving it multiprocessor support in an amazingly short amount of time. I think this porting was largely the work of one programmer, which is some achievement. From postings on the OpenBSD Journal it appears that support is available for SMP on sparc and i386 at least.
Here is the Changelog from 1.6 to 2.0
Solaris has a poor threading implementation, even Sun's own engineers admit that. However, that shouldn't be taken as proof that all M:N implementations are poor. In a demonstration at BSDCon Japan 2003, NetBSD's scheduler activations outperformed FreeBSD 5 and Linux NPTL. See the tech-misc mailing list thread that starts from here: http://news.gw.com/netbsd.tech.misc/701.
I hear a lot of people say that the user experience across architectures varies a lot with NetBSD. Even between popular archs like x86, macppc and sparc64.
That's peculiar, as one of NetBSD's strengths is the consistency across platforms. I use it on machines as diverse as a VaxStation VLC, SparcStation 5 and a Dell laptop - the installation, configuration and use of NetBSD on all of them is identical. Of course, I wont be running Mozilla on the Vax, but it makes a great little webserver.
Has anyone else noticed that the three major BSD variants are all going to have major releases within about two weeks of each other?
FreeBSD 5.3 is scheduled for a Oct 17 release. NetBSD 2.0 is scheduled for a mid-October release. OpenBSD 3.6 is scheduled for a Nov 1 release.
Hmmm?
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