Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

NetBSD Goodies: 2.0 RC1 Tagged, New pkgsrc Branch

Posted by timothy on from the recently-ported-to-difference-engine dept.

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."

3 of 55 comments (clear)

  1. Re:multi-platform by torstenvl · · Score: 3, Insightful

    From http://www.kernel.org/:
    "These days it also runs on (at least) the Compaq Alpha AXP, Sun SPARC and UltraSPARC, Motorola 68000, PowerPC, PowerPC64, ARM, Hitachi SuperH, IBM S/390, MIPS, HP PA-RISC, Intel IA-64, DEC VAX, AMD x86-64 and CRIS architectures."

    Check, check, check, check, check, dunno, check, in progress, in progress, check, check, nope (who needs Itanium? :-P), check, check, never heard of it.

    From http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/formal-1.6/NetBSD-1 .6.2.html:
    "The NetBSD operating system is a full-featured, open source, UNIX-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2. NetBSD runs on 52 different system architectures featuring 17 machine architectures across 11 distinct CPU families, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.6.2 release contains complete binary releases for 40 different machine types."

    There are certainly some that Linux supports that NetBSD doesn't, but not many. And as far as sheer number, NetBSD wins hands down.

    Besides. At a certain point, you get past the serious marker, because you've exhausted all the common platforms. At that point, only one thing matters: Can I run *Nix on my Atari?

  2. Re:multi-platform by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I like how you list CPU architectures, not platforms. Like there is absolutely no difference between an old 68K amiga and the Sun 3/260 I have downstairs?

    Adding support for a new CPU type in NetBSD is fairly easy... the code is clean and portable. I'm sure most of those processors could be easily supportable if there was sufficient desire, but personally, I don't even know what the "cris" processor is, and what machine runs the h8300 processor? Its more likely a matter of nobody having the hardware, or the time, to spend porting to a machine nobody has.

    With all the garbage I've had installed with "out of the box" linux installs, randomly changing the whole VM system in the middle of a "release" OS, and the like, I far prefer the stability of a release version of NetBSD. If it wasn't for having to power off my NetBSD server here at home to replace a failed 120GB drive a few weeks back, I'd have almost 2 years of uptime (the UPS helps ;-) ). We run RedHat at work on our servers, and besides the damn date problem (tell me again why exaclty uptime can't count over 250-some-odd days?), I've had more random crashes and poor VM behaviour on RedHat than I've ever had with NetBSD.

    2.0 has been a long time in coming, but I far prefer the NetBSD philosophy of "do it right, before you release it" rather than the seeming linux philosphy of "relese it, and we can always fix it later".

  3. Re:From a user and soon-to-be commiter by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The problem for the other architectures compared to NetBSD concerning scheduler activations is the fact that NetBSD has a smaller and cleaner core.
    This is the same reason NetBSD is so simple to port; as a *BSD programmer I can tell you that NetBSD code is so clean you can eat it.

    I'm not using NetBSD, I only code for it, but with the release of 2.0 I will move away some of our production machines from FreeBSD. I love FreeBSD, it's what I use, but the code is no where near as clean.

    I don't really want to mention Linux, because it's butt ugly dirty code in about 95% of the code you look at, it's an achivement that it works at all; it's a complete wonder that it works so well as it does, probably the huge amount of involuntary(unknowing) testers that does the trick.

    NetBSD and DragonflyBSD is probably the perfect mix for the future, as far as I'm concerned. But I dubt that it will happen at the level I want it to.