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."

Comments

From a user and soon-to-be commiter

[agent dero]

For those of you that don't know, NetBSD 2.0 is going to be _awesome_

I run -current on 3 machines (x86,sparc32,sparc64) and it's just cool. One of the features that come to mind (really don't think it's in 1.6.2) is FFS2 (FFS being their file system)

SMP is still being worked on, I don't know about the status of the i386 port, but for sparc64, SMP is to the point where the kernel will spin up that second CPU.

(Of course, we never paid a developer full time to hack SMP ::cough:: ::cough:: ;) [mods, it's a joke])

Re:From a user and soon-to-be commiter

[LizardKing]

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.