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NetBSD 2.0RC2 Released
An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD 2.0 RC2 has been released. Get it using sup or ftp from one of the mirror sites. NetBSD is used to routinely set transmission-speed records, and is widely considered to be the cleanest of the BSDs. NetBSD is widely portable."
Its the most simple, and therefore is easiest to port to all sorts of hardware. Its not huge on features, but rather simplicity, portability, stability and flexibility.
In this sense we can think of cleanliness and portability as things that imply the other, though it would be quite a different thing to interpret this particular kind of cleanliness as anything but that; it wouldn't be safe to assume on those grounds alone that the code would be faster/more efficient or be more feature rich/powerful, which I'm thinking some people might want to extrapolate. It's not beyond reason, however, and, as the author points out, there are speed records involved, so its possible that these things are related somehow (but not necessarily).
What exactly does NetBSD lack that FreeBSD has?
usb stack: check (FreeBSD borrowed it)
SMP : check (getting much better fast)
RAIDframe: check (FreeBSD killed it on 5.x)
Kernel assisted threading (Scheduler Activations) : check (works better than FreeBSD's KSE btw)
FFSv2 : check
Sendmail and postfix in base: check
veirexec : check (FreeBSD doesn't have it)
pkgsrsc: check (works on FreeBSD too)
rcNG : check (FreeBSD borrowed it)
arrogant developers: nope, FreeBSD does though, phk@, des@ and some more.
cross compilable kernel, world *and* X : check
Find me a more feature rich, portable and clean unix-like system, please...
"RAIDframe: check (FreeBSD killed it on 5.x)"
:)
:)
;)
Options for software RAID on FreeBSD 5 right now: vinum (old and crufty these days), gvinum (GEOM version of vinum), gmirror/gstripe (standalone GEOM RAID-1 and 0 modules), ataraid, ccd (old and crummy, seems mainly an experiment in GEOM porting). Was there a compelling reason to keep RAIDframe?
"Kernel assisted threading (Scheduler Activations) : check (works better than FreeBSD's KSE btw)"
References? I'd be especially interested in a MySQL super-smack benchmark on a decent SMP system.
"FFSv2 : check"
With snapshots? Obtained from: FreeBSD?
"Sendmail and postfix in base: check"
Great, now I get two mail daemons I don't like instead of just one. At least syspkg makes them easy to avoid
"veirexec : check (FreeBSD doesn't have it)"
whatexec?
"arrogant developers: nope"
Just the users, huh?
I've used both NetBSD and FreeBSD systems as desktops for over a year, and I can say from the standpoint of initial setup they're pretty equal. But I can say the same thing for most Linux systems as well. You can get X, KDE, GAIM, Moz, X-Chat, etc working pretty easily on both systems after an initial install.
:)
However, where they differ is the maintainability. FreeBSD has portupgrade, which doesn't seem to exist in the NetBSD ports world. Portupgrade, although not a perfect port management tool, is damn near close to perfect
Having a ports tree is nice, all the BSD's have that, but having a tool that can intelligently upgrade your existing packages without having to remove and recompile 1/2 your installed packages (try a "make update" sometime on NetBSD, you'll see), is a must.
As well, updating NetBSD from source has always been an exercise in frustration for me. Most of the time, after updating, I can no longer rebuild the userland. It's always some small problem or other, but it's still a far stretch from FreeBSD-STABLE which has broken maybe 3-4 times in the 5 years I've worked with it.
Stability of desktop apps seems to be a bit of an issue for me as well. Mozilla in particular (Linux emulated, and native) core dumps on me on a weekly basis. This was with the pre-RC 2.0 beta's though, so they might have worked that issue out. I imagine it can't be threading related, because KDE seemed very solid, and never gave me grief.
After all this, I still trust NetBSD as a firewall which it has performed perfectly for me for years now. It's also the only OS that I find works well on non i386 hardware. Everything in the Linux world I've tried for Sparc (not Sparc64) has been crap compared to NetBSD in terms of stability. As well, 68k support (Older macs, and older HP workstations) on NetBSD is top notch, and very usable. I actually had a Quadra 610 mac (33Mhz, 24 meg ram, 250 meg SCSI-2 hdd) running apache, php, postgresql and bind 8, and it was still surprisingly fast, and even more amazingly fit well within that tiny hard drive.
NetBSD can give your older oddball hardware new life. The scalability factor that they push is not only impressive upwardly, but downwardly as well. Can you imagine any Linux distro working well on 25Mhz machines with 250 meg drives? Me neither. When they finally come out with a tool for netbsd like portupgrade, and 2.0 gets a minor revision number, I'll be there with my desktop systems.
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
Two days ago, RC3 was tagged, adding an NFS fix (transfers or directory operations hang under special circumstances).
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
Linux supports:
alpha, arm, arm26, cris, h8300, i386, ia64, m32r, m68k, mips, parisc, ppc, ppc64, s390, sh, sh64, sparc, sparc64, v850, x86-64
NetBSD supports:
alpha, arm, arm26, i386, m68k, mips, ns32k, parisc, ppc, sh, sh64, sparc, sparc64, vax, x86-64
Actually, I count 20 for Linux vs 15 for NetBSD.