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."

Comments

Cleanest?

[chjones]

Just out of curiosity, who considers NetBSD to be the "cleanest" of the BSDs, and why? I'm not trolling, just wondering---I don't think I've ever heard that (specifically). CDJ

Re:Cleanest?

[redhotchil]

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.

Re:Cleanest?

[vga_init]

Well, I am not an expert on it, but my gut feeling tells me that it's linked with the concept of portability. We know that it's portable because it's been proven so many times, and I think portability implies an above-average deal of cleanliness. In order to port your software, you need a system that is very logically and uniformly structured. So, your design goals are focused on creating an implementation that contains the least amount of messy or inextricable code. Also, the pressure for portability helps promote the deprecation of code that might otherwise cling.

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).

Re:Cleanest?

[the real darkskye]

Aside from FreeBSD's install system, NetBSD is the easiest I've encountered.
It is much more friendly (well less intimidating) than OpenBSD's although I do have reservations about it, such as it not storeing any options you set at install time, and not booting with RC_CONFIGURED=false by default to alert you to the fact you need to set options.

Re:Cleanest?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

Re:Cleanest?

[0racle]

Different priorities for different projects. You could also say that OpenBSD has a low priority for desktop 'users' (as opposed to developers) with the stress on absolute security being the over-riding factor, everything else gets added in later. NetBSD works toward a clean implementation and portability of the code across many different platforms, everything else comes second. Not to say that NetBSD doesn't care about security, just that its not the number one driving factor, and that still sounds bad. On the other hand, Linux, as part of the fact that the parts that make a complete OS are created by different people for each part, seems to aim at whatever the most vocal of the parts wish it to do, and thats be a Microsoft killer, hence the appearance to attempt to gear it more to a desktop user.

Re:Cleanest?

[Fweeky]

"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? ;)

Re:Cleanest?

[mnmn]

I've always considered OpenBSD to be the cleanest. It has resisted major change but has been code-audited much more than NetBSD.

I dont know about portability but OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD, and has been changed less since and audited more.

But if you mean 'original' by clean, the earlier versions of either would be cleaner.

Re:Cleanest?

[beholder77]

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.

Re:Cleanest?

[tedu]

"widely" is a codeword for "i can't prove it, but it sounds good." see also: "everybody else thinks so, what's wrong with you?"

uh huh

[syrinx]

NetBSD is widely portable.

In other news: the ocean is wet. :P

Re:uh huh

[AvantLegion]

All I know is that NetBSD will even install on my taco.

I don't mean an N-Gage. I mean the damn taco I just bought from Taco Bell.

I accidentally dropped a NetBSD CD into the Taco Bell bag, and when I pulled out my taco, there was a bash prompt on the tortilla shell.

DANGER

[ArbitraryConstant]

DANGER

Replying to this post may result in flames no matter what your position.

I know which BSD is the cleanest. I'm just not going to say it here...

NetBSD portability vs Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

it is less portable than Linux.

It depends of what you are talking. Linux is just the kernel, NetBSD is a compete OS. You have to pick up a Linux distro and compare its portability to NetNSD.

NetBSD builds for more than 50 architectures from the same source tree, fully supporting cross-building of the entire system (it's as simple as running a shell script).

It has the same distribution layout for all the supported architectures, and the same installation system for most of them. It has machine independant drivers (write once, run everwhere), including for things such as the system console.

NetBSD also has a cross-platform package system (in fact it's even cross-OS, as it works also for other systems) that automates rebuilding from source. The vast majority of the packages are therefore available to all NetBSD architectures.

Now can you name a Linux distribution that can compete?

actually, RC3 is tagged

[jschauma]

Two days ago, RC3 was tagged, adding an NFS fix (transfers or directory operations hang under special circumstances).

Status of SMP support?

[Greg Koenig]

What is the condition of the SMP support in the upcoming NetBSD 2.0 release?

I know that SMP has been present in -current, at least for architectures like Alpha (and others?), for several years. My impression is that 2.0 is intended to be the first release where SMP is a real priority. I have been a longtime FreeBSD user and have watched their progress (and struggles) as the state of the art has moved from SMP in the 4.x kernels into the 5.x kernels where they are trying to squash down the BGL. How does the SMP work in NetBSD compare to this effort? Is it more akin to the FreeBSD 4.x efforts, are they trying to do something more along the lines of the FreeBSD 5.x work, or something else entirely?

The reason that I ask is that NetBSD has this reputation for not doing something until they figure out the "right" way to do it. So I guess what I'm really asking is what their take is on the "right" way to do SMP. I really want to look at the source code to figure this out, but haven't had the time to invest in this, so I'm wondering if someone else who has might share their impressions.

Cleanest OS

[uid100]

I believe that the term "cleanest" is in reference to one of NetBSD's principle goals of creating truly portable code. Code which compiles and runs on as many different arch as possible with a minimum of #ifdef and such.