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NetBSD 2.0 RC4 Tagged and Released
agent dero writes "According to recent news at NetBSD.org, NetBSD 2.0 Release Candidate #4 has been tagged and released to the release engineering server Check out the announcement for more info on changes since RC 3. Also note worthy, the final release has been pushed back a few weeks to allow for testing of RC4"
What are the new changes in NetBSD 2.0 that warrant the major vesion number change?
The release candidates require lots of testers to work the final bugs out. Slashdot has people that can do that, if they will. While it may be pedantic/boring/whatever to have each release candidate posted, if it catches one bug, then it's been worth it.
"NetBSD 2.0 RC4 Bagged and Tagged"
:)
It's a joke.. laugh.
I tend to agree, but Slashdot posted a series of articles about Linux kernel 2.5.n and FreeBSD 5.3-BETAn, so I guess beta OS releases are deemed newsworthy here.
From the Changelog:
2.1.6. Verified Exec
As the name suggests, Verified Exec verifies a cryptographic hash before allowing execution of binaries and scripts.
This can be used to prevent a system from running binaries or scripts which have been illegally modified or installed. In addition, Verified Exec can also be used to limit the use of script interpreters to authorized scripts only and disallow interactive use.
I've been looking for something like this for Linux some time ago. Anyone here know if it exists?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
Anyway, the poor kid is very, very ill. I really don't know what I can do to help him to recover.
Since this is the *BSD section, it makes perfect sense to make the readers aware that a new micro/macro/mini/maxi/nano/mega/pico/giga-release is out.
I've never experienced putting NetBSD (or OpenBSD) machines in a FreeBSD ethernet. I guess everything should run smoothly after some configuring. But are there any potential issues I'd have to watch for (file system compatibility, etc)?
I quickly decided I feel like experimenting it directly :-P
Will it finally run on my toaster?
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep)
Heh... the harsh truth of software development (and many other sci/tech fields as well): quality and quantity often don't walk hand in hand. :-)
Simple. NetBSD has infinitely higher quality and cleanliness. While it is reputed that Linux is now "more portable", not all of the ports are in the main source tree, not all are actively maintained and support all the features (let alone a userland, which NetBSD has for every arch). NetBSD's ports are, with few exceptions where things are just impractical on a device (e.g. Playstation 2 wouldn't really go far), all equally functional and stable, and all are in the main source tree, without needing to apply hacks and do unheardof installation procedures.
NetBSD's stability and cleanliness even put it ahead of FreeBSD, and leave Linux in the dust. Performance that stems from this same cleanliness and the developers' understanding of hardware and good software is pretty hardcore, especially in 2.0. SMP is supported but I haven't heard much about it.
Seriously, try it, you'd be amazed. NetBSD is not just for portability, that happens to be its edge against other BSDs (with OpenBSD close behind, for obvious historical reasons). It is the leader of cleanliness and code perfectionism, and hardware support is right up there (especially the way it handles USB devices is much better than FreeBSD and on par with Linux, albeit with less devices).
I got trolled, I have lost, I'm having a nice day, but at least I got that out there.
Fear this: http://netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/ - and those were much older releases.
Sam ty sig.
Gosh, with all these delicious BSD releases about to happen, (nbsd 2.0, fbsd 5.3, dbsd 1.0) it makes it hard for a guy to decide which one to play with.
I need some more harddrives so i'll have a place to install them!
do() || do_not();
And it seems next Debian release (sarge) lacks amd64, sh3 and vax. NetBSD have all of those.
Nonsense. If that were true then trees would be the cleanest and most pure things around because they are passed by every day by dozens of gardeners. Didn't make sense, did it?
Seriously, your comment is stupid. BSDs have lots of developers, and moreso, the elitist attitude displayed by many is exactly what makes the code bases pure and clean.
I said it before and I'll say it again: Linux development is a hack orgy. They care about what they can say about things ("more interactivity to rule the desktop, cleaner this and that, runs on X and Y") and less what code issues could result. Con Kolivas himself pointed out that Linux 2.6's interactivity hacks were to cover up sloppy coding of drivers and kernel procedures that should have been low-latency by design, not because you interrupt them when it's convenient. The Linux code base has been gradually mangled together to suit the needs and wants (often just to brag) of developers and their sponsors/employers. Can something grown in this fashion, with lousy maintenance afterwards (read the mailing lists regarding devfs' problems, Mr. "more programmers must make it cleaner" clueless troll), possibly be cleaner than systems which are actually engineered to be clean and sensible, not just tacking on new hacks just because they'll sound good in changelogs?
Your parents must be so proud.
Sam ty sig.
I can't speak for every port out there (having only tried i386 myself, due to my own hardware limits), but I'd have thought that page at the end with the in-action shots of NetBSD on unbelievable hardware would have served as enough evidence. Of course you can't have every bit of software work everywhere - X on graphics calculator? - but enough does to get something interesting done. Look, there's one shot there of a guy running NetBSD on his StrongArm-based MP3 jukebox, capable of using the audio adapter and optical drives and input. What more do you want?
One thing that surprised me was that NetBSD doesn't have an XBox port. This could be because of the usual "why would any serious developer want that? It's a Linux geek thing", but then again the whole low-cost-okay-power side leaves room for questioning.
Sam ty sig.
As far as I know, *BSDs are committed to technical excellence, and have an academic spirit that's light-years away from all the proprietary-hating political crap that infests (and sometimes, sadly, characterizes) the linux commmunity. :-)
Spreading FUD is a disgusting political act, and it has gone on for so long, and steadily, on this board. Clearly this "troll" has an agenda... But I don't think it's worth taking it personally: *BSD's play in a completely different class.
>Linux kernel code is much cleaner than BSDs',
In your dreams.
>because it's peer-reviewed by a huge number of programmers.
This is very true. The fact that 1) there's a huge number of linux programmers and 2) they're peers. :-)
That pretty much sums it up about their skills. I couldn't have said it better myself.
"Lifting" isn't too far off - the ULE scheduler was based at least in part on the O(1) scheduler, but without the problems (there were exceptional cases where the O(1) scheduler in Linux performed erratically, but ULE had much cleaner behavior). It had its own problems later, we know, but it doesn't really matter now.
What's your point though? Who cares if a BSD takes something from Linux? The number of things that Linux has taken from the BSDs is mind boggling. Early code bases didn't have network support until they ripped the BSD network stack ("lifted" definitely). They didn't do that right either - the new open BSDs continue to have infinitely better networking capabilities ("NetBSD 2.0 beats land speed record" twice, and there was that post regarding FreeBSD 5.x routing hundreds/thousands of times as much data over the network as Linux).
The only reason Linux rose to such glamor at all is media hype, certainly not technical merit. There was some geek romance in the notion of a kernel written for users who hate windows, more than for those who love UNIX. The BSDs couldn't care less about fighting off Windows, that's why their features are carefully planned and engineered (even at the cost of convenience for users), not just hacked on to make a cool headline and support pro-Linux evangelists.
Finally, I do not envy Linux. I have run it frequently with varying successes, and there was a time I used it exclusively with quite a bit of success. That's not the point - the point is I didn't know any better. At that stage I was happy mashing together tarballs and compilations into a sorta-working system, with no idea that there were systems out there that were Whole Operating Systems that fit together and did everything with attention to integration and cleanliness. Imagine my surprise.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a lot of things that are persuasive towards its adoption. Just the options of file systems and curious drivers is enough for many users. But managability, reliability and good documentation? Go elsewhere. It's the equivalent of a group of casual engineers building a house while also putting in pieces (often entire rooms) that kids in their back yard built with Lego and mud, then having some entirely different party figure out how to live in the house and document it - often months out of date. Sometimes the lego and mud will be replaced by an engineer, maybe even well documented, but this will never apply to the whole thing.
Sam ty sig.
I won't bother replying at length to this one. It can only be a troll.
Fact: All of the BSDs were working decades before Linux was bootable, written [b]only[/b] by the best and brightest comp sci and soft. eng students (and above), and the UNIX before that by companies and some university contribution. Linux was, with all due respect to Linus Torvalds, a hack to have a non-BSD UNIX-like that worked on i386.
If you'll note, FreeBSD was much more scalable than Linux up until 2.6 arrived, and since no other open source system had this level of scalability (let alone performance and stability) it could only be from-scratch. Where were your PhD.s then? Coding for FreeBSD, obviously. They had the "proper design principles" and "algorithms" going very strongly, while Linux was applying dirty hacks to support new things (you should have seen the early USB support), having never bothered measuring scalability.
Sam ty sig.
Case in Point:
:)
Microsoft has many many more Computer Science Ph.D.s working on Windows than Linux does.
Hmmmmm.....
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
I didn't have to look far. Driver for Broadcom 440x network cards (like the one in the laptop I'm talking from)
/home/nbsd/src/sys/dev/pci/if_bce.c
/usr/src/linux/drivers/net/b44.c
/home/nbsd/src/sys/dev/pci/if_bce.c | grep func | wc -l /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/b44.c | grep func | wc -l
Linux 2.6.9-rc4-mm1: drivers/net/b44.c
NetBSD 2.0: src/sys/dev/pci/if_bce.c
Come on. The Linux one can even pass as bloated:
44K
48K
A colossal 4kb larger. And a lot of the code within is dirty, but you asked for file names only, right? The Linux one even uses spinlocks where they are completely unnecessary. It has many more functions than the NetBSD one, implying a heavily complicated driver handling concept, or possibly just a sloppy design. Real coders know how many primitive objects to split a design into, and it's clear who's the real coder:
dirk root # exuberant-ctags -x
22
dirk root # exuberant-ctags -x
69
Granted the NetBSD source (like the other non-DragonFly BSDs) is mostly in K&R C, which many consider 'dirty' (even if technically more interoperable, which pays dividends in NetBSD's ability to be compiled on virtually any system). That's splitting hairs though. It still manages to be smaller and tighter than the Linux code in spite of the 'redundant' argument naming of K&R.
Anything else you wanted? You seem owned to me. Go back to not knowing about code.
Sam ty sig.