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NetBSD 2.0 RC5 Tagged
ulib writes "NetBSD 2.0_RC5 has now been tagged. Changes since RC4 include fixes to various COMPAT_ emulations, IP Filter backward compatibility fixes, XFree86, pax(1), rsh(1), hp300 boot blocks, pthread fixes for amd64 and i386, documentation updates. Binary snapshots of NetBSD 2.0_RC5 are available in the daily builds directory on the main FTP site."
Posting works. It's morning EST; the nerds slumber. I for one am pumped about 2.0. I'm a recent convert from Linux and I like NetBSD's installer as well as its bloat and crap-free default software arsenal.
With Fluxbox, the GNU coreutils, and bash, my P133 makes a reasonable desktop workstation. Though Linux would work, the low hard-drive footprint of a NetBSD install is what makes the installation trouble-free. Comparable modern Linux distros seem to me to take time to whittle down to a sub-300MB install. With NetBSD, the core system with XFree uses only 290.
Does NetBSD have any plans to migrate? Or do they have a good reason for sticking with XFree86?
Licensing aside, most of the development seems to be happening at X.Org and that is a good reason to migrate.
any other reason why I would want to use netbsd instead of freebsd in an x86 machine?
THanks for the tips
Sigs are dangerous coy things
- If you need top of the line security, use OpenBSD.
- If you need a small footprint, use NetBSD.
- If you need to run on an odd architecture, use NetBSD.
- If you need a great BSD operating system, and know that everything you'll use is in NetBSD's package system, use NetBSD.
- If none of the above meet your criteria, use FreeBSD.
Also, FreeBSD has better hardware support than the other BSDs as far as number of supported devices. FreeBSD works well, and ports is pretty good, but the cost of that is bloat (although it pales in comparison to what Linux users regard as bloat. A bloated FreeBSD is comparable to a modestly slimmed down Linux installation, although if you really bite down hard, Linux can be made a little smaller than FreeBSD, while still not being able to compare to NetBSD). Basically, if one of the other BSDs will work for you, use it instead of FreeBSDLastly, in time, DragonFlyBSD will edge out FreeBSD. Dfly is going to have far better SMP and clustering, and it's being done so well that performance on a UP machine isn't suffering.
Just curious (as I've never installed or maintained any *BSD system): Suppose you have a FreeBSD and lets say a Mandrake workstation setup, complete with XOrg, GNOME, KDE, OpenOffice, etc. Are we talking a substantial bloat increase with the Mandrake setup just because it's "Linux"? Is it more libraries, bigger binaries, more software package dependancies...? Or are you talking a default install of *BSD versus a typical default install of a modern Linux distro?
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Mandrake
I would recommend FreeBSD over Mandrake, if you're just looking for a non-Windows OS. FreeBSD's configuration takes place via direct manipulation of the text files that control the OS. It's generally not hard to find information on what to twiddle and how, and you end up learning more in the process. Mandrake (and Redhat, the last time I used it) uses GUI frontends to change these text files, and often uses its own nonstandard text files, so that anything you learn won't carry over to another Linux distribution. Furthermore, the last time I used Redhat, I had choices of several different GUI frontends to many different text files, some of which were changed in different ways for different purposes. Without X, I couldn't configure my system.
Is it more libraries, bigger binaries, more software package dependancies...? Or are you talking a default install of *BSD versus a typical default install of a modern Linux distro?
It's typical distribution size. Almost every Linux distribution has a large sprawl involved with what it's including these days. A default Linux From Scratch install contains expect and Perl, for example. The BSDs are built with a focus on taking away everything that isn't necessary. Linux distributions for the most part don't even try.
As for the system binaries, it depends on how they're built. You could build in the library routines they use, or compile them so that they need dynamic libraries, or you could use something like busybox to decrease the size dramatically. It's not a cut and dry situation, but most Linux distributions manage to be larger than the BSDs anyway.
As always, it comes down to what you personally need and what matches your skill level. For Linux, you're better off using Slackware or Debian or Gentoo because they're less likely to damage your ability to learn Linux deeply than something like Mandrake. Today, even though I have no trouble managing FreeBSD or Linux From Scratch, I'd probably have trouble managing a Redhat or Mandrake installation, but I could probably pick up Gentoo or Debian's way of doing things in a few days.
A commercial Linux distribution tends to install more programs and libraries by default than *BSD. On a *BSD it's more common to actually add the different applications you want from the ports system.
I understand the OpenBSD has its origins in NetBSD. I've been using OpenBSD for some time now and was curious if anyone knew any pros/cons of one versus the other. Thanks.
It's more than just base software choices actually. The BSDs have huge amounts of useful base system software, and depending on your needs you can get an amazing lot done without touching a single out-of-tree package. This includes relatively comfortable software development thanks to nvi, gcc/g++/etc, gdb, BSD make, and so on.
The difference comes in when you look at how bloated the software itself is. All the BSDs have libcs that are tiny (a couple of minutes to compile on even my slowest machines) and do everything a C library should, including full networking and everything. The GNU libc, which you'll find on every Linux system by default (there's a diet libc out there, but it isn't recognized), is a HUGE package that takes a very long time to compile and results in a hefty binary in the end. What does all this bloat go towards? Most say it's all because of its attempt at being completely internationalized, but this is hardly enough to warrant about a 10x size increase.
The same idea applies to all other software that wasn't imported from GNU. If you can do the same things smaller and more efficiently, do it that way. There's no point in having 90% of your source appeal to minor features few people will ever use. There's also a strict adherence to tradition where possible - nvi is kept instead of some stripped-down vim-alike (which would have more convenient features, for instance) because people coming from a BSD system a decade ago won't get culture shock. But all the same modern software is a 'make install' away on any of the BSDs.
The bloat difference in the Linux kernel and BSD kernels isn't even worth discussing. It's just not funny any more. Linux has inflated a LOT in recent times. I remember back when some 2.4 was about 25 megs tar.bz2, now look at it - 2.6.9 weighs in at 35 meg. Is it really 40% more functional? Nowhere near. If anything it should be getting smaller, since they insist they're refining to simpler algorithms that should work faster and take less code.
The NetBSD 2.0RC5 src/sys source compresses (bzip2 -9) to 20M, smaller than Linux 2.4 was. Compared to 2.6, it includes most of the same drivers, the same functionality (plus good security), the ability to run Linux binaries natively (and FreeBSD, SVR4, and some others I forgot), a network stack known to be better than Linux', and oh so much more. This source INCLUDES the ports of NetBSD for which Linux needs EXTERNAL patch sets to run on, meaning that this source tree is even more portable. We all know it's more stable, too. Where is the gargantuan (~175%) size of Linux going? It's all pure bloat. And I challenge even one person to come up with something Linux does that NetBSD can't do, and that takes up 15 meg when bzip2-9'd.
Sam ty sig.
Actually, before some clueless newbie posts saying it's all file systems, take a look at this:
/usr/src/linux
thor linux # tar -c fs | bzip2 -9 > fs.tar.bz2
thor linux # du -h fs.tar.bz2
2.8M fs.tar.bz2
...) they have in common. Sorry folks, file systems doesn't answer for it.
thor linux # pwd
Not to mention NetBSD supports a few file systems Linux doesn't in-tree (LFS, portalfs, nullfs...), and that many (NFSv3, UFS [NetBSD supports more of it anyway], ext2fs, SMBFS,
Sam ty sig.
RC's aren't a huge deal (in my opinion anyways), compared to -RELEASES. I'm sure the 2.0-RELEASE will be on the frontpage of slashdot for surely!
Exactly, see? Good systems don't need code bloat. OpenBSD is yet another system which does what it does very well and obviously efficiently.
Linux doesn't have security, in 2.6 it doesn't even have stability, and performance seems limited to synthetic cases. Why it gets all the attention is beyond me.
BSD: The cathedral versus the bizarre.
Sam ty sig.
You're right. I should join in and help make Linux a bigger, more 'forward' project.
/usr/src/linux
...and then email the diff to Linus who'll happilly include it. Seems that's how the coding is done, anyway.
cd
dd if=/dev/urandom of=l33t-new-functionality.c bs=1k count=10k
Face it man, getting bigger doesn't mean getting better. It still suffers from very significant issues in stability, networking capability, security, and root@life knows how dirty it is in every way, even dmesg. That's what you get when you hand a tosspot around to thousands of developers.
Sam ty sig.
It does not support more architectures in-tree. You need external patches for a great many of them. A person with a clue would know this. NetBSD supports them all in-tree and with mutual inclusion.
LFS is a journalling file system, which NetBSD has. A person with a clue would know this. If you looked at my self-reply post, I pointed out that the difference the Linux file systems makes is roughly "jack shit".
There are also few drivers Linux has the BSDs don't. These are mostly only the 'evil' new cards made by NVidia and co, for which you often need external Linux drivers anyway. What's your point? None of them take up 15 meg bzip2'd anyway.
More scalable doesn't require larger code, if done right. If you knew ANYTHING about programming you'd understand this. You're coming off as a clueless troll and I can only conclude this is in fact what you are. Go read a book before you try to write one.
Sam ty sig.
Oh, and LFS isn't a journalling filesystem. It's a log structured filesystem. The idea of LFS is that nothing is deleted (until you run out of space). When you save a file, it writes the changes at the end of the disk. This means that nothing you do will corrupt the disk in the event of a power failure (as with journalling, the only thing you'll lose is the last update), and that you can easily undo changes to a file (since the original is never overwritten). Additionally, the write performance of LFS is close to the theoretical maximum of the disk (since the head never has to seek for a write). The disadvantages are that it requires a lot more disk space, and disk reads of frequently modified files are slow. Additionally, when the disk becomes nearly full it is necessary to compact the log (i.e. erase bytes that have been overwritten). Log structured filesystems were a hot research area about a decade ago, but the disk space requirements were such that they were not considered feasible for general use. That will probably change in the near future due to larger disk sizes (except for Linux users, who won't be happy unless they have 500 text editors installed...). Tanenbaum proposed an interesting variant of a log structured filesystem that was implemented in Amoeba. In this version, there was no modify operation. Files were created and written to, then became read-only. Modifying a file was a matter of reading the entire file, modifying it in-core, and then writing the new version. This gave similar write-performance to a log structured FS, but also gave very good read performance (since files were always contiguous). While this design is not feasible for everything (very large files, frequently updated files), it would be ideal for many things.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Well log-structuring is said to be the 'more complete journalling' so I didn't figure the distinction would matter as much. Thanks for the extensive description though, that really depicts the differences. Even the online documentation on NetBSD's site didn't go into that much detail.
We need more people like you and less like great grandparent (fellow talking about Linux being the only one with journalling file systems and hence being so bloated, etc).
Sam ty sig.
Beautiful. The first 100% troll post I've seen in ages. Usually trolls have had at least one thing that was partially true, but not this one. Pure shit :)
A work of art, even. Thankyou sir, you give us something to mark other stupidities by.
Sam ty sig.
Hey, you. You're a NetBSD advocate.
Make them release 2.0 already. I bought CD-R's specifically for this and I'll be damned if I don't get a chance to use them soon!
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
Your post doesn't work very well for supporting NetBSD nor Linux: Which Linux distrobution was used? Which NetBSD release was used? OpenBSD? FreeBSD? What tests were used to determine the scalability? Were the tests made fairly or optimized for one platform or system? Who ran them? Were developers contacted to help optimize the systems or were default installs used? What compilers were used? Which platform? You need to put this information in a post for it to be taken seriously when you talk about a performance test of any kind. NetBSD is not as secure as OpenBSD, there is no way one can prove otherwise, it is the way things are. Just as OpenBSD cannot claim to be on the most processor architectures, it simply isn't. The NetBSD record for TCP/IP packet handling could probably be obtained by any system with a similar stack if the same test is done with them. If you are vaguely referring to the same record I think you are; then only NetBSD was tried for that test. Once again, who did the test? What was used to test it? Etcetera... I could care less what a university uses themselves; they also use Windows and Solaris. Perhaps if you said that MIT and NASA used it for their extremely important sevices and listed them it would matter to people. Sure, NetBSD is a very slim looking operating system, I just happen to be doing her sister.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Your post doesn't work very well for supporting NetBSD nor Linux:
Which Linux distrobution was used? Which NetBSD release was used? OpenBSD? FreeBSD?
What tests were used to determine the scalability? Were the tests made fairly or optimized for one platform or system? Who ran them? Were developers contacted to help optimize the systems or were default installs used? What compilers were used? Which platform?
You need to put this information in a post for it to be taken seriously when you talk about a performance test of any kind.
NetBSD is not as secure as OpenBSD, there is no way one can prove otherwise, it is the way things are. Just as OpenBSD cannot claim to be on the most processor architectures, it simply isn't.
The NetBSD record for TCP/IP packet handling could probably be obtained by any system with a similar stack if the same test is done with them. If you are vaguely referring to the same record I think you are; then only NetBSD was tried for that test.
Once again, who did the test? What was used to test it? Etcetera...
I could care less what a university uses themselves; they also use Windows and Solaris. Perhaps if you said that MIT and NASA used it for their extremely important sevices and listed them it would matter to people.
Sure, NetBSD is a very slim looking operating system, I just happen to be doing her sister.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
I don't have that kind of power, nor would I do it if I could. You can install a 2.0RC5 system with a couple of floppies and FTP, or failing that, an unofficial ISO. You can then track (via cvs) netbsd-2-0 past its release and on to -stable. This will work very well for you and not require an official release, which, at this stage, could mean a flaky system for some other users (since there are still issues holding it back).
A lot happened to make 2.0, and given it's edging NetBSD out of 'old slow deprecated system' into 'holy sh*t-fast modern system', getting the first release Right is well worth the wait. The functional difference is about as much as FreeBSD 4 into FreeBSD 5 (sans some things like Project Evil), but with a performance gain instead of performance loss. You really have to try it to believe it.
Sam ty sig.
You'd know all of this if you didn't live under a rock. Almost all of Slashdot's OS zealots/trolls know about Felix' (very flawed but still popular, making Felix himself a great candidate for government, ) scalability benchmarks which compare apples and oranges and then slander perfectly good systems.
Nevertheless, NetBSD went from being second worst to second best in two weeks of work, all of which continues to work stably and all. This is a proud achievement that the other BSDs could learn from, and apparently have (but nobody has put new figures up yet so it's not 'public').
NetBSD has three important things going for it: Cleanliness (code and system), stability, and portability. It also has security (but is not as active in this as OpenBSD, yet still very active..) and amazing performance in 2.0 (but most of the time performance is still left up to Linux). It has a very good place in computing, but could be doing much better if NVidia got up off their asses and made drivers for it, at the very least.
And yes, there are newer architectures that it doesn't support, ppc64 and ia64. Strange but true. Nevertheless when they do support it, they'll support it with "solutions, not hacks".
Sam ty sig.
I was not talking smack about NetBSD's architecture numbers, I was more saying they do alot of cross compiling; a bad idea in my eyes as you no longer know for sure that the system can rebuild itself.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
I'm a NetBSD user but don't follow all the news about latest developments at this level. In a nutshell, what's responsible for such a large performance boost? The biggest new feature I'm looking forward to in 2.0 is native threading. I'm going to recompile a bunch of my apps to take advantage of it.
Constitutionally Correct
Native threading is one very big thing (surprisingly big thing even), but generally they seem to have optimized everything and it all adds up to blinding performance, especially in how well it uses hardware. You won't see any hardware NOT doing the best it possibly can, is what I mean to say. And the hardware support itself is what I would call "clean like Linux, but with sensible messages". Hotplugging and everything is kernel-level unlike FreeBSD, which I rather like.
More interesting changes will come in AFTER 2.0 is released, since some new stuff is happening in -current that has to wait until after release. On this topic, the 2.0 release HAS BEEN TAGGED, so it's a matter of days before the release is official! The wait is over!
The power to serve - on the platform of your choice.
Sam ty sig.
That wasn't a flame, just wondering how anyone could ask at this point in time what scalability benches are being discussed. Don't take it so harshly.
The architecture numbers were a tangent mention that just happened to appear in a post otherwise replying to you. These things happen.
Take it easy, it's not worth popping a vein on Slashdot.
Sam ty sig.
I didn't take it as an attack on me or anything, it is simply that one cannot expect other people to know everything that they do. I have read a few trans-operating system scalability tests, none of them really any good; so I cannot just magically know what one AC means in their post.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.