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NetBSD 2.0 Released
Quique writes "NetBSD 2.0 is the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, and has just been released. It can be downloaded from one of the mirror sites.
NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty four different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more.
NetBSD 2.0 continues the long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals." The release announcement is also available.
Only in Soviet Russia.
Everywhere else, NetBSD 2.0 confirms it... Netcraft is dead!
Sure, but will it run on my toaster?
DAMN YOU OCTODOG! DAMN YOU TO HELL!
What are NetBSD's strengths?
Well, it's really good at dying, especially confirmed dying. It's been doing it for some time now, years even. In fact, I have never seen anything so good at dying.
NetBSD is often used in porting software and OSes to other processors, due to the wide range it runs on.
:p, whatever floats your boat. Hell, you could even use Windows 2003 Server if you've got a few thousand burnig a hole in your pocket and the server isn't too important :D
As a result of the massively postable code though, it has a footprint relatively smaller than most ofther OSes, and tends to be quite fast.
For servers, I'd stick with FreeBSD, and for ultra secure servers, OpenBSD...
Or Linux
does it support SMP efficiently yet?
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
I can see many microcontrollers going this route. One of the cheapest (and oldest) ways to get a u-controller up and running was to buy one of the 8086 based mini-boards and program it with the old Borland Turbo C.
Now with NetBSD, the same kind of boards could have a mini BSD OS, that could use all the free tools to have a more robust design. I'm not incredibly familiar with NetBSD, but I imagine they do have "real-time" control software for these small processors. Great job. And now of course the choice of processors is very large.
"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, *BSD will die."
"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say it will be spared."
"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here. What then? If it be like to die, it had better do it, and decrease the surplus operating system population."
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief. It was sad to see any operating system die, even one so obviously flawed and useless as *BSD.
God bless us, every one.
No hits for OMAP or PXA families which are well supported by Linux
Both the TI OMAP and the Intel PXA are ARM-architecture. The OMAP is pretty much a standard ARM-9, and the PXA is specifically mentioned on the evbarm page.
I just finished instaling NetBSD 1.6.2, and opened a new browser window on my iMac to look up how to install packages..... and what do I see on the front page of Slashdot? NetBSD 2.0 released. The same thing happened with OpenBSD a while back.
:-P.
Maybe I should install Windows XP on one of my computers... Then maybe Longhorn would come out as I opened an IE window to get FireFox
-- TheMadRedHatter
while(1)
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Ah, the story of life.
NetBSD is _the_ most underrated free OS project.
Do not be distracted by the fact that it can run on most every architecture. This is only a side effect of an uncompromisingly elegant design and clean implementation.
NetBSD is quite performant on modern hardware. It keeps pace with other operating systems in most areas, and exceeds in others. Remember, NetBSD was probably the first 64-bit clean open source operating system. It had USB support before Linux. It had IPv6 before... well... anybody.
NetBSD makes a great all around OS. NetBSD tends to be willing to break with tradition where others aren't. Proof is in things like its re-engineering of the BSD init system. It's so simply correct, that I can barely remember the traditional BSD inits. Hence, FreeBSD (and OpenBSD?) have adopted it.
So, run. Don't walk. Download, install, and enjoy.
-Peter
P.S. NetBSD's pkgsrc is only thing that comes close to a truly cross platform package management/build system. It supports Irix, Solaris, NetBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OS X, and (to a lesser degree) AIX. I'm sure I'm leaving out a few.
. Penguins Surely Ca
Here's a direct link to the torrent for the x86 Binary ISO.
Not to flame, but I've often wondered how true this statement is. It seems as if a whole bunch of the archs are "quasi-archs". Meaning the under-lying core is still based on a fairly standardized CPU arch. An example is hpcram, which is based on the StrongARM cpu ...
Also, the offical release says 48 archs, not 54 as in the slashdot story
And finally, some asshole named Zafer Aydogan stole my NetBSD Toaster dmesg. Real original can be found at the NYCBUG *BSD dmesg project. (Very funny read!)
Cool, enough random crap from me, heh
Sunny Dubey
It's sort of ironic that a story about a dead operating system was submitted by someone with whose user name comes from a dead language...
Is it? Maybe I'm not laughing because I just don't understand the constant need to disrespect everyone else's favorite Linux/BSD distro.
For many architectures there is no other modern operating system available, let alone a powerful open source Unix-like system. I think that NetBSD, although it has a relatively small user base, plays an important part in the open source community in this respect. Can't we all appreciate the fact that such a ported and portable open source operating system like NetBSD exists?
I wonder what sort of insecurities you have about your own operating system fuel your need to trash a such a benign project.
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
Proof of performance (Coralized for politeness) http://bulk.fefe.de.nyud.net:8090/scalability/
The benchmarks on this page are a year old, but still show a very interesting picture of network socket performance.
It's just as secure as OpenBSD, not more. I can't think of anything more secure then OpenBSD at the moment though.
I just installed NetBSD 2.0 about 1 hour ago, and I must say, I am quite impressed! Check this out:
$ uptime
8:40PM up 67 days, 1:56, 14 users, load averages: 1.02, 0.42, 0.35
No.
Irony is an incongruity between what's to be expected and what actually happens. If NetBSD truly were a dead operating system, what's so incongruent about a fan of a dead language posting an article about a dead operating system? I vaguely recall something about "birds of a feather" banding together and forming small social orders based on similarities or something like that, so there's nothing surprising about a fan of an alleged dead language posting an article about an alleged OS.
Or were we playing buzzword-bingo and I missed the part where they handed out the game charts?
OpenBSD forked off of NetBSD and thus ceased to be NetBSD. That is different from certain other OSes, which are 'ported to other platforms' by creating forks that seldom merge back together ever again, yet are claimed to still be the same OS.
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
"It's just as secure as OpenBSD, not more."
:)
No, it's not.
-a great deal less of the privsep stuff
-no propolice
-no W^X
A number of vulnerabilities common to NetBSD and OpenBSD were mitigated by ProPolice on OpenBSD. That was 1.6... but I didn't see anything about propolice on the 2.0 release page.
"I can't think of anything more secure then OpenBSD at the moment though."
There are special cases where other OSes can be more secure, IMO. For example, on a big system where you have to let people in with permissions to do something interesting, rather than a firewall or a server spewing pages, the FreeBSD jail facility can make it more secure in practical terms.
There's usually a better OpenBSD way to do it, but that way is sometimes enough of a PITA that it doesn'thappen. For example, you can give someone root in a FreeBSD jail and just let them do their thing rather than screwing around with systrace on an OpenBSD machine. Jails are a very blunt tool, but they're very effective.
Apart from localized advantages such as that, OpenBSD is the most secure. I just didn't want anyone to think I was a zealot blind to the advantages of other OSes.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
IIRC, they already have. Just press Scroll Lock and user Page Up and Down to scroll.
The benchmarks are a year old, the system used is even older. Anyway, what's your point? They didn't bother with scalability until recently. You'd be amazed at what NetBSD 2.0 can do. Go try it yourself. Condemning an OS based on not being scalable at one point in time is just stupid. Linux wasn't scalable until 2.6, have you condemned that too? "Look at these benchmarks from 2 years ago - it shows a very interesting picture of Linux sucking".
On a related note, it isn't just NETWORK socket performance, since you can use sockets over loopback too. In NetBSD, being so supportive of systems which need as much space as possible, can even compile a replacement pipe mechanism which uses sockets to be smaller but slightly slower.
Sam ty sig.
Never fear. As of this afternoon I was running 1.6.2 too and tonight I'm on 2.0 with minimal effort.
I used bittorrent to download the new 2.0 ISO image, I checked the MD5 sig, I burned a CD, I booted the CD, I choose "upgrade existing install", and I hit the enter key through a few minor dialogs... and voila! With less than an hour total effort (I didn't stay to watch the install) I'm back up and running with no noticeable glitches (YMMV). And, all that with absolutely no reading of any documentation whatsoever on my part. Amazing. Simply simple. Gotta love NetBSD.
There are so many differences between pkgsrc and RPM is isn't even funny. They're in completely different domains. I realize you have a very low userid, but that doesn't stop you from sounding like a "me too" drone when you bring up RPM. It's like those schmucks claiming a minimalist window manager as the equivalent of a complete desktop.
I use FreeBSD, which is listed as one of the platforms for RPM in your link. But there are native RPM packages for FreeBSD. It's only used for installing some *Linux* binaries. But with pkgsrc I get everything I need. I can even forego the native ports and rely exclusively on pkgsrc should I wish.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
NetBSD isn't under GPL which I guess is a good reason why ports to things like OMAP and PXA27x are not in the public domain.
Do you know what "public domain" even is? Any software under the GPL is specifically *NOT* in the public domain.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
You are not quite right.
bus_space(9) and bus_dma(9) are kernel interfaces which achieve
NetBSD's extreme portability.
And although both FreeBSD and OpenBSD incorporated these interfaces
from NetBSD already, they haven't finished to convert all their
drivers to use these interfaces yet. Thus, the portability of
FreeBSD and OpenBSD is still limited, and isn't comparable with
NetBSD at this point.
Linux still don't have these abstractions.
Its portability is achived by i386 emulation (e.g. cli, inb, outb),
and very limited compared with *BSDs.
What could I expect in terms of driver support on NetBSD?
With NetBSD's design I doubt they have a lot of headaches even with many archs. If there's a bug in a chipset driver probably all archs using it are affected and there's only one place to fix it.
The main advantage of having 48 archs is not to actually run NetBSD on each and every one of them productively. It's to abstract your code to such levels that a Realtek NIC is using the very same source on i386 as it does on alpha or sparc. A Realtek on an ISA bus is probably using the same source as one on PCI. And an equal PCI chipset on i386 and alpha is using the same source again. Everything is held together by well-designed glue APIs. Independent of 32bit, 64bit, big endian, little endian, etc. Try to compile your Linux app of the day on something else than 32bit i386..
Really, it's beatiful, you can compile the whole system natively or for a completely different arch by just specifying -m to the build.sh script. It boostraps a self-contained (cross-)compiler environment on any decent POSIXish system. And in the parts that are native to NetBSD you don't get a single compiler warning. The imported GNU utils on the other hand...
'nuff said, try NetBSD!
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
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 but I haven't found anything.. Anyone know if it is possible?
My other account has a 3-digit UID.
This, folks, is an example of a clueless newbie insulting an operating system based on his own ignorance.
/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/GENERIC:
# console scrolling support.
#options WSDISPLAY_SCROLLSUPPORT
It's not on by default because it's too new a feature. BSDs work on 'method of least surprise'. If you uncomment that and build a fresh kernel, it will use the Shift+PgUp/Down mechanism that Linux has, no worse.
Anything else you want to be owned on?
Sam ty sig.
OpenSSH, PF, the TCP/IP stack that founded the internet... you're right, nothing out of BSD.
If anything, nothing comes out of Linux. BSDs are breeding grounds for world-changing software. Unless you mean to tell me that Linus and his buddies write all the software instead of getting it from GNU and other devs, GNU/Linux is much more of a hand-me-down collection than any given BSD, the latter containing some source that started in BSD and continues to be in BSD. Even some GNU tools (indent, for instance) were forks of BSD tools.
Sam ty sig.
That's FUD. You would be more right in saying 90% are very stable and 10% less so, but I would say the share is even more towards stable. If you look at the ports page and the mailing lists, almost all systems (save those that nobody expects much from, e.g. Playstation 2) have numerous users with success stories, and where there are problems, solutions come up.
I personally have seen many, many reports of NetBSD on exotic machines being very useful and stable. Googling is the least amount of work needed to find more.
Sam ty sig.
Is NetBSD sufficiently similar in structure to FreeBSD that I can use this book to set up and understand my machine? Or is there just to much difference?
If anyone can point me to printed documentation on NetBSD, that would be very welcome indeed.
z i n k p u t (a t) h o t m a i l . c o m
!ERR: Signature not found.
No, sendmail is on by default. Try "netstat -a | LISTEN" after a fresh install. You need to put "sendmail=NO" to /etc/rc.conf if you don't need sendmail.
Unfortunately no G5 support yet. I figured it would support that before Linux. Oh well. Now it's a race between OpenBSD and NetBSD to see who gets it first.
Damn
Elegant
And
Dependable
D.E.A.D. I tell you!
Spread the word!
MD