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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.
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
The addition of a native threads implementation for all platforms and symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) on i386 and other popular platforms were long-standing goals for NetBSD 2.0. Both of these goals have now been met--SMP support has been added for i386, SPARC, and PowerPC, and the SMP support on Alpha and VAX has been improved.
RTFA?
What were the skies like when you were young?
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
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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.
They went on forever - they - When I - we lived in Arizona, And the skies always had these Little fluffy clouds in 'em, And they were long, clear, and There were lots of stars, at night. And when it would rain, they would all turn - They were beautiful, the most beautiful skies As a matter of fact. Um, the sunsets were purple and red and yellow And on fire, And the clouds would catch the colors everywhere. That's uh, neat cause I used to Look at them all the time, When I was little. You don't see that You might still see it in the desert.
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
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.
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?
"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.
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.
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
You can print the NetBSD handbook yourself :)
There are many similarities between FreeBSD and NetBSD thanks to their mutual heritage, but FreeBSD's documentation doesn't usually apply equally to NetBSD. The differences are well covered in NetBSD's own online documentation, though.
I had been using FreeBSD since 4.8 or so, and was able to pick up NetBSD almost instantly. Only one thing held me back (for weeks even), and that was my use of CFLAGS= instead of CFLAGS+= in mk.conf, which made world builds break. Entirely my fault, but could use a warning in documentation. But the basic idea is, if you're willing to read a couple of items of documentation and ask questions, it's very easy to learn.
Sam ty sig.