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Where Does NetBSD Fit In?
NetBSD Fan writes "KernelTrap offers a fascinating summary of the recent 2004 Annual NetBSD Group Meeting. Included is an introduction by NetBSD foundation president Christos Zoulas discussing NetBSD's relevance in light of competition from well known operating systems such as Linux and Windows which he acknowledges 'both offer more features than we do, and they have behind them the resources of very large commercial organizations.' He also talks about FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and Darwin, ultimately concluding that they all are facing their own serious challenges, and that plenty of opportunities remain for NetBSD. The NetBSD project recently released NetBSD 2.0."
FreeBSD is the popular one
OpenBSD is the secure one
and NetBSD is the one that'll run on my electric toothbrush
Oh well it should hav'em.
NetBSD my firewall OS of choice.
NetBSD fits in my toaster....
I thought it fit "everywhere". I've got the same os on my powerbook as I do on my Jornada.
On my Macintosh PowerBook 3400c
In fact, the latest release of NetBSD fits better, and runs faster, than the Solaris of 4 years ago.
NetBSD runs on 17 CPU architectures. Can you count up 17?
NetBSD will be the OS what you can always use on your old boxes, when you don't get running anything else on them.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they attack you, then you win." -- Mahatma Gandhi
On the other hand, it's solid and stable, and they have FreeBSD and OpenBSD to swipe code from.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Linux keeps re-writing major portions of the kernel and has stability issues. It now depends on 3rd party vendors to integrate and make stable releases of the code.
Linux has always kept rewriting fundamental parts of the kernel true, and it will probably keep it that way. If not how can you explain that linux has gone from crawling in 8-ways to running in 512-cpu SGI boxes? When someone rewrites a part the kernel is for a reason, usually to do something better, and netbsd has also rewritten big parts of the kernel to get where netbsd 2.0. right now some people is rewriting fundamental parts of linux because they want to achieve realtime support. I don't see how this rewrite an be bad.
And I don't see lot of unstability issues, and I bet lot of people unsing 2.6 here will agree with me that 2.6 has been by far the stablest linux release ever. The fact that IBM has been testing linux in 32-way boxes during the whole development of the kernel has helped a lotfor that and its something BSDs can not benefit from (they don't even _boot_ on these boxes). A 32-way machine finds bugs much, much faster than a single-p4 does, it's as simple as that. That is one of the reasons 2.6 is so stable even with the new development model, people test things in those big machines before merging them in the main tree
And yes linux "depends" on distros to publish a workable system. This is how linux works, and while some people don't like it, the fact it that this way of doing things has encouraged the spread of linux,specially in the desktop - everyone can find a distro that fits to him. Do you really expect to be able to build a single base OS that 6000 millions of people will like?
Why? Because it now doesn't trail in performance, and the quality seems to be better than the FreeBSD 5.x releases. (i.e. *all* of PF works, not just parts.....pf doesn't work on bridge interfaces under FreeBSD. Nor does it play very nicely with vlan support)
If you haven't tried NetBSD 2.0, you ought to. If you're looking at the now-looming death of FreeBSD 4.x and need a replacement, look at NetBSD. Also, if you have older hardware, NetBSD is probably a better choice than Linux. Glibc is very large these days, while NetBSD's libc is still pretty tight. I've been using an RC version of NetBSD 2.0 on a SS10MP machine for a few months now...zero problems, and the MP support works fine. It's also feels snappier than Solaris 9.
NetBSD is the BSD for people who don't like change, and I'm one of them. Although the system has gained many new features and has matured significantly over the past few years, the base system has largely retained the same design and layout that it has for years. Nearly every NetBSD version looks the same and behaves the same, which means you almost always know what to expect.
One of my favorite things that's come out of the NetBSD Project in the past few years is the Pkgsrc collection. Pkgsrc has been gradually evolving from a NetBSD-only 'ports' system, to a very robust cross-platform package management system. It really cuts down on a lot of work to be able to manage a handful of different Unix systems, but use the same package management scheme on each system, and keep the pkgsrc repository on a single NFS server updated with a nightly cvs cronjob.
In the BSD world, NetBSD seems to be the least driven by hype and feature creep. This makes it a real joy to use and maintain, because like I said before, you always know what to expect: a cleanly-designed, stable, functional, easy to use Unix system.
We got an old SUN. 200M harddrive, poor CPU, not too much RAM, GREAT monitor, nice keyboard and mouse. A dream machine for an X terminal for our servers. But what to run on it? I tried Linux. It would barely fit. No way to fit X, a desktop manager and enough to comfortably use it. It was still possible to mount a drive over NFS and pull some binaries from there, but it was way too slow. In short, Linux sucked for it. I looked what else would work on that architecture. NetBSD? Let's give it a shot. I installed it, installed X, some basic software so it could work as a standalone workstation, not just terminal, then found enough spare diskspace, that I set up root directory and all demons necessary to run YET another SUN, a diskless workstation with equally great monitor from it (even with SWAP memory accessible over NFS, swapfile on that small drive...) So, two very nice terminals on exotic architecture, all off a 200M harddrive.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Doesn't run on my main Sun (SS1000e, Sun4d) or SGI
(R10000 Origin200, IP27) or RS/6000 (PowerServer-930).
I think the only machines I have that NetBSD supports
are really generic suns (SS2, SS5, SS20) and Moto
VME boards.
Not only is NetBSD ported to many architectures (17, 54, by any count, the most of any comparable OS), but it is the most portable. Desktops have gradually settled on x86 as the only CPU on which new OS'es (from revisions to totally new ones) are required to be released; though PPC remains significant (and growing), it doesn't really force "porting pressure" as just the only real alternative. But desktops are not where the OS innovation lies - at most, they're where the GUI layer is maturing. Clustered servers and personal devices are where new OS features are being hashed out. And they're the sectors where all the different CPU architectures are found. With cheaper, more productive EDA tools, we'll see more and more specialized CPUs requiring OS'es to serve their niche. And increasingly fabric-organized internetworks will make clustering demand heterogenous CPU architectures with consistent OS'es much more compelling, even necessary. NetBSD is very well suited to running on all these ported versions, both technically, and because the community has so much architecture porting experience. If the community gets drained enough by giving up hope of relevance, it will perish. And uCLinux is a threat, even in those natural NetBSD niches. But NetBSD is both stable and portable enough to survive best in a new environment defined by rapidly changing CPU architecture landscapes.
--
make install -not war
I know a guy who built a computer into a (non-working, I can only hope, although I only saw pictures) toilet. I don't think it ran NetBSD, but it could have. Oh, and hostname = Jon (he uses Garfield character names for his network naming scheme).
One awesome thing about netbsd is that it runs on some of my old hardware that never would otherwise be useful. DECstation 5000 with a sexy 21" monitor would be a paper weight without NetBSD. I can run it as an X terminal just fine. It even is nice for small stuff like my Macintosh SE/30. System 6 can only do so much, barely even run an old version of nutscrape. I have an old copy of MacX but it sucked. NetBSD, got a nice little Xterm, ssh client, etc. Fits in the server room, and bang. I have a xterm smaller than most of our VT510s ;)
NetBSD fills a need no-one else will, and because of that its relevant.
It won't run on the Cray J90, either. Otherwise I'd have one.
Ran great until I started getting flooded with spam. SpamAssassin just couldn't keep up on that box; it'd still be processing the previous batch of mail when fetchmail grabbed the next batch.
I upgraded to a sparc 10 with dual 60Mhz processors, but had to move to Linux because NetBSD didn't yet support multiprocessor SPARC. It kept up OK, but 2.4 didn't support Sparc32 very well; the ext3 filesystem became corrupted with SMP enabled, so I had to go back to ext2. There seemed to be little remaining interest among the Linux kernel developers for Sparc32 anymore.
I think Solaris 10 is 64-bit only, so NetBSD may be the only option left to stay up to date on all those old Sparcs!
We apologize for the inconvenience.
NetBSD enjoys incredible popularity as an embedded OS due to its basic complement of functionality, ease of adaptability, and of course its free as in beer license.
The big challenge for NetBSD is Microsoft's Embedded XP. I believe a big reason for this is the support an appliance vendor gets from Microsoft as as a partner is becoming more and more attractive (get the gorilla on your side). Also Embedded XP comes with the latest greatest device drivers, while NetBSD continues to lag behind.
Linux as an embedded OS is futureless as the licensing issues are so problematic.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Some people argue that linux may have more arches than netbsd
even if is't not more or the same number: Linux runs on any hardware I can deam with and its constantly being ported and in some cases developed by the same companies who develop the system.
This makes me wonder... When ARE they going to fork 2.7 and stop piling feature after feature into 2.6? There's been all kinds of stability issues with 2.6; anyone who wants a rock solid system has to still run 2.4.
We need to finalize 2.6 already and move onto 2.7, so critical servers can get a much needed kernel upgrade once it's stable. I even have a couple of Fedora Core 2 based servers running 2.4 because 2.6 kept randomly crashing.
-Z
Where does NetBSD fit in? Somewhere between various flavors of it running a ton of mission critical machines and a lame joke about BSD being dead.
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
BSD is dying...
and now they're no longer in denial!
(just kidding! my server runs openbsd)
This is not a troll, and I am not interested in fanboy reactions. I really am curious.
...
...
... if this is simple truth, and the Linux quote is an exaggeration, where do the other quotes sit?
He says about Linux, same quote as the parent
Linux keeps re-writing major portions of the kernel and has stability issues. It now depends on 3rd party vendors to integrate and make stable releases of the code.
which sounds worse than reality, so I wonder how much these other quotes similarly exaggerate
FreeBSD took over the huge task to implement fine grain SMP and after two years of effort they still don't have a production quality system.
Is FreeBSD's SMP code that bad? Is their SMP still not reliable?
OpenBSD is still touting its security features but lacks the manpower to integrate major kernel features such as UBC and address performance problems. Instead it focuses in supporting and re-implementing major userland utilities.
How much is OpenBSD spinning its wheels, or rather reinventing them?
The Windows release cycles keep getting longer and longer and promised features keep getting postponed because of the increasing complexity of the operating system.
This is not exaggeration, and therein lies my curiousity
Sun is trying to keep Solaris relevant by open-sourcing it, but nobody is certain of what is going to be open-sourced and when.
Not much of an exaggeration, except that I doubt NetBSD is more relevant than Solaris, so I am not sure what to think of this quote.
Apple's Darwin effort does not seem to be producing any useful results, possibly because it is not complete, and the open-source version of the tree is always behind the commercial version.
Here I am really confused, I suppose from not following Apple very much. MacOS X is certainly useful to Apple, seems to be advancing well enough, so is Darwin some free source spinoff which is going nowhere? I had thought Darwin was Apple code, but maybe I have not been paying enough attention to know better.
Infuriate left and right
This is really a no brainer,
NetBSD is designed to be low footprint, highly portable, and flexible. It's the ideal BSD for embedded systems (whereas FreeBSD is suited to larger size systems and servers, and OpenBSD is unfortunately in the middle as a security oriented system, but not portable nor performance enough as NetBSD).
Licensing is a key NetBSD selling point. The problem with Linux/GNU is the GNU license which does not favour commercial embedded manufacturers who want to customise the software inside their product and (a) not have to offer the source code, and (b) not have to offer any competitive/IP/commercially-sensitive content in that source code (i.e. algorithms, device driver interfaces, etc). Despite all of the hoo-haa about the GPL, I'm afraid that companies really do like to minimise risk and lower cost by keeping their product internals as secret as possible.
Portability: NetBSD wins hands down: Linux has been ported to lots of things, but the basic architecture is not as clean. This is been shown time over again, and proven by the supported (not just "happened to be ported to") platforms of NetBSD.
NetBSD also gets to leverage the work from FreeBSD and OpenBSD, as FreeBSD really has greater commercial support in terms of device drivers and so on than either NetBSD or FreeBSD.
What NetBSD should be focusing on (in this order)
1. keeping tight BSD licenses (the kind of Theo style approach being applied to OpenBSD at the moment : to be very strict about licenses of included items) -- commercially friendly for competitive/cost reasons;
2. keeping high portability and flexibility: making sure that as new processors/platforms/drivers come along, that they can be quickly and easily supported -- commercially friendly for time to market allowing easy leverage of the existing product;
3. continually rolling in new support for hardware and security features as possible by grafting from FreeBSD and OpenBSD;
4. continually reworking and streamlining the internals to support all of the above;
5. improving the build environments (i.e. the cross compile is fantastic now), the ports system (fantastic and incredibly easy to bring third-party components in), and other things such as boot code, embedded/compressed installs, etc;
6. not getting "lost" on wasted effort for things like graphical installers, or coloured-ls's, etc;
Basically, NetBSD should continue to
- target small/embedded devices;
- continue/improve commercial friendly;
- innovate/improve on reducing total effort to realise NetBSD onto a new hardware platform;
Elvis, is that you? The king of Rock and Roll? Are you risen and living amongst us?
Stick Men
BSD doesn't generate hype like Linux does, because it's not about hype at all. It just exist to promote solid standards and engineering. That's it. No taking over the world, etc. When the hype is absent, it's easier to not take notice.
BTW, you're wrong about corps never giving back code. Many things have been implemented in the various *BSD's only because some company or another was willing to fund that development. And it works out good for the company because they get the benefit of a whole community's worth of testing, bug fixing, etc. as well as not having to fork the code internally and constantly merge stuff from the free codebase. Except of course for proprietary stuff they don't want to release, but that's their choice, and it's a lot less scary than the GPL when it comes to that sort of thing.
I stick with Net/Free/Open BSD for the sake of sheer familiarity. I understand the BSD way of organizing things. I understand and love pf. I understand how most BSD projects organize their code trees, so using CVS to pull down a stable branch and compile is really second nature. I could devote time to relearning Linux, but I don't have any circumstances that necessitates such an undertaking.
I'm sure that my circumstances are not unique, and that Linux folks can say the same thing about their flavor of Linux.
-Troy
That's precisely the problem with BSD licenses.
Another Slashdotter recently pointed out that BSD is a good license for making example source for new algorithms, etc. because you want them to be freely available to anyone.
That said, the GPL guarantees that if anyone distributes modified versions of a program you have, you can get those modifications too.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Almost everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
We need real-time scheduling support, POSIX real-time extensions, and thread-safe libraries.
That would be AWESOME. NetBSD is already great for embedded, but with the addition of real time we can finally get rid of the hegemony of proprietary RTOS vendors. My company was using an RT Unix, but the royalties were just too great and we had to abandon it for... WinXPe + INtime. Aaargh! NetBSD was actually evaluated for this, but it had to be abandoned due to the lack of RT.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
- MacMini
- Recent SMP PCs
- Opteron machines
- Embedded StrongARM, PowerPC, MIPS and
Super-Hiachi hardware up and down the road
(See e.g. here,
here
and here.
I guess NetBSD can be counted as the most under-hyped OS. I welcome everyone to actually try NetBSD!- Hubert
One of the requirements for stability is that the stable branch, especially the kernel itself, doesn't get experimental code. Linux breaks that law all the time... So don't be surprised when people think it's not stability-oriented. Linux is nothing but a hacker's playtoy in that regard.
As far as OpenBSD reinventing the wheel, it's not. It's just fixing broken stuff that nobody else is going to fix. And nobody else is nearly as proactive in the security side of things.
Now if you don't care about that stuff, fine. But some of us do. Some of us care a hell of a lot about those things.
- Hubert
reminded of DeForest Kelley's prescient observation:
Once again we witness what I call the "NetBSD Pavlov Reflex" - NetBSD gets mentioned and soon the "Toaster-Postings" show up. NetBSD is not that runs-on-obsolete-junk OS - It's the OS that focuses on clean design and good code.This policy will in the long run lead to portability, speed, stability and security. Just look at the facts:
- The Internet2 Land Speed World Record
- Benchmarks which show NetBSD is faster & scales better than FreeBSD (on uniprocessor systems)
- A superb security-record (which can easily match that of OpenBSD)
And all that with much less manpower than most other projects and nearly without corporate backing.
If you had, you would already know what netcraft says.
no trolling, I mean it. Given that now there is a 16-Bit-20-MHz CPU and several hard disks for it, it should at least be possible. Ok, they have their Unix based OS already but NetBSD would definitly be a different class.
Roman Kennke
Let me begin by saying that, although I prefer the GPL to the BSD licence, both are free licences and fine by me. Actually, in a perfect world, the BSD licence should be enough (or even no licence at all...)
Now, about this "BSD licence is better for business and corporations"... it's IMHO true, but not in every way, and especially not in the way that the BSD's would gain more. From what I have saw the BSD licence is great for corporations when the idea is to *take* new code made freely available and incorporating it. But for a corporation that wants to *give* code away the GPL is, interestingly enough, better. This is so because by making it GPL the business/corporation is assured that any later improvement on the code will be available, and so it doesn't give a competitive edge to rival corporations, it more or less guarantees that from there on every implementation of the code is equal, even if being made or used by another corporation.
This makes sense; BSD licence "evangelists" are known to bring out the fact that "programmers need to eat" when dismissing the importantance of forcing the availability of the changed code. So it follows that a company will not provice ammo to rivals by allowing them to take their code and keep the changes to themselves. BSD developers are sellfishness, companies aren't.
Have you looked at RTEMS (http://www.rtems.com)? It is GPL licensed with an exception similar to Linux allowing for proprietary uses.
You could run it on the J90 IOS's, and try to hack
a Y1 channel driver. Heh heh.
As a long-time NetBSD user on my primary home machine, I would say the project is approuching irrelevance.
... Software GL is /so/ 1994.
Honestly, why should it be used when it has:
. no stable journaling filesystem, or even a stable/production-environment-worth softdeps implimentation.
. no DRI
. no USB hotplug infrastructure.. or even stable USB support! (plug in a Logitech Attack3 joystick-- crash the kernel USB thread-- no more work USB mouse-- no way to restart it..)
. the _worst-performing_ threads in existance-- Mozilla is unusable, even on a 2GHz+ system.
"NetBSD! Now ported to 44 different architectures! Only stable enough to use on about 2 of them!"
Sure netbsd runs on lots of arhcitectures, but it hardly runs good on any. They work and work to get it ported everywhere, and once it works on a single box of that architecture, that's enough for them and they move on, look at SPARC, they don't support U1's, and they didn't even have SMP support until NetBSD 2.0
Setec Astronomy
The businesses won't give back. That's not true. Wasabi systems is a consulting-type company specializing in NetBSD embedded systems. Any code developed by Wasabi is property of the people who hired them to write it. According to Wasabi, their clients allow them to release code they've developed back to the community. Usually 6 to 12 months after it was originally developed but it gets out there none the less. If so, why don't we see BSD as popular as linux? Linux came out at a time when BSD was tied up in a lawsuit. It was the perfect time to strike. If there was no BSD lawsuit, the BSDs would have a much larger presence in the computing world. Further, many Linux geeks are Microsoft bashers (It's true, we know it, admit it). They see Linux as possibly killing Microsoft -- which is a false vision but it's what they see none the less. The GPL pervents Microsoft from using Linux if Linux were to ever become popular.
I would think a major reason is that Linux has several comercial vendors, most notiably Red Hat. Outside of web hosts you don't see much BSD and it is usually FreeBSD for workstation if anything. I highly doubt BSD will ever be big in its self since you can take the code from it and put it in your OS and not worry about licensing issues.
Umm even Apple gives back.. Open Darwin comes to mind.
The main issue between BSD items and Linux items, is marketing..
And i wouldnt say that BSD is a flop.. Its just not made it big in the comsumer market like linux has..
However, look in server rooms around the world and you will lots of BSD stuff.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Is there any effort to port netBSD to the Newton? It runs on arm so it isn't that much of a stretch. I want a NetBSD-running emate :)
If so, why don't we see BSD as popular as linux?
Possibly because those people who use BSD code aren't required to disclose it? I've always wondered how much out there was running on BSD and nobody knew it. I'm reminded of the exploit discovered in the BSD TCP-IP stack which effected machines running Windows as well.
BSD should stand for BSD is Silent but Deadly. Your car, or DVD player, or cable box, or router could be running on BSD, and you would never know.
The ______ Agenda
Here I am really confused, I suppose from not following Apple very much. MacOS X is certainly useful to Apple, seems to be advancing well enough, so is Darwin some free source spinoff which is going nowhere? I had thought Darwin was Apple code, but maybe I have not been paying enough attention to know better.
OS X can be split up into two layers. There's the Darwin layer (a Mach microkernel hooked up to a FreeBSD kernel) and then the Apple layer (Carbon, Cocoa, Quartz, and so on -- all of Apple's proprietary technologies). I don't remember the particulars, but Apple released Darwin as an open source operating system. This was done by design. This is a good thing for Apple unix geeks -- there's plenty of documentation on-line for Darwin so that anyone with Panther and the dev tools can modify OS X as much as they want.
After all, I am strangely colored.
Interesting that you should use the phrase "BSD distros." I bet you didn't know that on the server side FreeBSD is more popular than any given linux distro. http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/near
On the desktop side, if you include OS X as a BSD (and there's no reason not to), BSD owns Linux in terms of popularity, no contest. (if you don't, well, it's obviously not even in the running)
Now before I get modded down, I be to remind whoever might read this that what I am saying is FACT. - bogaboga
I welcome everyone to actually try NetBSD!
I tried NetBSD 2.0 on my EPIA 5000 Eden board, but was promptly bitten by kern/26007, so no luck here :-(. FreeBSD 5.3 worked like a charm; with disks and later even in a complete diskless setup. So NetBSD doesn't run everywhere, despite the hype.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
and if the opposite were true, then why is linux just as insignificant when compared to Windows?
Instead of having scattered efforts around 600 versions of Un*x operating systems (Linux distros and BSD) how about unifying that effort and having a sane number of distros that achieve some of the things Unix type operating systems have always been criticized for: Standard utilites/commands and proper portability between the variants.
At any one time there are one or two current Windows desktop OS's, 1 or 2 for server, 1 or 2 for Mac, but about 1000 very similar but different distributions for the open source Unix variants, and people wonder why it hasn't taken off on the desktop.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Speak up, sonny. It's hard to hear at the edge of death....
If there are indeed any stability and security issues caused by rapid development, they might be caused by the fundamental design decisions rather than the size of the project and development speed per se. I couldn't agree with you more on this point: "This is not an app, this is a kernel and kernels require rigorous testing and full security audits." What I am trying to say is that if the kernel was not monolithic then 99.9% of it would be an app for all practical purposes, and only the small part running in the kernel space would require said rigorous testing and full security audits. Monolithic design is not an issue when you have a small kernel, but today Linux is starting to get so large that it slowly causes problems. There are a lot of third party binary drivers and they all run in the kernel space, just like in Windows, and in effect any bug in such a driver is indeed a bug in the kernel, with all of the consequences security- and stability-wise. Linux per se may be rock solid, but buy a new graphics card, install drivers and suddenly Linux is only as stable as the least stable kernel module. This is what what Andrew Tanenbaum was talking about in 1992 and if Linus Torvalds hadn't overreacted so furiously when Linux was only one year old, today, 13 years later, we might not face many of the problems you are talking about. Unfortunately, when it comes to advanced projects like this, the ego often plays a much more important role than technical merits. Today it is much to late to fix that design. You have pointed out a very important issue but it was not a secret that we had it coming for over a decade now.
Sincerely,
Pan Tarhei Hosé, PhD.
"Homo sum et cogito ergo odi profanum vulgus et libido."
Homosexual cats? Hurry, lets ban same-sex feline marriages before they ruin the institution of marriage (like debt, cheating, and stupid kids don't).
FreeBSD and NetBSD will have booths at the Southern California Linux Expo. If you're in the LA area use the promo code "free" for a free exhibit hall pass. The promo code "NEWSP" will get you discount off a full access pass.
If you want a stable, fully tested kernel you use a patched kernel release from a distribution. There's nothing wrong with that -- it's how Linux works -- but the original comment is not, IMO, out of line.
Regarding Darwin: I think the issue is that there simply isn't that much demand for it. It doesn't have the parts that make OS X distinctive and there's no shortage of open-source Unix-like operating systems out there, so why choose it over something better-known and better-supported?
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Somebody once said to me: "Linux is for people who hate [Microsoft]Windows; BSD is for people who love Unix."
;)
After lurking slashdot for a time, I can see this quote is quite accurate.
PS: I am a Linux guy who secretly flirts with BSD (but too young to remember Unix) and loathes Windows.
If so, why don't we see BSD as popular as linux?
It doesn't matter. The BSDs have withstood the test of time, people like them, and they won't be going away. That's what matters.
-- Microsoft is the most expensive commodity operating system and office suite vendor in the marketplace.
http://www.uberg33k.com/gallery/bsdgirlCopy of the above...
http://my.net4u.cc/whyt/pics/pic.44t3n3f44mt.html
http://www.randomimage.us/files/4159c35cd94cb.png
http://travis.kroh.net/archives/000549.jpg
http://www.linuxisforbitches.com/imgs/small_takei
And that's all I gotta say about that..
moderated up or down????
+(norad) if you rearrange the letters in mother in law, you get woman hitler
I salvaged these sparcs from the trash at my university. They didn't come with any working OS, almost no ram, and tiny hard drives. Any remotely current version of Solaris was out of the question.
NetBSD was an excellent choice for a current, lightweight, and robust OS that would run well on it. Getting Apache/PHP/MySQL installed through pkgsrc was very easy, and its been doing daily duty as my personal webserver for months.
Of course Linux does run on this box as well. Debian's port is pretty mature. Part of my interest in NetBSD on it was learning something new, as opposed to just another Debian box.
I have been very impressed with its performance thus far. Enough to consider NBSD other places.
once you go slack, you never go back
"But kernel development should NOT be done by desperate men."
Tell that to all the people who see Linux as a way to hurt Microsoft.
I find the argument amusing. Basically they want to argue that digital bits can be locked up, and hence legal means (GPL) are required to prevent that.* However P2P'ers and every time an *AA story comes up on Slashdot. There the argument is the complete reverse. Digital bits can't be locked up, and legal (and technical) means aren't effective in enforcing that.
*Not to mention there are legal "loopholes" in the whole *GPL that allow one to hide IP (ask Nvidia, ATI, Ethernet, and Winmodem companies for details).
Linux has been around for longer than FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD. So I guess Linux has withstood the test of time too?
Umm, the Newton OS?
**BOTH** have withstood the test of time. The "BSD is dying" trolls are a pile of poop.
Dogs and cats... living togther.
Now that's unnatural.
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
As a long time Linux user(7 years), I find NetBSD 2.0 with a custom kernel and optimised sources from pkgsrc outperforms my other Linux machines.
NetBSD is exactly as they say it:
1) Clean
2) Excellent code
3) Robust
4) Stable
5) Fast
Linux has a long way to go, I am home.
NetBSD netbsd 2.0.1 NetBSD 2.0.1 (MYKERNEL) #1: Tue Jan 25 15:47:35 NZDT 2005
Same old GNU/Linux FUD, that has been disproved countless times...
In short: the MIT research is *11 years old*, and that Rice study on the TCP/IP stack uses FreeBSD *2.2.6*
Probably because corporate contributors to OSS prefer the GPL: they can get their name in the lights for "giving back to the community" without worrying about a competitor jacking their code and running with it had they released it under a BSD license.
That's my theory anyway. It's challenging enough already to get individuals and businesses to contribute to software they don't own.
Nosce Te Ipsum
The potential downside to BSD licensed software: embrace, extend, extinguish.
Nosce Te Ipsum
Same old GNU/Linux FUD, that has been disproved countless times...
In short: the MIT research is *11 years old*, and that Rice study on the TCP/IP stack uses FreeBSD *2.2.6*
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
And Netcraft runs on BSD servers :)
Just for the record.
Oh nos!
Your right!
Where do I go to download the windows????????/
There are bug-fixes-only patches available since 2.6.10 thanks to Andres Salomon. So if you are afraid of a 2.6.x kernel you can wait for 2.6.x.n which won't contain the most cruel bugs.
"If so, why don't we see BSD as popular as linux?"
That's pretty obvious: because the GPL is very favourable to large companies specialized in hardware/assistance (IBM, HP, etc), since it gives them the chance to compete on what they do best and undercut software companies.
( An interesting link )
"BSD fans tell you all the time that BSD license is better for getting businesses and large corporations behind the product."
I really don't think "BSD fans" tell it "all the time", because it would be wrong (unless you restrict that to *software* companies).
What BSD advocates might be telling "all the time" is that the BSD license is more free than the GPL, since it comes with fewer restrictions; that it's much shorter and it avoids legalese, in order to keep lawyers & law issues out of your way; and most of all, that the BSD license reflects an actual academic spirit, unencumbered by any political junk that has hardly anything to do with computer science.
The only point in favor of the GPL is that it's contributing to make the Microsoft monopoly end sooner - and that's actually good.
For the rest, the GPL is just a political manifesto - a *communist* manifesto, to be precise, since its declared purpose is to put an end to private property as far as software is concerned.
"BSD license may be good for business, but it isn't as good for the community, and the users."
Of course it depends on what users you're talking about. For those users who are also professional programmers, the BSD license is obviously better, since it doesn't force you to disclose *your own* code whether you want it or not, like the GPL does.
--
Requiem for the FUD
Hey, mod me troll if you like, but I'm simply summarizing the points made in the article. They said the $COMPONENT is way out of date.
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
It really depends on what you need it for. It didn't quite fit in on my Athlon 64 machine because there was very little hardware support. It works nicely on one of my workstations that's an Athlon XP 3200+ with pretty standard hardware. I've experimented with it vs. the other BSDs and found I prefer FreeBSD on high end web and e-mail servers most of the time.
s toryid=83
NetBSD is overall a decent operating system, but it lacks a lot of the features that mainstream users may desire. Essentially, it's pretty bare bones. That can be a great thing to some and an annoying feature to others.
The main problem, in my opinion, is poor and lackadaiscal project management, lack of PR and a general "someone else can do it for us" attitude about getting the proper exposure. On the one hand, on the mailing lists I've read, I've found that NetBSD people are adament about talking about getting things done, but when it comes down to actually doing it, that's another story. Of course, they're backed by donations of monetary value, hardware and time of developers- so the more exposure, theorhetically, the more they can grow.
However, I've had my own negative experience with the foundation running a small BSD news site called BSDFreak.org (http://bsdfreak.org/), where I received a cease and desist letter for selling some merchandise with the NetBSD logo which I was intending to actually donate the profits of back to the foundation. I opened up a shop on CafePress and two months later they followed suit opening up their own and threatening legal action if I didn't close down or raise my prices to match theirs (at least that's the impression I got). It wasn't a very pleasent experience. I wrote more about it on my site, here: http://www.bsdfreak.org/modules/news/article.php?
shop.envescent.com - Computer hardware and more.
Perhaps you haven't tried it?
...) business.
NetBSD doesn't "forbid" you from installing X.org.
However, when the XFree86/X.org fork happened,
NetBSD was already committed to using XFree86 4.4
for the 2.0 release, as I understand it. And
besides, as several pointed out, the XFree86 fork
was an internal matter that was not NetBSD's (or
OpenBSD's or RedHat GNU/LINUX's or Debian
GNU/LINUX's or
However, for quite some time, X.org has been
available as a package for NetBSD, to make its
installation easier.
My understanding is that NetBSD will eventually
switch to X.org. But it's not religion that made
NetBSD choose a particular X server for the base
system. It's more pragmatics.
I have a ppc 5500/225, i tried to get some form (no matter what) of BSD to run on this oldworld powermac, unfrotunatly not even netbsd would run on it, but linux does (and very hapily at that).
I heard NetBSD could run on anything. But it did not run on my HP PA-RISC B1000 machine. Or any newer PA-RISC machine for that matter (Linux ran fine).
The way I see it they fit in as the only choise you are left with when you need an OS but nothing else will work. But they should focus on getting it to run better on the already "supported" archs instead of porting it to a milion new ones and leaving it as soon as it kinda works.
When in danger, whewn in doubt! Run in circles, scream and shout!