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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."
Oh well it should hav'em.
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.
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.
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make install -not war
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
You are just wrong.. if there is something that you really know, probably you will be able to configure that operating system to be more secure than a default-secure operating system that you have no knowledge about. So his choice for what he knew is the best, not the security advertising about openbsd.
"You can't do that with Linux either. The name aside, the Linux you run on one arch is not the Linux on another arch."
What the heck are you talking about? Of the architectures I mentioned, Debian Linux is available for every one of them except for POWER.
Well, maybe you don't like Debian. Okay. Fedora Linux (or distributions based directly off of it like Yellowdog and RHEL) gives you support for all of the architectures I've mentioned, including POWER.
And with Debian (and Fedora), you never loose the source-based flexibility. If you've got time to burn, you're welcome to recompile all the code from the source packages.
Anyway, the point that I was trying to make, is that on a modern polyarchitectural network, you're better of using Linux because it actually has support for all the modern architectures.
Can you have the same single source tree shared over NFS and have every architecture (or one cross-compilation) build for every machine on the network with any Linux distribution? Without needing any disparity in versions, and WITHOUT introducing bugs?
NetBSD's like that by design and it works. Source or binary. Hell, you can cross compile it from another operating system running on another architecture and it will still work. If there's a Linux distro out there that does it just as well (or 'better' because of that 'all the modern architectures' that 0.01% of the sysadmin population will get to look at in the next few years), well, I'd love to hear about it.
Sam ty sig.