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."

Comments

it fits on my old SPARC

[ChipMonk]

In fact, the latest release of NetBSD fits better, and runs faster, than the Solaris of 4 years ago.

VERY handy.

[SharpFang]

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.

Re:misinformation?

[antonakis]

Perhaps linux is somewhat unreliable because of the speed the patches are being integrated? This is not an app, this is a kernel and kernels require rigorous testing and full security audits. Take a look at the kernel changelogs.Things are moving very fast in the linux world, so fast that merges of unstable/unsecure code are frequent.Even the grsec guys were complaining at the bad quality of code which makes its way to the kernel.Nowadays, linux seems to have become a testbed for all the cool new features, while it's left for the distro makers to further stabilize and test the kernel. This job should be done before releasing the kernel.

netbsd is relevent cause its has a niche

[geiseri]

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.

Best option for Sparc32

[Digital Pizza]

I used to use NetBSD (I forget which version it was at the time, now) on a Sparc IPX; 40Mhz, 64MB RAM, 1GB drive. I had an extra SBUS ethernet card in it and used it as my firewall, DNS, DHCP, and IMAP mail server (in concert with fetchmail).

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!

no brainer - commerial embedded devices

[mqx]

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;