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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
NetBSD my firewall OS of choice.
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
NetBSD fits in my toaster....
That's funny, I always thought that was the place where Windows fit in...
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
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.
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!
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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;
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
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!
- Hubert
Do you want your toast turning into flaming death and being shot at you when your toaster blue screens?
And imagine the viruses. While it may keep me on my toes, suriken toast is not something I want to deal with in the morning...
Everything I need to know I learned by killing smart people and eating their brains.
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.
Wrong on so many counts.
NetBSD was the first open source OS to have IPv6 support. Yeah, "way out of date" IP stack.
NetBSD was the first open source OS to have USB support. Yeah, "way out of date" hardware support. Further, NetBSD allows for "Machine Independent" drivers, leading to portability far beyond other operating systems.
Not enough developers? You don't need a lot of developers. Code remains cleaner when only educated people submit features.
Unlike with other operating systems -- including FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux -- NetBSD holds off on releasing features until they are stable. That's why there are few releases. This is a good thing.
It's one of the most secure operating systems in the world. Compare the NetBSD 1.6.2 security patch list to the OpenBSD 3.5 security patch list.
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
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.
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 ----
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
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
Mac OS X is going to be severely kludged if you try to install it on an OldWorld Mac. If that 3400 isn't upgraded with a G3, then the grandparent poster won't be able to go beyond 10.1. Classic Mac OS is of limited usefulness anymore since it doesn't have up-to-date applications being released for it.
Linux development, oddly enough, has suffered a similar fate. You need to have BootX installed (this may be true for NetBSD as well), which entails a Mac OS partition, even if it is a minimal install. Also, most of the exciting new development is taking place with the newer PPC platforms, trying to bring the latest iMac or G5 into line. (I tried to install Gentoo on a 603-based clone last year and didn't get much beyond stage1.)
NetBSD's "run on everything, even if it is obsolete" philosophy, though, is something of an insurance policy against the devs getting distracted by new shiny stuff. If it breaks, somebody somewhere will pay attention. Apple themselves is only going to guarantee a quality experience with their OS for a minimum level of technology, so a dedicated group of developers like NetBSD is just about the last place to turn.
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.
Actually you don't have to have BootX; I have a PowerMac 7500 at home (with a dual 604e/180 CPU card in it), and I use quik to boot the system. It can be a bit difficult to set up (unfortunately, since OldWorld OpenFirmware versions are broken in assorted painful ways), but I've not had any reason to boot into MacOS on it, so everything is happy now.
Sam: "That was needlessly cryptic."
Max: "I'd be peeing my pants if I wore any!"