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NetBSD Status Report January - March 2005
jschauma writes "The NetBSD Foundation published its first quarterly
status report in 2005, covering the months January through March of 2005.
Among many other things, this status report covers the addition of TCP/SACK
and PAM support, the opening of the Foundations Online Store, the new stable
pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items."
PAM has been around for a while, but it's a huge pain in the ass to get working right. It was around when I was building my LFS-4.0 system, and the only thing it served was to confuse me. It's used by some apps, but not by most, although the apps not using it could be blocked by apps using it if you didn't have the settings correct.
Since this is a BSD PAM, at least we know there'll be good documentation concerning it (ie, more than what it is and what it can do).
Regarding Xen support, is it robust enough to "jail" applications like web servers or ftp servers? Or, at least, can it be used to provide multiple personal "servers" as we have seen with VMware? -LLM
Annoy a Conservative...
It wasn't adopted because PAM is a steaming pile, and the people on the NetBSD mailing lists have been arguing ceaselessly about the only benefit that PAM has over other, technologically superior schemes: support for closed-source binary authentication modules.
Part of the reason for the push for PAM adoption has been the recent commercial slant of the decisions of NetBSD core. I wouldn't call it "selling out" per se, but I would say that it is no longer just about the code.
It's unfortunate. It's reluctance to incorporate things like PAM, or use Linux-like exploding version numbering, was the primary reason I was such a pro-NetBSD supporter. Now that those attractions are gone and the NetBSD foundation seems to want to play catch-up with Linux, I might as well just go with FreeBSD, or a version of Linux.
I believe the reason for the recent commercial slant is simple: I think the commercial customers of Wasabi Systems are pushing them to build an OS which is as close to Linux as possible but is not encumbered by the GPL. The commercial advantages of that are obvious, but disheartening.
NetBSD's old niche of extreme portability and purity is now overshadowed by these commercial interests. Too bad.
http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html
FreeBSD - Originally started out as an x86 only port. Screams on x86 hardware. Other ports are kinda lackluster. Its the BSD for people who don't want to run Linux. NetBSD - Runs on everything from a Sun Ultra 60 to a toaster. Has an extremely robust IP stack and a very well designed architecture independant framework for both host machines and device drivers OpenBSD - Supposedly "secure out of the box" via large amounts of code review for security holes. Eh. The biggest thing with OpenBSD is Theo's ego. Yes, I'm kinda partial to NetBSD.
there's also Darwin, which is the BSD-core of Apple's Mac OS X. Darwin is Open Source, though Apple is pretty finnicky about who they let contribute for obvious reasons (it's the core of a commercial Operating System). There's also OpenDarwin which is basically a community controlled branch of Darwin that occasionally serves as a testbed for standard Darwin features. Darwin is based on a Mach 3.0 microkernel, though it's more of a hybrid than that simplistic description would suggest.
BSD/OS is commercial.
FreeBSD _was_ performing very good on x86 hardware (only), FreeBSD 5.x is often slower on single-cpu machines because they try to improve SMP performance and functionality. 5.x supports quite a few architectures aswell.
DragonFly is a fork of FreeBSD 4.x, better performance than FreeBSD 5.x but not for production (if you ask them), if I've understood everything correct their goal is among others fast IPC and beeing able to run the OS on a cluster. Right now they are going x86 only I think.
NetBSD is about portability, clean code and correctness, earlier it was slower than FreeBSD but it has catched up a lot with 2.x.
OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD which centers about security, althought many people are sceptical.
Personally I've got more and more tired of OpenBSD, really like NetBSD and are very intrested in what will become of DragonFly. If you just want something which works as a desktop FreeBSD might still be your best bet thought.
Now that those attractions are gone and the NetBSD foundation seems to want to play catch-up with Linux, I might as well just go with FreeBSD, or a version of Linux.
Have you considered OpenBSD? I think we can safely say that OpenBSD will never "play catch up" by going against core project ideals. They'd rather implement from scratch if the need arose.
If only OpenBSD had Unified Buffer Cache I might be using it 100% of the time, as opposed to 90/10 Open/Net.
At least I can rest assured that OpenBSD moves carefully forward and performance issues will continue to be sorted out with the long term big picture in mind and not use some quick fix hacks.
I think the commercial customers of Wasabi Systems are pushing them to build an OS which is as close to Linux as possible but is not encumbered by the GPL.
What can Linux do that NetBSD can't? This is a serious question BTW. NetBSD has been a better fit when I have had to deploy in commercial environments. I've tested latest SuSE and RH Core against NetBSD 2.0 with the custom disk heavy apps I deploy and NetBSD killed them all. What are people who choose NetBSD missing out on?
Socket traffic between processes on the same machine doesn't have to go over the loopback interface.
(Hint: "UNIX-domain sockets".)
The big problem with PAM is that it wants to stay in control of the thread and only use callbacks when it needs some information from the user. This cause several problems if you're not willing do dedicate a separate thread to authenticating. If you for example have periodic tasks or want to support multiple users at the same time, you have to make various hacks to make PAM return control of the thread to you.
I think you misunderstood the closed source part. It was about corporations pressuring to be able to use their closed source PAM modules with any PAM application.
I do not agree much with the GP though, and I think the version number system is a weird thing to choose your OS on. NetBSD still has the cleanest source base out there, and BSD in general have lots of advantages over Linux.
You can use pkg_add on any supported NetBSD platform, assuming someone built a package. Otherwise, you'll have to download pkgsrc.tar.gz, untar it, and use "make && make install"