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NetBSD v3.0 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the happy-christmas dept.

FullMetalAlchemist writes "After six release candidates, the NetBSD project has finally released a gold version of a major mile stone; v3.0. I'm looking forward to this release a good deal. If I wanted to, I could build our entire office infrastructure on it thanks to Xen. Major Changes can be found on the NetBSD website, and there are several ways to get the release. Get downloading!"

5 of 132 comments (clear)

  1. The VAX port stopped working a long time ago by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Hrrmph. As a loyal VAX owner, I need to note that it seems that although NetBSD claims to support some gawd-awful high number of architectures...many are left behind to basically fend for themselves.
    Just because NetBSD v3 is out, doesn't mean it runs on anything except a few of the common Intel/PPC chips.

    It would be nice to be able to complete a full VAX build without some bizarre GCC error forcing me to go look for a workaround.

    VAX 4-ever!

    1. Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago by SillyNickName4me · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Heh, the last version that actually builds and works correctly on my VAX is 1.4

    2. Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago by possible · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Why does VAX need to be supported?

      Because porting to non x86 architectures forces you to fix bugs. If the code is faulty, it may work for 99% of the x86 users, but crash for the remaining 1% of x86 users. But since none of the developers can reproduce the problem, it's a case of "I dunno, works on my machine, I'm not going to spend time looking for it". Whereas on other architectures, incorrect code may fail 100% of the time due to aligment, different exception handling, etc.

      NetBSD doesn't just suck on VAX. It sucks on ppc (aka, Macs) too. And up til recently it sucked badly on amd64. Most of NetBSD's "supported architectures" haven't worked for years, because they often cross-build instead of doing native builds.

    3. Re:The VAX port stopped working a long time ago by SillyNickName4me · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Hmm... just wondering, if I post what version each of the obscure pieces of hardware I have lying around manages to run, will all of those posts get a +5 interesting moderation?

      Anyway, its a vaxstation 3100 m20 with 16mb ram and monochrome graphics with a local (scsi) disk for swap and temp storage, it is netbooted. When trying to run 1.5 or 1.6 and build a world, the machine just hangs after some 2 days of work. 1.4 finishes building a world but it takes forever to do so (actually, something like 7 or 8 days). I never tried 2.x and current however, maybe I should when I can be bothered to connect it again and setup mopd on some machine here.

  2. does it fulfill portability promises? by drwho · · Score: 3, Interesting

    "Of course it runs NetBSD" - the old saw, it seems. But I think that NetBSD is falling down in this regard. Many ports don't work properly, or haven't been updated in ages. Mailing lists lie dormant, waiting for attention, such as SBMips (BroadCom Sybyte MIPS) - in spite of Wasabi Systems (which is basically the commercial arm of NetBSD) having a press release about Broadcom support back in 2002, not much is being done in extending NetBSD to the CPUs used in consumer-grade equipment like Linksys routers. It's not even available for a fee: Wasabi doesn't have it in their development products and doesn't plan to. Linux is clearly quite far out in front in this regard.

    And it's not only MIPS: VAX ports are stale as well, from what I see here. This is sad. I like the idea of portability, and I like NetBSD - but I don't find that it lives up to its repuation in portability. Yes, someday I'll shut up and work on ports to the platforms I care, but in the meantime I am using Linux on the Broadcom CPUs and finding I enjoy it..almost too much to bother with NetBSD.