Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot

debilo writes, "ONLamp.com is featuring a lengthy interview with Charles M. Hannum, to Slashdotters probably best known for his wake-up call aptly titled The Future of NetBSD that generated a rather vocal discussion. In the interview, Charles speaks about his role in and the beginning of The NetBSD Project, shares his thoughts on software licenses, discusses the popularity of Linux and its development model, and further addresses the problems that NetBSD is facing. Some notable quotes include: 'If I were doing it again, I might very well switch to the LGPL. I'll just note that it didn't exist at the time.' And: 'There was a lot of FUD around this issue — some of it from Linus, actually — and it did cause us some problems.'"

Comments

Re:We need a NetBSD

[sudog]

Base install for NetBSD is about 23MB, or 47MB with development tools, 55MB with manpages, and 112MB for all the above plus X.

I can get it installed on older hardware in less than 5 minutes, including the boot time for the floppies. I can get it installed on modern Opteron-based badass hardware in about half that. That's pretty cool.

And you're being very short-sighted about other architectures.

GPLv3 OS

[r00t]

You can't convert Linux. GPLv2 and GPLv3 both prohibit extra restrictions.

You could create a GPLv3 fork of NetBSD though. That might revive NetBSD. You might just take the kernel though, letting distributions form around it. Debian already supports Hurd and FreeBSD kernels; they could do a NetBSD one as well.

Of course you'd need to find a name other than "NetBSD".

Ideas: NetOS, NotBSD, Netix, Netrix, Netux, Nettle, WebBSD...

X11 is heavyweight?

[steveha]

X-Windows needs to be replaced with something more light-weight (i.e. single-user with direct access to the multimedia hardware).

Really? Can you please point me to some numbers that demonstrate this point?

X11 was invented in the bad old days, running on UNIX systems less powerful than today's PDAs. As I understand it, it's actually quite lightweight. Certainly the network transparency features don't cost much, because when you run the X server and the X client software on the same computer, they communicate by using domain sockets (which are very lightweight). Both Microsoft Windows and Apple OS X have abstraction layers that isolate the graphics hardware; do you have some numbers showing that X11 has significantly more overhead than those abstraction layers?

The latest versions coming out of X.org now have support for features similar to what OS X does: applications are rendered into offscreen buffers, and the buffers are composited together (with transparency effects, or other special effects if you desire). So, X11 is no barrier to cool eye-candy either.

The worst thing about X11 used to be way it was managed (under Xfree86). Now that the project has moved to X.org and has been revamped, progress has sped up a lot.

steveha

Re:X11 is heavyweight?

[TheRaven64]

Certainly the network transparency features don't cost much, because when you run the X server and the X client software on the same computer, they communicate by using domain sockets (which are very lightweight).

Not that lightweight. Fortunately, in the '80s, MIT released the shared memory extension which took away most of that overhead and has been standard in X servers for over a decade. The problem with X11's network transparency is that it is at the wrong layer. X11 puts network transparency between the view and the frame buffer, when it should be between the view and the controller. Sun realised this with NeWS, but did a typical Sun and said 'Hey, we've got this great technology! How can we market it in such a way that it never goes anywhere?'

Architecturally, there are quite a few things wrong with X11. The easiest solution is the one that Apple took; throw it away and replace it with something new. That isn't really a good idea for *NIX, however, since there is a lot of legacy software that uses X11. Fortunately, Keith Packard seems well aware of the shortcomings of X11 and has a set of incremental improvements that address them.