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NetBSD 4.0 Has Been Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-stacks dept.

ci4 writes to tell us that NetBSD 4.0 has been released and has been dedicated to the memory of Jun-Ichiro "itojun" Hagino. "Itojun was a member of the KAME project, which provided IPv6 and IPsec support; he was also a member of the NetBSD core team (the technical management for the project), and one of the Security Officers. Due to Itojun's efforts, NetBSD was the first open source operating system with a production ready IPv6 networking stack, which was included in the base system before many people knew what IPv6 was. We are grateful to have known and worked with Itojun, and we know that he will be missed. This release is therefore dedicated, with thanks, to his memory."

30 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Yes! by angryfirelord · · Score: 5, Funny

    Time to upgrade my toaster!

    1. Re:Yes! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Funny

      FreeBSD lost 93% of its core developers Do you have any kind of source for that? The FreeBSD core team consists of 9 people, so losing 92% of them would mean losing 8.37 of them, which doesn't really make sense.
      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    2. Re:Yes! by ByOhTek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      or it once had 128 or 129 devs...

      *shrug* Given the way the last two releases have progressed, and the fact that it's been a while since the releases have been anywhere remotely on schedule, it wouldn't surprise me if they took a huge dev hit.

      Personally, I don't care how popular my OS is, as long as it gets the job done, and does it well. So for for me, FreeBSD does that.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    3. Re:Yes! by ByOhTek · · Score: 4, Informative

      I was nervous to - I had so many Linux users tell me how bad it was, that it was harder to use and learn than Linux, etc.

      I found it wasn't the case. The more you have experience coding and building from source in Linux, the better off you'll be, but here goes:

      (1) I didn't buy any books or anything, I had a friend who was into FreeBSD tell me about it. She gave me a few hints and tips on how to start and what to avoid. She said I should try it since I'd rather use Windows than Linux, and it'd be nicer for me to use a FOSS OS if I could. I listened, and tried, and was hooked on the OS within a day of installing it.

      So the best resource you can have is a friend who knows what he or she is doing (or at least has a bit more of a clue than you).

      (2) The handbook is your friend. under /usr/share/doc/en/books/handbook/index.html is the system documentation. You can look at it on the freebsd website under the handbook section. It is actually EXTREMELY useful, and fairly well written/comprehensive. Unless you are looking for VPN stuff, they you're sporked.

      (3) The Mailing list and it's archives are invaluable. Don't worry, the people there don't eat babies or penguins (if they did, I wouldn't use the OS, I have a friend who I love to hang out with who'd never speak to me again if I talked to people who ate penguins!). Actually they are a friendly and easy going bunch. They don't like people picking on them for their OS choice, but they don't mind people preferring different OSes. If you have a question, let them know your background when you ask, so they can better tailor the advice. You'll be asked to read some stuff, but they'll tell you what you need to read, and not just give you a blind RTFM. Heck, one user recently said he wanted to migrate to Linux, and asked which distro would be easiest for a FreeBSD user, no flames came.

      (4) The errors are typically useful, and if you read them, they'll point you to a file or directory that's a problem. Using that you can figure out if something needs to be edited, deleted, etc. When making packages, if something is described as "marked" (ex. "Marked as broken on AMD64", or described as "conflicts", it is the packages make file, and you may need to modify that (or find another package that does the same thing, usually there are hints, but not always). You can sometimes find documentation related to these files either in the man pages for the program that uses them, or with the file name itself. Sometimes the error messages will actually tell you what to type or give you options on what to do to fix the problem - they don't fix it automatically because they'd assume you'd rather chose the fix option rather than have the choice made for you.

      More practical (basically the advice my friend gave me, aside from the location of the handbook):

      1. Until you are confident in your ability to get your system up to the poing of getting a web browser out to the internet from a fresh install (read: have done it at least once), only install freebsd if you have a system you can access the internet from, preferrably while running freebsd (i.e. install FreeBSD to a virtual machine, or on a spare computer).

      2. I've found that the non-minimal installs tend to be a bit confused in their setup. I just do a minimal install, and install everything else manually. Read up on the section about partitioning your disk, FreeBSD does this in an odd manner, and you'll want to be familiar with it.
      2.1. Ports - Compiling your own stuff
      2.1.1. Familiarize with "csup", under /usr/share/examples you'll not run this often, but it updates your ports tree. typically you just type "csup -g -L 2 [path to supfile]", there's a sample supfile in the /usr/doc/examples directory somewhere, probably in a csup or cvsup directory, and the man page is fairly useful. In fact, most BSD man pages are (weird). They usually have good examples.
      2.1.2. to build a package, go to /usr/ports, find the pac

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    4. Re:Yes! by CleverDan · · Score: 3, Informative

      The Complete FreeBSD is available from the author, Greg Lehey, online here: http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/ Greg's site itself is pretty interesting, too.

    5. Re:Yes! by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative

      I always keep a tree around (and a freebsd one) for a reference so I can look up how some things are implemented at the low level. You cannot do that with linux (or god forbid Slowarez) without arming yourself with a couple of aspirins and a bottle of vodka. I'd agree with Linux, but the Solaris code is often very, very clean. The parts I've looked at have been close to OpenBSD standard, which is the most readable kernel I've come across.
      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    6. Re:Yes! by eclectro · · Score: 3, Funny

      so losing 92% of them would mean losing 8.37 of them, which doesn't really make sense. It does if you make him get a haircut and shave.
      --
      Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
    7. Re:Yes! by eronysis · · Score: 2, Funny

      Hmmmm

      You claim to knwo a female into BSD?
      This is not a fan fiction thread man.

    8. Re:Yes! by coryking · · Score: 4, Insightful

      You'll love it here. We are chill.

      The folk behind FreeBSD are all just professional people trying to get real work done. You will not find your next religion when you use FreeBSD. Nor will you find saints who preach to you about how you should and should not use your computer. Nor will you find people telling you how you should and should not value your labor.

      We dont give a shit if you like Vista. We dont care make FreeBSD work with your Windows Server. We dont care if you embed FreeBSD in your Tivo or Playstation. We are more than happy if you take our code and use it in your TCP/IP stack. Seriously. Take our code! No strings attached!

      And hey, we all have to eat here in FreeBSD-land and so do you! We don't care if you make money from what comes out of your brain. Many of us are programmers whose livelihood depends on selling the value of our brain. We dont preach to you about the evils of intellectual property. If you sell software, the more power to you! If you become the next Microsoft, sweet!

      And at the end of the day, FreeBSD works. It is the most boring OS you'll ever find. It is about as exciting as your water heater. And that is the best part about it.

    9. Re:Yes! by mi · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'd agree with Linux, but the Solaris code is often very, very clean.

      Solaris kernel may be clean. Solaris' user-space programs, however, are a disaster. For example, even in the most-modern Solaris 10:

      • awk could still complain about "input line too long"
      • vi which would allow multiple editing sessions of the same file and, also, complain about "screen too wide"
      • the castrated /bin/sh (no wonder, Sun's own scripts use /bin/ksh!)
      • find, which does not have the -print0
      • make that can't parallelize jobs
      • no out-of-the-box locate
      • ftp-client has no line-history/editing
      • etc., etc., etc.

      Maybe, all of these utilities have a really clean source, of course. Cleanliness is not sufficient, however — it is merely required. The common solution to the above-listed problems is to install GNU versions of the utilities — which brings in all that ugly-but-functional code we are complaining about... It is also done differently by every sysadmin, so portable scripts can't rely on it...

      If you want out-of-the-box functionality and clean source code, you want a BSD operating system. Be that Net, Open, Free, or DragonFlyBSD. Or even MacOS.

      --
      In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
  2. Holy crap, they've removed Sendmail... by Saint+Aardvark · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...and replaced it with Postfix. Sendmail's still available from pkgsrc, but it's no longer the default. Man, never thought I'd see the day when one of the BSDs finally did this...

    --
    Carousel is a lie!
    1. Re:Holy crap, they've removed Sendmail... by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 2, Insightful

      'bout frickin' time!

      Look, the rest of the world has moved on to Postfix, which is much smaller and less bloated than sendmail, easier to configure, and, most importantly, a ton more secure.

      Why have the BSDs taken so long to realize this simple fact of life?

      --
      My blog
    2. Re:Holy crap, they've removed Sendmail... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      ...and replaced it with Postfix. Sendmail's still available from pkgsrc, but it's no longer the default. Man, never thought I'd see the day when one of the BSDs finally did this...

      As a reference, sendmail is still good. But given the lack of desire of the maintainers of sendmail to be more proactive in anti-spam and further development of SMTP, many people have switched to Postfix. I view this as a highly progressive move.

      I switched my systems to postfix last year. Love it. Even though I mastered the sendmail.cf/mc so my understanding of sendmail, above average even in complex routing and multiple domains/rewriting. I am not looking back, postini is superior.

      Leave it to where the intelligence is, BSD is far from dead because of contributions that "itojun" Hagino and others make. It is why other OSes follow and do not lead.

      ----
      MS: You say you run Windows?
      Tech: Yep, sure do, X-Windows.

    3. Re:Holy crap, they've removed Sendmail... by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Informative

      Why have the BSDs taken so long to realize this simple fact of life?

      Well, in the case of OpenBSD, it's because they've gone over the Sendmail code with a fine-toothed comb and patched up any problems they found along the way. It's pretty well vetted by people who care intensely about such things. Therefore, replacing Sendmail with anything else would be a case of the devil you know being better than the devil you don't.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    4. Re:Holy crap, they've removed Sendmail... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      Doesn't quite look like the rest of the world got your memo.

      http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200711/mxsurvey.html

  3. Some actual information by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. Also, system security was further enhanced with restrictions of mprotect(2) to enforce W^X policies, the Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements of the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, which can be used to harden the system against trojan horses and virus attacks.

  4. Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0 by NeoManyon · · Score: 5, Informative

    Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. Also, system security was further enhanced with restrictions of mprotect(2) to enforce W^X policies, the Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements of the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, which can be used to harden the system against trojan horses and virus attacks. Please read below for a list of changes in NetBSD 4.0.

    http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-4/NetBSD-4.0.html

    Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0

    The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES and CHANGES-4.0 files in the top level directory of the NetBSD 4.0 release tree. Some highlights include:
    Networking

    * agr(4): new pseudo-device driver for link level aggregation.
    * IPv6 support was extended with an RFC 3542-compliant API and added for gre(4) tunnels and the tun(4) device.
    * An NDIS-wrapper was added to use Windows binary drivers on the i386 platform, see ndiscvt(8).
    * The IPv4 source-address selection policy can be set from a number of algorithms. See "IPSRCSEL" in options(4) and in_getifa(9).
    * Imported wpa_supplicant(8) and wpa_cli(8). Utilities to connect and handle aspects of 802.11 WPA networks.
    * Imported hostapd(8). An authenticator for IEEE 802.11 networks.
    * carp(4): imported Common Address Redundancy Protocol to allow multiple hosts to share a set of IP addresses for high availability / redundancy, from OpenBSD.
    * ALTQ support for the PF packet filter.
    * etherip(4): new EtherIP tunneling device. It's able to tunnel Ethernet traffic over IPv4 and IPv6 using the EtherIP protocol specified in RFC 3378.
    * ftpd(8) can now run in standalone mode, instead of from inetd(8).
    * tftp(1) now has support for multicast TFTP operation in open-loop mode, server is in progress.
    * tcp(4): added support for RFC 3465 Appropriate Byte Counting (ABC) and Explicit Congestion Notification as defined in RFC 3168.

    File systems

    * scan_ffs(8), scan_lfs(8): utilities to find FFSv1/v2 and LFS partitions to recover lost disklabels on disks and image files.
    * tmpfs: added a new memory-based file system aimed at replacing mfs. Contrary to mfs, it is not based on a disk file system, so it is more efficient both in overall memory consumption and speed. See mount_tmpfs(8).
    * Added UDF support for optical media and block devices, see mount_udf(8). Read-only for now.
    * NFS export list handling was changed to be filesystem independent.
    * LFS: lots of stability improvements and new cleaner daemon. It is now also possible to use LFS as root filesystem.
    * vnd(4): the vnode disk driver can be used on filesystems such as smbfs and tmpfs.
    * Support for System V Boot File System was added, see newfs_sysvbfs(8) and mount_sysvbfs(8).

    Drivers

    *

    Audio:
    o Support for new models on drivers such as Intel ICH8/6300ESB, NVIDIA nForce 3/4, etc.
    o Added support for AC'97 modems.

    --
    Your thoughts form your reality.
    1. Re:Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor...

      Ah, so it does run Linux. I was going to ask.

    2. Re:Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0 by TheRaven64 · · Score: 2, Informative
      The new bluetooth stack from NetBSD has now been ported to DragonFly BSD and OpenBSD, so others benefit from this work, not just those running NetBSD. Looking through the new features list, I see a lot of things that I recognise from both OpenBSD and FreeBSD, so the sharing goes both ways.

      NetBSD is, I believe, the second kernel to officially support running as a Xen 3 Domain 0 guest. Both Solaris and NetBSD have been able to do this in prerelease versions for quite a few months, but I believe NetBSD is the first to release it officially. (The first kernel overall was Linux, although the Xen patches are still not in the main kernel.org tree).

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
  5. Oh Boy! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    An OS that supports more platforms than it has users.

  6. Re:Holy Shit. by trybywrench · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Sad to hear about itojun. This is the first time i've heard of this news. Anyone know how he passed away?

    yeah you'd think that would be in the summary.

    I knew nothing of him but rest in peace and thanks for all the hard work

    --
    I came to the datacenter drunk with a fake ID, don't you want to be just like me?
  7. Re:Holy Shit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    Responding to my own post, apparently he was fighting a long illness and did not make it. Gathered from comments at undeadly.
    See also http://www.wide.ad.jp/news/press/20071031-itojun-e.html

    Jeez. The guy was a good guy. Very upset that he is no longer with the community. RIP.

  8. Netcraft is dead by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    this new release of NetBSD confirms it.

  9. Re:Holy Shit. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    http://www.itojun.org/resume.html ... too many activies to summarize from my limited head.

  10. Since wide user base seems to be your preferred by ByOhTek · · Score: 4, Funny

    metric in OS worth...

    How are you liking your Windows install? Just curious.

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    1. Re:Since wide user base seems to be your preferred by Monsuco · · Score: 3, Funny

      How are you liking your Windows install? Just curious.
      Ugh, mines horrible, it lets in a draft and the screen fell out. Next time I will just get a contractor.
      --
      The Gospel according to lolcat
  11. Re:1. I've used Postfix on NetBSD since 2000 or so by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1. Good for you. I'm talking about what comes installed by default, not what you can install yourself after the fact. And, yes, it matters, because people, even experienced, seasoned, veteran administrators are likely to use what's installed by default rather than install something extra manually. It's usually the path of least resistance.

    2. I'm sorry you don't like my posts. I tend to make a lot of jokes with heavy, sarcastic humor and it's one of those things that either people love or they hate. Most of my funny posts get moderated either up to +5, Funny, or down to -1, Troll or Flamebait. One man's humour is another man's troll. Go figure. *shrug* On my more serious posts, I say exactly what I think. You don't like it? Disagree with me? Okay, I don't care. I think it's more important to say you what you really think than it is to say something that's popular and/or likely to be modded up.

    --
    My blog
  12. Released? by Huntr · · Score: 3, Funny

    Does that mean they spread its ashes around somewhere or what? ;)

  13. Google Cache Reveals Cause of Death by h4ck7h3p14n37 · · Score: 2, Informative

    I did a little digging and determined that it was almost certainly suicide. I found two blog posts from a google search on Itojun and noticed that the Google cache version was dated one day prior to the date listed on the blog posts. I then discovered that you can actually retrieve old text from the Google cache version of a page by tweaking your search query over and over. I determined that the two bloggers had deleted paragraphs from each of their posts talking about the cause of death, Itojun's mental health problems and his recent decent into depression.

    To see what I'm talking about, check these search results and then compare the page that's being linked. You'll notice it's dated the 31st and the paragraph from the search results has been deleted. If you then perform queries using text from the search result snippet you can reveal more and more of the deleted text. For example, like this.

    I'm a bit conflicted about posting the cause of death since multiple people took the trouble to attempt to delete that information from public view, but I figure that people will find this technique at recovering deleted information quite useful. I have recovered the complete text from each blog post, but am not going to post that information. If you care that much, you can figure it out for yourself.

    1. Re:Google Cache Reveals Cause of Death by Anonymuous+Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful
      It may not be that simple.

      Many people that are treated for depression have the bad habit of mixing booze and medicine. And sometimes shit happens.

      I did that too. I've almost killed myself. Nobody believed it was simply an accident, despite this being the pure truth.

      My advice wrt itojun would be to let him RIP. He was an IPv6 and BSD hacker, not Britney Spears.