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NetBSD 5.0 Released

Posted by samzenpus on from the come-and-get-it dept.

kl76 writes "The NetBSD Project have announced the release of NetBSD 5.0 after two years of development. Highlights of the seven million new lines of code in 5.0 include a new threads implementation, kernel preemption, a new scheduler, POSIX real-time scheduling, message queues and asynchronous I/O, WAPBL metadata journaling for FFS filesystems, improved ACPI support, UDF write support, X.Org instead of XFree86 (on some platforms — at last!) and lots of driver updates. Binary distributions for 53 different platforms are provided."

15 of 129 comments (clear)

  1. Excellent by Venture37 · · Score: 3, Informative

    NetBSD 5 is out today & OpenBSD 4.5 is out tomorrow, it's going to be busy weekend for some. :D

    1. Re:Excellent by toejam13 · · Score: 2, Informative

      To add to it, DragonflyBSD 2.2.1 was released just last week. Also, FreeBSD 7.2 is currently in release candidate (RC1) state. It should be out soon as well.

    2. Re:Excellent by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

      Actually, FreeBSD 7.2RC2 is out.. ;)
      (As of April 24th, 2009)
      http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2009-April/049591.html

  2. Also don't forget Debian! by martin-boundary · · Score: 2, Informative

    Don't forget to use Debian GNU/NetBSD ;-)

    1. Re:Also don't forget Debian! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      No I am talking about netbsd in the context of debian. You can upgrade a debian system entirely with dpkg. You can not upgrade a netbsd system entirely with pkg tools. I am suggesting that netbsd make it possible to do that. All the tools exist, its just a matter of how they are used.

      pkgtools are for installing and maintaining third-party software packages, and not the "base" system.

      Traditionally BSD has done an upgrade-via-source way of doing things, but some FreeBSD people have been experimenting with binary updates:

      http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/

      Of course you don't have to compile the source on every system. The build process can be centralized on one host, and then you can mount it into the local /usr/src and just do a "make install".

  3. Re:Bring Out Yer Dead by rdwald · · Score: 2, Informative

    Replying to eliminate incorrect moderation.

  4. Re:7 million new lines of code? by Brian+Gordon · · Score: 4, Informative

    I wouldn't get out the incense too soon. Switching to x.org is a Bad Idea right now. xorg-server-1.3 is aging badly: unsupported, unfixable bugs, and oh god xorg.conf. xorg-server-1.5.3 isn't really stable yet, especially for NetBSD, but we're on the cusp of the migration. If NetBSD is including 1.3 then all the fixing and configuring admins will have to do will be wasted when 1.5.3 breaks everything again.

    1.5.2 completely destroyed my gentoo X a few months ago when I tried installing kde-4.2. Apparently fglrx didn't support 1.5.x yet?! I was cast into DPI hell and my font sizes are still a barely noticeable few pixels off. grumble grumble

  5. Re:7 million new lines of code? by MichaelSmith · · Score: 4, Informative

    No its seven million lines in the patch. Many of them will be changed or removed line of code.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  6. Re:Uptime by nicodoggie · · Score: 4, Informative
    from http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html#os

    Why do some Operating Systems never show uptimes above 497 days ?

    The method that Netcraft uses to determine the uptime of a server is bounded by an upper limit of 497 days for some Operating Systems (see above). It is therefore not possible to see uptimes for these systems that go beyond this upper limit. Although we could in theory attempt to compute the true uptime for OS's with this upper limit by monitoring for restarts at the expected time, we prefer not to do this as it can be inaccurate and error prone.

    Why does my uptime go back to 0 after 198 days ?

    The Linux TCP stack uses the low 32 bits from the system uptime timer, and this timer, in recent kernel releases, runs at 250Hz. This means that the timer value wraps around to 0 after roughly 198 days. Although we could in theory attempt to compute the true uptime for OS's with this upper limit by monitoring for restarts at the expected time, we prefer not to do this as it can be error prone.

    Why do you not report uptimes for Linux 2.6 or FreeBSD 6 ?

    We only report uptimes for systems where the operating system's timer runs at 100Hz or less. Because the TCP code only uses the low 32 bits of the timer, if the timer runs at say 1000Hz, the value wraps around every 49.7 days (whereas at 100Hz it wraps after 497 days). As there are large numbers of systems which have a higher uptime than this, it is not possible to report accurate uptimes for these systems.

    The Linux kernel switched to a higher internal timer rate at kernel version 2.5.26. Linux 2.4 used a rate of 100Hz. Linux 2.6 used a timer at 1000Hz (some architectures were using 1000Hz before this), until the default was changed back to 250Hz in May 2006. (An explanation of the HZ setting in Linux.)

    FreeBSD versions 4 and 5 used a 100Hz timer, but FreeBSD 6 has moved to a customisable timer with a default setting of 1000Hz.

    So unfortunately this means that we cannot give reliable uptime figures for many Linux and FreeBSD servers.

    meh...

  7. Re:So where is it used? by onefriedrice · · Score: 4, Informative

    Major projects? Not that I know of. Tons and tons of small projects? Very much yes. NetBSD runs reliably on old hardware that would otherwise be put out to pasture. Don't assume that it's worthless just because it wasn't used to build facebook. In fact, it's not even very safe to assume that NetBSD isn't a modern, very capable general purpose operating system. In fact, it is.

    --
    This author takes full ownership and responsibility for the unpopular opinions outlined above.
  8. Re:7 million new lines of code? by Galactic+Dominator · · Score: 3, Informative

    xorg-server-1.5.3 isn't really stable yet, especially for NetBSD, but we're on the cusp of the migration. If NetBSD is including 1.3 then all the fixing and configuring admins will have to do will be wasted when 1.5.3 breaks everything again.

    I've got no idea about NetBSD, but xorg server 1.6 has worked great on my system for months on FreeBSD 7.1 and 7-stable. 1.5.x was fine too except for a few conf changes.

    midco# pkg_info | grep xorg-server
    xorg-server-1.6.0,1 X.Org X server and related programs

    --
    brandelf -t FreeBSD /brain
  9. Why NetBSD? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    I believe NetBSD 5.0 is a major turn of tide. Compared to 4.0, this is definitely a new chapter. In a way Mr. Hannum did a favour in his infamous rant: practically all aspects he identified have been addressed.

    We here at $DAYJOB have made extensive evaluation of the NetBSD 5.0 pre-releases and it is looking very good indeed. Our internal benchmarks show that for our typical workload, performance of NetBSD is now comparable to that of Linux and FreeBSD. (Numbers and methodology may not be representative nor even correct, but we have to base our decisions to something.) It is very likely that we will be rolling the next big-iron production line solely with NetBSD again. The recent happenings with Sun and the uncertainty surrounding Solaris have warmed also the management section upstairs.

    Besides performance and SMP, other things that account high in our book:

    1. Long support cycles and backward compatibility. This has always been one of the greatest strengths of NetBSD.
    2. Stability. When evaluating an operating system for servers that should be online to the late next decade, it is of crucial importance that stability is guaranteed. In this item there is a question mark for Linux in our list.
    3. Security. We believe that reducing the amount of code running is the first step to a more secure environment. In the Linux world the trend has been exactly the opposite even with so-called enterprise distributions. From NetBSD 5.0 we look forward to ASLR and security features inspired by PaX, the technology which we believe in with our Linux systems. This is one area where there is a big minus sign for FreeBSD.
    4. Xen. Not only does it run on NetBSD, but does it better (stability-wise) with NetBSD. Contradicts with all previous points, but is probably going to be employed in some parts of our farm, even if it is just to please management.
    5. Journaling support. While ZFS is the clear winner here, no doubt about it, the so-called WAPBL has looked promising in our tests. Roughly speaking, our conclusion has been that ext3 and FFS+WAPBL are quite comparable in their performance and stability. To rephrase this: both suck equally bad. Our Solaris-fileservers are not going anywhere for at least five years.
    6. Cleanroom implementations and central source for code. Since we have a relatively large in-house software stack, this, combined with (1) and (2), is very important to us. We are an open-minded shop with technically competent people who can replace non-optimal or bad parts of the system with internal designs. Avery dangerous thing to do with Linux due lack of coherency, but our previous experiences have shown that this is not so much of a problem with NetBSD.
    7. Documentation. Add to the end of (6). A big minus sign for Linux.

    Some drawbacks:

    1. The package system. A huddle of shell scripts without a strict API. Can be forgiven since nothing essential depends on it. A big plus sign for Linux.
    2. Lack of binary updates. A blessing and a curse. Can be forgiven in our case, but would be a pain in more heterogeneous environment. Again a plus sign and a parrot sticker for Linux.
    3. Java. Practically a complete lack of enterprise-like support for this nasty piece of software rules out NetBSD in many of our servers. Linux and Solaris are the only options to consider.

    At $HOME perhaps the most exciting feature is the new power management framework. This has taken huge leap forward in NetBSD 5.0. While there is still much work to be done, the direction is right. I believe that like SMP on the other end, power management will be one of the dominant factors in consumer-grade computing at the other end of the spectrum.

    Other things that I like generally in NetBSD:

    1. UNIX legacy. I have always liked the history of computing and it is a fresh breeze of air to find a system in which you can still feel the good-old days instead of the GU
    1. Re:Why NetBSD? by hson · · Score: 2, Informative

      Here is a short presentation with some purty graphs comparing NetBSD 4.0, NetBSD 5.0, Linux and FreeBSD 7.1.
      http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/50/img0.html
      Done by Andrew Doran, one of the most prolific NetBSD developers.

  10. Re:So where is it used? by DerCed · · Score: 2, Informative

    This is at least a start:

    http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/sites.html

    A list of sites using NetBSD...

  11. Re:Oh mighty masters of xBSD help please by LizardKing · · Score: 3, Informative

    Seems strange that the amd64 iso is only 247Mb

    That's because it only includes what would be called a "base" install by the standards of most Linux distros. You'll get all the command line utilities, developer tools and an X Window install if you choose to install all the packages from the CD. What you wont get is things like a GNOME or KDE environment - those can be added after installing from CD by using the package tools. With these tools you can download pre-compiled packages from the NetBSD FTP server or (preferably) a mirror close to you.