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NetBSD 5.0 Released
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."
That's $28 million/month in total!!!!!!
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
NetBSD 5 is out today & OpenBSD 4.5 is out tomorrow, it's going to be busy weekend for some. :D
NETCRAFT:
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
CUSTOMER:
Here's one.
NETCRAFT:
Ninepence.
NETBSD:
I'm not dead!
NETCRAFT:
What?
CUSTOMER:
Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
NETBSD:
I'm not dead!
NETCRAFT:
'Ere. He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:
Yes, he is.
NETBSD: Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
Bring out your dead!
[clang]
I'm not!
NETCRAFT:
He isn't?
CUSTOMER:
Well, he will be soon. He's very ill.
NETBSD:
I'm getting better!
CUSTOMER:
No, you're not. You'll be stone dead in a moment.
NETCRAFT:
Oh, I can't take him like that. It's against regulations.
NETBSD:
I don't want to go on the cart!
CUSTOMER:
Oh, don't be such a baby.
NETCRAFT:
I can't take him.
NETBSD:
I feel fine!
CUSTOMER:
Well, do us a favour.
NETCRAFT:
I can't.
CUSTOMER:
Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
NETCRAFT:
No, I've got to go to FreeBSD. They've lost nine today.
CUSTOMER:
Well, when's your next round?
NETCRAFT:
Thursday.
NETBSD:
I think I'll go for a walk.
CUSTOMER:
You're not fooling anyone, you know. Look. Isn't there something you can do?
NETBSD: [singing]
I feel happy. I feel happy.
[whop]
CUSTOMER:
Ah, thanks very much.
NETCRAFT:
Not at all. See you on Thursday.
CUSTOMER:
Right. All right.
[howl]
[clop clop clop]
Who's that, then?
NETCRAFT:
I dunno. Must be Tux.
CUSTOMER:
Why?
NETCRAFT:
He hasn't got shit all over him.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Kudos to the NetBSD team. I have a NetBSD machine running as a NAS and media server that's so reliable that even my wife likes it. However, I won't be upgrading for a while. That's an incredible amount of new code they've committed, and while I have enormous faith in the skills of the NetBSD developers, there's a good chance that something slipped through the cracks. I think I'll wait for the bugfix release :) BSD Forever!
Confessions of a Recovering Preppie: The Blog
Of course it will. Toasting multiple toasts simultaneously is now supported, as well as suspending and resuming the toasting process. If toasting fails, the toasts will now be rolled back into the original raw state.
Ezekiel 23:20
Don't forget to use Debian GNU/NetBSD ;-)
You don't put toast in a toaster, btw.
It is interesting, but is it relevant to this thread?
I tried to find a methodology of their statistics. If I recall, netcraft used to perform fancy packet inspection to determine what a site was running and if or when a site rebooted. Today, any site of substance is really a cluster of servers fronted by load balancers. You really have no idea when a server behind it reboots.
This is a boring sig
And how exactly do you know that K. S. Kyosuke does not put toast in his toaster? For your information I always buy my bread pre-toasted and then put them in my toaster.
Would that be called the undough or redough function?
Every mans' island needs an ocean; choose your ocean carefully.
Its fascinating how windows dominates that list.
zosxavius photography
BSD is one of those things that I've been interested in doing, especially early on. It is arguably more secure than Linux, is definitely older and potentially more secure.
So after using Linux for a year or so, I tried OpenBSD for a full month because of its much-touted security benefits before going back to Linux, and I've never looked back. Why?
1) At the time, getting stuff installed was more of a chore.
2) Although they had similar backgrounds and technologies, the differences were enough that it was almost a complete re-learn. RPM didn't work. Init was totally different. Commands such as ps, at, etc. had different options.
3) Didn't have support for multi-core systems. (at the time, I believe that's long under the bridge now)
Bottom line? I'd started to build a business that continues to this day using Linux as my architecture. In order to move over, I'd have to port over all my administration scripts, and much of my software to an environment that was just different enough to make me *think* I knew the answer when I didn't. Porting would have been somewhat expensive, and the case to make for the switch was marginal.
Linux isn't the best at everything, but it does pretty good at everything. Security is decent, reliability is decent, performance is excellent, hardware support is good-to-excellent, etc. all of these well within the range of "commercially viable". So, I stick with Linux, and my hosted software company has grown from a few clients to over 100 client organizations, some with hundreds of users. We've grown from 1 server to 9. Our uptimes are excellent, best in the business, our software is fast becoming an industry standard, and Linux has basically never disappointed us.
But don't get me wrong: I have immense respect for BSD, I live and die by SSH, which is foundational to our administration, backups, and cluster replication technology, and if I were starting over today, I would feel perfectly comfortable choosing *BSD.
Long live BSD!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
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...
Anyone know of any major projects where NetBSD has been deployed and has been known to provide benefits far and beyond what can be gained from using more "traditional" operating systems?
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:
Some drawbacks:
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:
I think that it comes as no surprise to anybody that Linux and BSD can have years of uptime, but some people (particularly on /.) have hard time believing that, yes, it is actually possible to configure and administer a Windows/IIS box so that it will keep on par with that, too.
See this older post: http://hardware.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/11/1754253
You might give this NetBSD Live CD a try:
http://www.jibbed.org/
It would be a fairly painless way to see how NetBSD 5 behaves on your system.
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.