NetBSD 6.0 Has Shipped

New submitter Madwand sends this quote from the NetBSD Project's announcement that NetBSD 6.0 has been released: "Changes from the previous release include scalability improvements on multi-core systems, many new and updated device drivers, Xen and MIPS port improvements, and brand new features such as a new packet filter. Some NetBSD 6.0 highlights are: support for thread-local storage (TLS), Logical Volume Manager (LVM) functionality, rewritten disk quota subsystem, new subsystems to handle flash devices and NAND controllers, an experimental CHFS file system designed for flash devices, support for Multiprotocol Label Switching (MPLS) protocol, and more. This release also introduces NPF — a new packet filter, designed with multi-core systems in mind, which can do TCP/IP traffic filtering, stateful inspection, and network address translation (NAT)."

Comments

Re:Great!

[LizardKing]

I wonder how they manage to support all these different hardware.

One way is automated cross-compiling to ensure that the source at least builds for as many architectures as possible. Think of it as a large scale continuous integration environment.

Re:of the BSDs

[Lemming Mark]

The Darwin kernel (which is called XNU) is a bit weird - I spent some time looking into it when it was still a relatively new thing (2003-4 kind of era). XNU is Mach + FreeBSD + DeviceKit/Apple-y bits, all sharing the same protection domain. The latter point is interesting, since despite the fact Mach is considered a microkernel they've actually shoved all of the other kernel-level services in with it, rather than separating them into different processes. This makes the whole kernel basically monolithic (i.e. like the modern Windows and Linux kernels), which is kind of unexpected!

The Apple-y bits in the kernel that I mentioned definitely includes DeviceKit, their driver interface. Maybe some other stuff as well. The drivers are not normal FreeBSD-like device drivers - I think they're even C++, unlike FreeBSD itself.

I found it all a bit unexpected really, things didn't fit together as I'd imagined.

There's probably more in here; I'm not sure if it's the original one I read through!
https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelProgramming/About/About.html

Re:Everyone celebrates!

[rubycodez]

you might well be a NetBSD user and not know it. might be in your printer, network router or switch, internet security or web cam, cell phone.....it's an extremely stable, well engineered and high quality operating system

Re:of the BSDs

[cbhacking]

NetBSD is the "runs on any/everything" variant. It's absurdly portable. If you've heard stories / jokes about "BSD on a toaster", it was probably NetBSD.

It's not necessarily a great desktop system; "runs on everything" doesn't mean all internal or peripheral software support is going to be great (desktop-oriented BSD distros are usually FreeBSD based). However, it's a great choice if you have a very old or obscure computer that you want to run it on. I know a guy who runs NetBSD on one of the later-model VAXes.