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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)."
Did Netcraft confirm it?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Both of them!
Why does a STABLE release version highlight as a feature an EXPERIMENTAL filesystem?
The one I know most about is FreeBSD. I have this vague notion that NetBSD has historically been used for routers/traffic shaping?
PS: I don't reply to ACs.
Congrats on getting it installed! :)
Is the 68K port up to date?
I've got to dig up my SE/30 and see if I can get it going again.
Nothing like an old BW compact mac with a bash prompt to make a geek do a double take.
I even run this on an old Amgia, 20 years old. Amazing stuff, netbsd that is. I wonder how they manage to support all these different hardware. Cool.
Apparently, I'll never understand Slashdot. The latest junk from Facebook, Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Oracle, et al. make the front page, but one of the highest quality open source releases gets buried. (It's almost like people self-medicate their marketing these days, but separate issue.)
I got 6 years of uptime once off of NetBSD on sparc. This stuff is gold. It's platinum. It's so stable, you have to worry about making sure you get around to patching your apps because the OS just never dies... stick this on solid state storage with the new NAND support, and you don't even have to worry about spinning disk fails. As a network device OS, this will be an awesome high-uptime packet sensor or embedded packet router.
Bravo NetBSD! Keep up the good work. This is top headline stuff.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
I'm curious about the new packet filter. First, I'd like to see benchmarks on performance due to multi-core use (it certainly seems like a good idea). And second, because I've hated every packet filter I ever used (tried to use) - ipfwadm, iptables, ipchains, ipfw, tc, lartc. Hate 'em.
If you need a hand, ask on the netbsd-users mailing list (http://www.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/subscribe_list.pl?list=netbsd-users). Especially with the new release just being out there should be plenty of people willing to help with whatever issue you have.
(Since you've been running betas for a while you probably know about the mailing lists, so this is more of a PSA for anyone else)
I thought you were dead!
I was going to write something similar, but you did a far better job than I would have :)
the features list are things most kernels have had for a decade or two, but NetBSD acts like they are brand new features? Talking about these features that have been around forever as being the latest and greatest is absurd. The BSDs long ago lost relevance. Pretty much there is not a thing that they do better than Linux and there is a lot that they do not do that Linux can do. It is painfuil to install and the hardware support is worse than Windows. I cant see a a strength to it.
I've never really used NetBSD (I've installed it a couple times, but never used it much), but I've used OpenBSD and FreeBSD quite a bit.
It's probably not what you'd want for a desktop system. It will run all the server stuff you listed just fine. The system compiler is gcc, although it likely comes with BSD make, so you'll want to install GNU make for compiling some software (usually it doesn't make a difference, but some projects rely on GNU make).
Packaging is similar to Slackware's package system (or at least how it used to be - I haven't use Slack in years) - it's tarball based. There is the pkgsrc system where you can automatically download and compile software for the system (based off FreeBSD's port system, which I rather like). You can also download and recompile the entire OS if you want (the infamous "make world" on FreeBSD, although glancing at the docs it seems NetBSD doesn't use that exact term).
Binary updates are generally available for security or bugfixes. The system doesn't do this for you (unless you recompile the system from source regularly - see below), so you have to check the errata page often to see if you need to update something. If you do, it's generally as simple as downloading the new binary and installing it using the system install tool.
Source updates are done on CVS trees - you track one of the trees (STABLE or CURRENT) and you get updates. The BSDs differ a bit where this is concerned, so I can't really give any specifics, but on FreeBSD and OpenBSD it's relatively painless once you get it set up. There's a utility to help you update your configuration files in FreeBSD and OpenBSD, so I assume NetBSD has something similar.
It supports CARP if you want to do clustering. I'm not sure if that will cover your needs, but if not, OpenBSD or FreeBSD might. I can attest that netbooting OpenBSD is cake - my firewall runs diskless.
As far as my experiences, well, there's a bit of a learning curve. It's easier if you've worked with Slackware or some other source-heavy Linux distro. The BSDs have a very unified feel to them, probably because there's no separation of userland and kernel development - the base system is developed as one unit, not a bunch of different projects. Like with anything, you have to use it a while to get a feel for it.
I like it. It's not as stuffy as Solaris, but it has a more consistant feel than Linux. Documentation is usually excellent, and the man pages are the definitive resource and usually include examples and explainations. I use OpenBSD for my firewall and nameserver, and FreeBSD for my file/webserver (due to ZFS and better Java support). I would use FreeBSD as a professional workstation (as long as it didn't require heavy 3D work), but not for my home machine.
If you've got the time to put into learning it (which if you know your stuff from Linux, it won't take long), it's well worth it. Throw it on a server and use it for a bit, and see what you think.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Yeah, as long as you ignore the fact that that license supported the growth of its use. Yes, it may be counter-intuitive to some, but the GPL 2.0 license is a big part of WHY Linux has kicked *BSD's butt all over the marketplace.
"Ahh! I see you're in that indeterminate Schrodinger state where - oh, uh
Xorg works quite well. Just look at the PC-BSD project. They've taken the Desktop environment to a whole new level for *BSD.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Slackware might not be source-heavy now (I haven't used it in years), but it used to be, if you actually wanted to do anything with the system.
If you wanted to install something that's not in the package sets (most everything, since Pat wasn't superman), you had to download and compile the source code. I never touched a line of C before I started on Slackware, and it was a trip learning to coax code into working. This was back before GNU autoconf was popular. Also, this was back when compiling your own kernel was recommended for performance reasons if nothing else (it was a lot less modular in those days).
It got worse when Pat didn't update to glibc when all the other distros did (yes, he had his reasons, I know). A lot of code was being written with glibc in mind and would require a lot of work to get it to work with libc5. Then you had RedHat's hacked-up version of gcc that caused problems for everyone else... oh, and did I mention imake? I'm just glad I jumped in on the Linux bandwagon after the ELF switchover - some people in here could tell you some horror stories about that.
Anyway, thanks to Slackware's lack of a large package repository, I learned how to get C code to compile, even though I didn't (at the time) know the language. I learned all about how libraries and dependancies worked. I learned how to massage a makefile to see my include files. All that has served me very well over the years, and in these days when Debian's package system spoils me so well, I still get to use these skills (so a small degree) on BSD.
Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
Oh, I know that OpenBSD forked from NetBSD, but it has far outgrown it. NetBSD's only selling point was being most ported - at least amongst the BSDs, but even there, FreeBSD has a version for ia64, but NetBSD doesn't. Which is why I was wondering.
Currently, amongst the OSs still active for Itanium, aside from HP/UX, on the Linux side, only Debian remains, and on the BSD side, only FreeBSD. Any inputs on which of these is a better choice for this platform?
I have an Asus EEE PC (900A) with NetBSD 5 that runs the stock X.org and uses the kernel Intel DRI driver (i915drm) for accelerated 3D performance -- pretty good given the hardware. There are DRI drivers for Radeon that I've also used, haven't looked into Nouveau. So the 3D support foundation is there, but the hardware pickings are still kinda slim.
Besides basic 3D acceleration, the continual 'catchup game' with desktop BSD is the explicit coding for Linux on the part of the big open source desktop environments, example: https://live.gnome.org/PortabilityMatrix