NetBSD 6.1 Has Shipped

Madwand writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. NetBSD is a free, fast, secure, and highly portable Unix-like Open Source operating system. It is available for a wide range of platforms, from large-scale servers and powerful desktop systems to handheld and embedded devices. Its clean design and advanced features make it excellent for use in both production and research environments, and the source code is freely available under a business-friendly license. NetBSD is developed and supported by a large and vibrant international community. Many applications are readily available through pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection."

Comments

Why NetBSD?

[manu0601]

Why NetBSD?

• For its excellent backward compatibility: NetBSD 6.1 is still able to run a.out binaries built for NetBSD 1.0
• For its system-independant build system. Building NetBSD needs a POSIX system with a C compiler, which does not need to be NetBSD. It first builds the tools for the host, including the compiler itself, and then the target NetBSD system, which may be for another CPU.
• For its machine-independant drivers. Have a fancy platform with an odd CPU? If NetBSD has a driver for a chip, it will work as is, no need to port it

Re:Why NetBSD?

[flyingfsck]

Yup, the little bit I used NetBSD, I liked it, but I like Fedora more.

Re: Why NetBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, you like broken Fedora more ? I use Fedora 18 here and it's full of freaking bugs. Bugzilla is full of my reports and no one really cares to even reply to them or even fixes.

Gnome-Shell randomly crashes
Evolution permanently hangs with unknown processes messages
Printing skips first 20mm of the paper

I find myself spending more time fixing any Fedora related things than getting my freaking job done. Writing letter took 20 mins. Fixing printer issue took a whole day due to untested updates of cups.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[armanox]

The one system I really wanted to run NetBSD on isn't supported (SGI Octane). Ruined the whole "Of course it runs NetBSD" joke for me.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[manu0601]

Have you considered lending the machine to a NetBSD developer? In order to have hardware supported, we need the conjunction of (access to hardware, skills, time). You may lack the second entry of the tuple, but someone else may just lack the first one.

NetBSD mailing lists (port-sgimips here) are the right place to discuss such an arrangement

Re:Why NetBSD?

[manu0601]

Theses two OSes are not really for the same usage. NetBSD is good for servers and embedded, but it is not very desktop friendly. It can be used as a desktop, but it required some work that you do not have to do with Fedora.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

The one system I really wanted to run NetBSD on isn't supported (SGI Octane).

Try OpenBSD. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD in the 1990's and it supports SGI Octane.

http://www.openbsd.org/sgi.html

Re:Why NetBSD?

[armanox]

Reading the project page, X isn't supported on the Octane. While Gentoo was a pain to install on the Octane and get running (not supported anymore, this was back in 2007-8), it did have basic X support. Newer kernels probably don't work at all on this hardware. I've got two sitting in my room now (not the ones I got working in the LUG years ago), that it looks like IRIX is the only viable choice for.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[armanox]

I don't know any NetBSD devs, and especially not any that live in close proximity to me (I'm in Baltimore, MD). It's a heavy machine (~25 Kilos), and I'd rather not pay shipping costs.

Based on your posts it sounds like you are a NetBSD developer. If there is an interest in making it work, perhaps something can be arranged.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[manu0601]

Please subscribe to the port-sgimips mailing list and tell that you are ready to lend the machine to someone that would pick it up or pay shipping. You will get an answer or not, but at least you will have tried

Re:Why NetBSD?

[Achra]

Have you considered lending the machine to a NetBSD developer? In order to have hardware supported, we need the conjunction of (access to hardware, skills, time). You may lack the second entry of the tuple, but someone else may just lack the first one.

NetBSD mailing lists (port-sgimips here) are the right place to discuss such an arrangement

Eh, lack of availability of those computers isn't the problem. The problem is that the systems have very custom/unique architecture and there isn't a lot of end-user desire. I, too, went through what the GP is talking about. Irix is _still_ commercial and is realistically still the only option if you want to fire up your Octane. I went down all of the roads I possibly could with Linux/mips & NetBSD/mips.. support on both sides of the coin was the same: Terrible. Anything besides Irix on those old mips SGI's is pretty much useless, everything from "Hey, I got a bootloader to work and you can totally telnet into the machine, no framebuffer support" to "framebuffer support, mostly works, but no acceleration of any kind". The SGI Octane is really a conversation piece at this point anyways, I donated my long ago to the local PC-recycler and they turned it into scrap metal. Not old/rare enough to be a museum piece and not new/fast enough for modern use.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you could just hook this machine to your DSL router plus some sort of KVM switch ? I am to privy to the details of KVM stuff, but there should not be a general reason it cannot work.

Then you could make this machine available to a guy in Norway or maybe even Morocco.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[manu0601]

Wheres Fedora excels both as a server and as a desktop hence NetBSD is not really relevant.

IMO NetBSD is much better than Fedora as a server, but YMMV. This is what is nice with your troll-ish sentence: it works with any OS instead of Fedora and NetBSD.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[manu0601]

Maybe you could just hook this machine to your DSL router plus some sort of KVM switch ? I am to privy to the details of KVM stuff, but there should not be a general reason it cannot work.

Then you could make this machine available to a guy in Norway or maybe even Morocco.

For kernel developement, a remote-controlled power socket is also required, as the machine will probably crash a lot

Re:Why NetBSD?

[unixisc]

Why NetBSD?

• For its machine-independant drivers. Have a fancy platform with an odd CPU? If NetBSD has a driver for a chip, it will work as is, no need to port it

Last I checked, Itanium was not supported - it is supported on FreeBSD. Does NetBSD support it now, or have they abandoned plans of supporting it? It would certainly puncture their claims of being the most ported Unix around (aside from Linux)

That aside, it's nice to see some OSs, such as NetBSD, still strive for compatibility w/ different platforms. I'm disappointed that more recent versions of distros such as Red Hat have dropped support not just for Itanium, but for SPARC as well, while OpenIndiana & Bitrig - the LLVM/Clang based fork of OpenBSD - are both Intel-only OSs.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

An operating system cannot be written in ANSI/POSIX C.

Unless it is targeting a "machine" based on the C runtime.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[manu0601]

Last I checked, Itanium was not supported - it is supported on FreeBSD. Does NetBSD support it now, or have they abandoned plans of supporting it?

There is a work in progress port, but no formal release. I do not know how usable it is

Re:Why NetBSD?

[zipn00b]

A few years prior to that (probably around 2003 or so) Gentoo was a pain to install on a Mac but it was SOOOOO cool to see the penguin on the screen once I got it going.

Re:Why NetBSD?

[iggymanz]

OpenBSD runs on Octane supporting Octane 2 or ImpactSR graphics cards but no audio.....but it's one thing to run a server which is the main target of BSD, but quite another to make a desktop. There is GNU/Linux for Octane too such as Debian

Re:Why NetBSD?

[armanox]

Debian doesn't run on Octane (least not last time I checked). Gentoo was the only option when I was playing with it several years ago.

Gnome 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they get that working ?

Re:Gnome 3

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, Gnome 3 runs on NetBSD. Although I'm not altogether sure why you would want to do that. Still, you can, if you must.

Re:Gnome 3

[BrokenHalo]

No.

Re:Gnome 3

[unixisc]

GNOME3 is one of the options w/ OpenBSD, so that does bust the myth that it wouldn't work w/ the BSDs. Although GhostBSD will be moving from GNOME2 to MATE, and OBSD Is the only one that supports GNOME3.

Not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like (the) Linux (kernel), the BSD kernel comes with binary blobs.

Re:Not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

The OpenBSD kernel doesn't.

Re:Not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

You, sir, are a complete moron. Or perhaps it's m'am, but I doubt it, as no woman would be as stupid as you.

Just because something A that is open source also provides packages B that are not open source, doesn't mean that A suddenly stops being open source.

FFS, the education system sure has gone downhill in recent years. Or maybe you're just a Microsoft shill and paid to be clueless.

Re:Not open source

[LVSlushdat]

FFS, the education system sure has gone downhill in recent years.

WHAT "Education" system? What passes for the public "education system" now has become an "indoctrination system".. Instill "political correctness" in EVERYthing, make sure the children are molded into obedient little consumers, and NEVER question the state/powers-that-be.. My wife and I must have seen this coming when we got married in 1985, as we both decided to skip having children. I guarantee if we were younger and having children in today's screwed up world, they WOULD be home-schooled, no matter what sacrifices we needed to make to do that...

Re:Not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Prove that it too does, unfortunately: http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/sys/dev/microcode/atmel/atu-license?rev=1.3;content-type=text%2Fplain

Re:Not open source

[kthreadd]

Firmware is not part of the kernel.

Re:Not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Much more scarily, CPUs sometimes contain code to implement certain instructions. It's called Microcode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microcode

There have been cases of Intel CPUs being liable to crash due to "illegal" instruction sequences. That means a buffer overflow of a random C program could also crash the CPU itself. That's not the kernel, it is *inside* the CPU. So a CPU "exploit" is equivalent or maybe worse (for virtualization) as a kernel exploit.

That actually makes a very strong case for memory-safe languages and coincidentally I am the inventor of an efficient one (ok, grain of salt etc etc):

http://sourceforge.net/p/sappeurcompiler/code-0/HEAD/tree/trunk/
http://sourceforge.net/p/sappeurcompiler/code-0/HEAD/tree/trunk/doc/SAPPEUR.pdf?force=True

Re:Not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

In both my public school and public uni, they covered a lot of our government's blunders and current issues that aren't being talked about in the media. My public education made me question everything my government does. Maybe you just need to move to a state that isn't bad.

We have very liberal views, low crime, low teen birth, and score top 10 in the nation/world in many different areas. Welcome to MidWest USA.

Re:Not open source

[Anonymous Coward]

"My wife and I must have seen this coming when we got married in 1985, as we both decided to skip having children."

Good to know your genes will be put out of the pool.

Re:Not open source

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

EndOfThread detected.

Re:Not open source

[HotNeedleOfInquiry]

Ha. My wife and I had a child in 1988, partly because it looked like the world was finally getting it's shit together. No regrets.

Re:Not open source

[unixisc]

Open Source does not preclude binary blobs. Liberated Software does. Besides, the BSD licenses don't ban a mix & match w/ closed source items (I'm not sure about the ISC license that OpenBSD uses), so you are accusing them of not doing something that they don't claim to do in the first place.

Just use Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

It's 2013, and I'm not sure *BSD is really relevant anymore. I'm sure there are some users/corporations, but most serious independent (commercial) hacking isn't revealed because of it's lack of a GPL license.

Re:Just use Linux

[Nutria]

Old stuff doesn't get tossed out just because new stuff becomes available.

And NetBSD is small -- which is useful in some circumstances -- and some dislike the viral nature of the GPL.

Re:Just use Linux

[ruir]

You raise a point I have been mulling about for a while. In the past if did make sense to take advantage of boxes lying around. Nowadays, with virtual machine technologies, I have my doubts it is profitable to keep and maintain old hardware just for the sake of having one more server lying around.

Re:Just use Linux

[mab]

I think the Equallogic SAN controllers run it.

Re: Just use Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Or the uprising of corps you run away from linux because of the GPL (3)

Re:Just use Linux

[unixisc]

The GPL is the last reason that commercial entities would avoid using the software for in the first place. More likely, it would be that Linux is more widespread in terms of support, and has some viable companies backing it, such as Red Hat.

Otherwise, the BSD license is a good selling point - in fact, Minix touts that as one reason to prefer them instead of Linux, since copyleft doesn't apply there.

Re:Has Netcraft confirmed it?

[BrokenHalo]

If he hadn't explained, we would see a chorus of complaints that not every species of nerd is conversant with what BSD is. I recall a time when any /. user would slash his wrists before admitting that he was so utterly clueless, but now that time seems to belong to the same domain as the tooth fairy.

Re:Shipped?

[ducomputergeek]

Not sure about shops, but you can buy discs from several online vendors if you don't have the bandwidth to download: http://www.netbsd.org/sites/cdroms.html

Furthermore, I don't really see the difference between delivery via streaming packets vs delivery via post of a physical item from a logical viewpoint.

"UNIX-like"???

[gweihir]

AFAIK NetBSD is derived from the original UNIX-Sources as any BSD is. That makes NetBSD not "UNIX_Like", but a proper UNIX, or at the very least a "UNIX derivative". Linux, on the other hand, was implemented from scratch and not derived from the original UNIX sources (and even the scum at SCO has admitted that by now), and hence is only "UNIX-like".

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Antique Geekmeister]

The Linux _kernel_ was new. The Linux _operating system_ was primarily GNU tool based, using precisely that GPL licensing model that has been so effective in fostering open development. And even the GNU toolchains were not entirely from scratch: key tools like gcc and glibc were written with new code, but clearly written to emulate the behavior of the existing tools from BSD UNIX.

It's always seemed unfortunate to me that the core toolchains, such as C compilers and critical system tools like "make" and "cp" have different behavior in the different UNIX and Linux environments. It makes cross-platform suppoprt much more awkward. It's also helped pay my salary as my colleagues and I resolve such diffeences, but there are more interesting tasks we'd prefer to spend our time on in almost every project.

The main reason that Linux is considered "UNIX-like" isn't the software history. It's that getting certified as "UNIX" is expensive, and the stndards can be quite difficult to follow after a dozen years of free software and open source evolution. The standards are described at "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification".

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[tomxor]

AFAIK NetBSD is derived from the original UNIX-Sources as any BSD is. That makes NetBSD not "UNIX_Like", but a proper UNIX, or at the very least a "UNIX derivative"

Know your BSD history:

After Net/1, BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more non-AT&T sections of the BSD system be released under the same license as Net/1. To this end, he started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using the AT&T code. For example, vi, which had been based on the original Unix version of ed, was rewritten as nvi (new vi). Within eighteen months, all the AT&T utilities had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 release of Networking Release 2 (Net/2), a nearly complete operating system that was freely distributable. Net/2 was the basis for two separate ports of BSD to the Intel 80386 architecture: the free 386BSD by William Jolitz and the proprietary BSD/386 (later renamed BSD/OS) by Berkeley Software Design (BSDi). 386BSD itself was short-lived, but became the initial code base of the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects that were started shortly thereafter.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_Software_Distribution#Net.2F2_and_legal_troubles

The whole purpose of this was to make a functionally UNIX type system, but not UNIX (and there for free). This is why for legal reasons it is UNIX-Like, Linux on the other hand is is not as UNIX-like (if you like) because it's not trying to be.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Brandybuck]

On the other hand Darwin certified and blessed as a bona fide official UNIX. And Darwrin is derived from BSD.

Genetically, the various BSDs are direct descendents of UNIX. The ancestral tree might not be all that clean, but no one outside of a mythical Ozzie and Harriet world can claim the same about their family either. Legally I can't call NetBSD a UNIX, but that doesn't mean it isn't.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[tomxor]

On the other hand Darwin certified and blessed as a bona fide official UNIX. And Darwrin is derived from BSD.

Darwin is POSIX compliance meaning it can use the UNIX name, it is possible to write a completely separate system and gain POSIX compliance, it is merely a certification of compliance to a specification not of an inheritance to UNIX the operating system. Also darwin is derived from a great many things including a large portion of freeBSD and the mach kernel, not that it matters.

Genetically, the various BSDs are direct descendents of UNIX. The ancestral tree might not be all that clean, but no one outside of a mythical Ozzie and Harriet world can claim the same about their family either. Legally I can't call NetBSD a UNIX, but that doesn't mean it isn't.

I disagree, if you want to use genetics as the analogy, the source code (genes) are separate, even the way processes are performed is different, the functionality and interfaces are the only thing which is the same, that is a substantial step up from source code... if you look to nature for an analogy of this functional mimicry; the best fit i see is Batesian Mimicry.

My goal here isn't to strive at pedantism, i'm just pointing out that the inheritance here is functional not litteral, and then the very long evolution of that 386BSD "UNIX clone" to the various systems it has formed today make the word UNIX more of a classification than a litteral inheritance.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand Darwin certified and blessed as a bona fide official UNIX. And Darwrin is derived from BSD.

Genetically, the various BSDs are direct descendents of UNIX. The ancestral tree might not be all that clean, but no one outside of a mythical Ozzie and Harriet world can claim the same about their family either. Legally I can't call NetBSD a UNIX, but that doesn't mean it isn't.

I believe the problem is that you wish to add something to the discussion, to have your voice heard and acknowledged... yet you lack the vocabulary and knowledge to make intelligent, worthwhile contribution, and worse, you are not willing to learn. You just want to be inaccurate and still expect that everyone knows what you really meant as though it's perfectly acceptable that what you're penning is entirely literally incorrect.

In an attempt to neutralize the stench of this load of crap you're smearing all over yourself, and for those that genuinely wish to know the legitimate actual history (and not the poorly animated Pokemon version you're selling), there is actually a non-negligable, non-arbitrary difference between true UNIX, and other operating systems that live up to the standards of true UNIX.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[gweihir]

Of course I am talking about the Linux Kernel when I am talking about Linux. That the GNU tool-chain is not Linux-specific but available on a range of platforms is well known, no need to state the obvious.

Actually, the reason that Linux is not UNIX is that it is not derivative. The certification is entirely secondary and nobody cares about it.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[gweihir]

Hmm. Interesting! I just learned something.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Nimey]

The correct term is "pedantry". :P

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is "UNIX-like" because it's more of an evolutionary design with a goal of being UNIX, while BSDs are typically engineered and designed to be UNIX. BSDs tend to have better consistency and better cross compatibility while adhering to strict standards.

GPL: 80-20 rule. Any teenage hobbyist can start the next "big thing". Quite appealing to the general crowd of people who don't know how to design systems
BSD: 99-1 rule. Do it right. Likes to reject bad designs and does not like more than one tool that does the same thing.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Other companies began to offer commercial versions of the UNIX System for their own mini-computers and workstations. Many of these new Unix flavors were developed from the System V base under a license from AT others were based on BSD. One of the leading developers of BSD, Bill Joy, went on to co-found Sun Microsystems in 1982 and created SunOS for their workstation computers. --FTLA

Which one is SunOS or NeXT?

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[louden obscure]

i see what you did there...

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Which one is SunOS or NeXT?

Oh, that's easy... NeXT had way more Mach.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

But the UNIX standards, exemplified in the "Single UNIX Specification" at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Single_UNIX_Specification, are just that.. They are standards and say nothing about the ancestry or copyrights of the code in question. If an OS meets those standards, it really does not matter whether it's independently derived or a descendant. That's why some quit4e strange but standards compliant operating systems, such as SCO OpenServer and Tru64, have been correctly trademarked as UNIX.

Re: "UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Darwin is derived from the Mach which is not BSD (it's a micro kernel). Next welded chucks onto it from Bsd (iokit) to make it act as a monolithic kernel.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

Is NetBSD UNIX, or is it dancer?

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

LOL, missed your appointment with the shrink?

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[unixisc]

It's worth noting that except OS-X and Solaris, none of the current OSs are certified as Unix. Not FreeBSD, not OpenBSD, not NetBSD. So that's not something restricted to Linux. Also, it's useless to argue whether any of the BSDs would have passed more easily than Linux.

Also, weren't the original Unixes the System V unixes - the ones of which Solaris is the only survivor today? And the BSDs - be it FBSD/NBSD/OBSD - good as they are, are not the original Berkeley Unix - they are its modern successors. Aside from that, I wonder how relevant the single UNIX specification is today, w/ all the mainstream Unixes - Solaris, HP/UX, AIX - pretty stagnant? Linux is pretty much driven by Linux and the Linux Foundation, while the other foundations exist for each of the BSDs.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[unixisc]

Tru64 was OSF/1. and since the Open Group was a merged organization of X-Open and OSF, it would have been really strange had the latter's implementation of UNIX not been compliant w/ a standard that it was a party to subsequently defining.

But it seems that the modern definition of UNIX seems to be anything that is POSIX compliant (which would have included certain OSs such as NT and VMS and their derivatives). Not a tall bar to achieve. But yeah, you are right - any OS that meets the Single UNIX Specification standards qualifies to be called UNIX, whether it's Linux or NetBSD or Minix or whatever. Maybe someone should subject Linux 3.10 to those tests and then tell us whether it qualifies to be called UNIX.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[Anonymous Coward]

From Wikipededia, here is the list of current "UNIX" operating systems.

            AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, Solaris, Tru64 (formerly "Digital UNIX"), A/UX, OS X,[30][31] and a part of z/OS.

Shile most of those are no longer getting new releases, OS X is another name for the crrent release of MacOS. So I'd say that a defining and consistent architectural standard for the basic OS remains an important key to UNIX development. The architecture of the other BSD descendants is interesting, and they do _try_ to adhere to UNIX standards. Linux pretty clearly does not, there are key kernel and libc differences that mean it will never meet the UNIX specication.

Re: "UNIX-like"???

[unixisc]

Actually, no. NEXTSTEP 2.6 was based on Mach 2.5, which was NOT a microkernel. Darwin revved up the kernel to Mach 3.0, and put FBSD userland on top. So even though Mach 3.0 itself is a microkernel, the way Apple uses it and architects the OS makes it pretty different from one. In other words, XNU is not a microkernel.

Re:"UNIX-like"???

[zipn00b]

It's a tangled history with AT&T being greedy pricks over the whole thing. Considering they apparently didn't contribute financially to the project in the early stages that makes it even more interesting. For the most part I always considered the division between BSD and Unix being whether you paid licensing fees to AT&T. It's a very muddy delineation since Unix systems tend to contain BSD code but I guess it keeps the lawyers happy.......

The Google legacy, independence is for dolphins

[Anonymous Coward]

My wife and I must have seen this coming when we got married in 1985, as we both decided to skip having children.

Similar here, although I decided on no kids for career reasons only.

But you're right, what a screwed up world into which to bring children. A great place for obedient blank little slaves though, no need for independent thought, the megacorps will provide your opinions for you. It's so much more efficient. All praise Google.

Re:The Google legacy, independence is for dolphins

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel really sorry for you, not having kids "for the career".....

Re:Has Netcraft confirmed it?

[JustOK]

TOOTHFAIRY.COM is a new WORLD.COM WEBSITE.

What's the ARM support like?

[Anonymous Coward]

I play with lots of different boards that use ARM application processors, but I've always used Linux of various flavors. It's not because of any particular attachment to Linux, but just because Linux runs on most things.

An alternative would be welcome. just for variety. And I did use BSD4.2 on VAXen a million years ago, so I'd like to deploy a bit of nostalgia too, if NetBSD can do it.

Re:What's the ARM support like?

[manu0601]

Here is a good starting point.

There are a lot of kernels built for ARM platforms, but you will probably want to tweak and rebuild your own. This can be cross-built from your favorite Linux box, it is as simple as

• downloading the source tarballs from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.1/source/sets/
• unpack
• run ./build.sh -U -m evbarm tools to build the toolchain (-U for unprivilegied if you are not root, -m for target platform)
• copy a kernel config file from sys/arch/evbarm/conf, and change whatever you need
• run ./build.sh -u -U -m evbarm kernel=YOUR_KERNEL_FILE to cross-build your custom kernel (-u for update, it does not rebuild what you already have, which will be useful when you will tweak things)

Kernel are ELF, so if you already have an ELF bootloader, it should be straightforward

SPoF

[Anonymous Coward]

Resting on the sofa on a pleasant Sunday afternoon, you might like to mull around the concept of "Single Point of Failure".

Virtualization is great, but when your virt box goes down, everything goes down. In contrast, a 2W ARM board will keep running your Linux or BSD system + Internet router for ages while your power is out (CA, I'm looking at you), off just a small UPS.

Horses for courses. Virtualization provides a home for only one kind of horse. There are other kinds too.

Re:SPoF

[Anonymous Coward]

I think the same way when programming. Single responsibility principle is BS. /sarc

But really, with enough computers, virtualization reduces the chance of any one virtual system going down because it can just be migrated to a different physical box.

Re:SPoF

[ruir]

I don't discount your point. In a home setting it makes sense, no denial about it. In an enterprise setting where you have multiple virtualisation hosts, a redundant arquitecture, and hundreds of virtualisation servers, it is counter-productive to keep old hardware around just for the sake of having one more machine.Heck, even at home I don't want the hassle of dealing with old hardware, I just fire away a XEN machine remotely when I have to do some tests and destroy it shortly thereafter. And even then, I would prefer to deal with a Raspberry Pi then with an a two-decade old server at home.

That's all?

[pentadecagon]

You dodged the most important question: What is it good for? If I just want to get a job done, is there any kind of "job" beside "having fun setting up a strange OS" where NetBSD would be the appropriate choice?

Re:That's all?

[manu0601]

NetBSD has unmatched features for embedded: cross-building out of the box and machine-independant drivers help a lot here.

It is also very good as a server. The backward compatibility seems to be a detail, but when you think of it, that means easy upgrades: reboot with a newer kernel without upgrading userland, it works. Then drop to single user, unpack up-to-date userland without upgrading the packages, return to multiuser, it works. Install a package built for version n-1, it works.

Re:That's all?

[Anonymous Coward]

Diversity is good when Chicom Ltd. feels threatened and fires off their entire inventory of cyber weapons at once, taking out 90% of internet infrastructure (Apache, Linux, PHP, maybe even quite a few x86 CPUs by means of microcode exploits, Checkpoint firewalls, lots of Linux-based appliances).

Imagine 300000 sysadmins frantically trying to find an alternative to the Linux monoculture, which lies disabled on the ground, having fallen down from the clouds. THAT is when you need xBSD systems.

Now, replace Chicom with The Country They Plan To Bomb Soon, and maybe you get what I mean.

Re:Has Netcraft confirmed it?

[Nutria]

If he hadn't explained, we would see a chorus of complaints ...

Or... you could go back and looks at the summary again and notice that the explanation is copied directly from the NetBSD announcement page, and that linux.org has a similar "What is Linux?" paragraph.

Did they fix ...

[Anonymous Coward]

- filesystems: anything modern such as xfs, jfs? I don't feel like static inode allocation or ancient ufs anymore (even with softupdates) and 16TB volumes are a joke
- pkg stuff: don't feel like wasting a lot of inodes for pkgsrc, please give me something like "pacman" or an advanced "yum"
- O(1) scheduler?
- ionice?
- different block schedulers?
- actually usable kernel configuration tool (think "make menuconfig")?

Easy upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, that was the easiest upgrade ever. Much simpler than my recent debian upgrade from squeeze to wheezy, but maybe that would be more comparable if we were talking about a major netbsd release.

I want to love BSD

[EmperorOfCanada]

I would love to deploy some BSD machines and see how they fair in a long term A/B test against Linux machines. I hate to use the term but a TCO.

But with servers there is rarely one killer feature that make an OS way better than the others. Usually it is a bad feature that kills the OS. If you need a certain package and it doesn't exist or isn't well supported with a certain OS then that OS is dead to you regardless of all its other virtues.

Now I use Mac OS X for my desktop and Linux for my servers. I am impressed with the Bastard BSD underlying Mac OS X in that it doesn't get in my way.

So my question is: I am using CentOS because it keeps me in my Linux as Unix comfort zone but that NetBSD would be way better and every day I don't switch is a day wasted? Or would NetBSD make me angry that I left the happy easy land of CentOS?

Re:I want to love BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are a competent Unix user, it won't massively matter whether you run on Linux or xBSD. If you can be freaked out by the lack of support for - say - Epson printers on xBSD, you should better not touch it.

I am using cygwin on Windows and that makes this OS much more bearable for me. For example, I can kill 50 zombie processes in an instant via the command line, something the super-duper Windows Taskmanager can't do (for really stupid reasons I cannot fathom).

xBSDs are very important in the same way that seldom grass or tomato seeds are very important. Because the prevailing monoculture might be "developed" to the point where many users cannot stand it any more. Only alternatives keep people honest and that includes Mr Thorvalds. Plus, diversity is very critical for cyber security reasons. It increases the workload for the attackers and would-be attackers.

Re:I want to love BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

And the killer bad feature for Linux is security. There are local root exploits about every two months. Because I like to do more with my Unix servers then serve static HTTP files, I prefer using something other than Linux for general-purpose server tasks.

I still use Linux as single-purpose application servers--it's the most performant out-of-the-box, and package management with apt is incredibly easy and stable over the years. But the problem is that Linux has become a dumping ground for new features. Sometimes those features help with performance, but more often they introduce security holes.

I tend to use OpenBSD because that's what I've been using for the past 13 years, and it's the simplest out of the 3 most popular *BSDs. NetBSD looks really nice, but I don't care to re-learn about package management, system maintenance, etc, etc. I tend to upgrade my servers once or twice a year, *remotely*, for several years before changing hardware, and OpenBSD lets me do that while still being confident I understand the purpose of every file and directory in /etc, /usr, and /var.

Re:I want to love BSD

[ifrag]

If you need a certain package and it doesn't exist or isn't well supported with a certain OS then that OS is dead to you regardless of all its other virtues.

If you don't have access to source, all major BSD's have support for running linux binaries. Can be a bit of work to setup but I've used it successfully for a few things.

Re:I want to love BSD

[ducomputergeek]

I still love BSD. 15 years ago FreeBSD in particular had some advantages with its ports system over linux. It was also in that time that FreeBSD often time ran software faster using its linux emulation mode than linux itself back then. We still use FreeBSD to this day running many of our core web servers & PostgreSQL database cluster. The argument could be made today that Linux would be better suited for the task as it's far more common and you can find enterprise support. But frankly, our system ain't broke. It does its job, doesn't get in our way, and we use it in a few area like our network switches & routers are Juniper and we're using FreeNAS for our storage area.

Re:I want to love BSD

[iggymanz]

which apps and app platforms do you run on your servers? Any of the BSD do all the usual: apache, nginx, tomcat, php, perl, ruby, python, mysql, postgresql, postfix, qmail, sendmail, bind,

do you have something that is uniquely Linux-packaged running?

Fatal flaw: Filesystems = 4TB only.

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately NetBSD still only has old filesystems such as the BSD Fast File System, all of which seem to have a size limit of 4 terabytes.

I know 4TB sounds like a lot but for servers this is a piddlingly small amount. This makes NetBSD not suitable for storage servers.

Now, if they could port ZFS from FreeBSD they'd have a winner on their hands as it would then be the only well maintained, up to date and free OS with a functional enterprise grade storage system. (Since OpenIndiana and the OpenSolaris derivatives seem to have all died or are no-longer free.)

Re:Fatal flaw: Filesystems = 4TB only.

[UnknownSoldier]

> if they could port ZFS from FreeBSD they'd have a winner on their hands

What are you talking about?
  * http://wiki.netbsd.org/users/haad/porting_zfs/
  * http://netbsd-soc.sourceforge.net/projects/zfs-port/

Considering FreeNAS is based on TinyBSD, and ZFS is already available for Linux,
      http://zfsonlinux.org/
Not sure what issues you are having with NetBSD & ZFS.

ZFS for Linux was dead easy to get up and running ...
  1. Download spl
  2. Download zfs
  3. ./configure ; make
  4. zpool import /dev/...

Just pulled in 4x 1.5 TB drives in a 2.3 TB Raid-Z2 pool with ZFSonLinux that had already been setup in FreeNAS.

Why not Minix?

[unixisc]

For Embedded, why bother w/ NetBSD at all - Minix is smaller, but uses the same NetBSD userland. NetBSD is fine for servers. For desktops, I agree w/ you - they'd need to come up w/ their own equivalent of PC-BSD for a desktop OS. Maybe they could re-do the abandoned Desktop BSD distro to be based on NetBSD, borrow PBI/EasyPBI and build a laptop based distro based on that.

However, they may not wish to focus on the desktop at all, and instead, may want to focus on tablets. In which case, they should target that w/ Minix, rather than go w/ NetBSD themselves.

Re:Why not Minix?

[manu0601]

For Embedded, why bother w/ NetBSD at all - Minix is smaller, but uses the same NetBSD userland.

Right, but what about kernel support for embedded CPUs? You have ARM, but you could want SH3, SH5, MIPS, PowerPC...

Re:Why not Minix?

[unixisc]

Minix 2 used to support SPARC in addition to x86. But you're right - right now, Tannenbaum ain't interested in any platform other than ARM, so for people looking at MIPS or PowerPC or SH3/5, it's either Linux or NetBSD or even Windows CE. Incidentally, does Hitachi still do the SuperH CPUs?

Re:Shipped?

[unixisc]

I believe that a Frys or a MicroCenter would be a good place to look.

I didn't say microkernel :P

[tomxor]

Assuming you intended to reply to my post which mentions mach...

I just wrote "mach kernel" not "microkernel", i probably should have said XNU. I know that XNU is derived from a version of mach prior to mach's full microkernel implementation which turned out to be very slow. However XNU is still a microkernel in some useful ways, the big way that it doesn't operate as a microkernel is it's monolithic treatment of device drivers... but Darwin mainly being used for the basis of MacOS, this turned out to not be too much of a big deal given the small number of supported devices theoretically allowing for the production of higher quality device drivers, theoretically being the key word having experienced the result of a few Mac OS kext bugs myself, but device drivers are never perfect. The only thing we have to look forward to for solving this is Minix 3 which appears to have a reasonable performance sacrifice and some pretty awesome concepts for surviving with horribly buggy device drivers.

Re:I didn't say microkernel :P

[unixisc]

I was responding to AC, who wrote

Darwin is derived from the Mach which is not BSD (it's a micro kernel). Next welded chucks onto it from Bsd (iokit) to make it act as a monolithic kernel.

So I pointed out that NEXTSTEP was based on Mach before it became a microkernel, and so obviously, the microkernel nature of Mach 3.0 was irrelevant as far as Darwin went.

Re:I didn't say microkernel :P

[tomxor]

My mistake... still i always find it a bit odd when people pick out that detail... I mean the most accurate description would be a hybrid microkernel. I know apparently windows used or uses a microkernel scaffold in a completely monolithic way, but my understanding was that although XNU doesn't do the fancy device driver servers that it still acts like a microkernel in other ways which end up being useful for security, memory management comes to mind, maybe someone more knowledgable of XNU can enlighten us of what is and isn't a microkernel in the functionality of XNU as apposed to the structure.

:P

[tomxor]

You should get 5 points for that, i had that coming :D

BSD-Like ?

[tomxor]

Just to be annoying and argue both sides :D I recall that there are many places in the complex inheritance tree where the UNIX System integrates source from various BSDs' along the way after the 386BSD separation. Taking that into consideration it would be more accurate to call the UNIX Systems' a source descendant of BSD :P but essentially the descendants of 386BSD do have source code that is in UNIX Systems, the difference is however that UNIX inherited it from the BSDs' not the other way around... I don't want to suggest an analogy for that in nature O_o