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?

[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?

[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: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.

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...

"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"???

[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"???

[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: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: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

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: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.