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NetBSD 6.1 Has Shipped

Posted by timothy on from the more-of-a-workhorse-than-a-showboat dept.

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."

9 of 105 comments (clear)

  1. Why NetBSD? by manu0601 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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
    1. Re:Why NetBSD? by manu0601 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

    2. Re:Why NetBSD? by manu0601 · · Score: 4, Informative

      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

  2. Re:Shipped? by ducomputergeek · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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.

    --
    "The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
  3. "UNIX-like"??? by gweihir · · Score: 5, Informative

    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".

    --
    Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
    1. Re:"UNIX-like"??? by Antique+Geekmeister · · Score: 4, Informative

      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".

    2. Re:"UNIX-like"??? by tomxor · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:"UNIX-like"??? by tomxor · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

  4. Re:Fatal flaw: Filesystems = 4TB only. by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 4, Informative

    > 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.