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NetBSD 5.0 RC1 Released
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Feb 01, 2009 04:03 PM
from the while-it's-hot dept.
from the while-it's-hot dept.
jschauma writes "The first release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from the NetBSD FTP site. Here is the Release Engineering status of 5.0."
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Oh no! (Score:5, Funny)
Haha just kidding.
Slow news day (Score:2, Insightful)
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Of course, the "article" didn't really provide much to talk about.
It's NetBSD. It's 100% Hype Free [netbsd.org]!
They don't believe in hype. Hence, for the 'article', you get nothing more than "We released 5.0 RC1".
Re:Slow news day (Score:5, Informative)
I can't think of anything to say. Of course, the "article" didn't really provide much to talk about.
Here's the Changelog [netbsd.org]. To summarise, there's a new 1:1 threading implementation, as the previous M:N one was too complex to maintain. Along with this change has come a considerable performance boost and improved scalability, especially on SMP machines. Impressively, most of this work has been down to one developer, Andrew Doran. The second most important change is a switch to Xorg on most platforms. This took so long because NetBSD had a large number of changes in their tree for more obscure platforms - changes that were not integrated back into XFree86 before the Xorg fork. There is also a journaled filesystem that essentially obsoletes the troublesome softdeps. Like ext3 in the Linux world, the new journal features were added to the existing ffs ("fast file system") rather than being an entirely new filesystem. Other changes include a plethora of new device drivers and updated third party applications.
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What's troublesome with softdeps? Genuine question.
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What's troublesome with softdeps? Genuine question.
Soft dependencies were originally written as a FreeBSD feature, and then ported to NetBSD. I don't know how reliable it is on FreeBSD, but it has proved troublesome for some people on NetBSD, and getting to the bottom of it has been problematic since the code is rather complex. There hasn't been much enthusiasm to continue looking into the problems, and that's increasingly the case now that NetBSD has its own journaled filesystem.
Wrong logo (Score:5, Funny)
I for one is laughing my devilish ass off.
Re:Wrong logo (Score:5, Informative)
The BSD daemon, "Beastie", is not the FreeBSD logo. It is the BSD mascot, suitable for all BSDs. Even some official NetBSD flyers use it.
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Re:Wrong logo (Score:4, Informative)
When the occasional BSD lurker sees a devil, he thinks FreeBSD.
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Re:Wrong logo (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, it is decreasingly not the case. Beastie hasn't been the FreeBSD logo since 2005. They have a new logo now. [wikipedia.org] Beastie is moving more towards being a BSD-in-general icon like he's supposed to be.
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Just visit http://www.freebsd.org/ [freebsd.org] ... you will find BOTH logos, but Bestie is four times bigger and "important". The other anodyne logo seems more like a decoration element of the stylesheet.
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Accompanying the article with the FreeBSD logo is slightly tasteless, no?
Well, assume Beastie breathes fire.
That kinda' makes him a toaster...
Very tasteless (Score:4, Funny)
It certainly is. They should be using
the proper, official, globally accepted and widely lauded BSD logo.
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So, why should I care? (Score:5, Interesting)
What advantage does NetBSD give me over Linux? Other than avoiding monoculture, of course. People must obviously think it brings some set of advantages if they continue working on it and using it, I'd like to hear what they are.
Re:So, why should I care? (Score:5, Informative)
It's also where a lot of neat code sees its first light of day in the *BSD systems; over the years NetBSD has lent parts of its code to the other two BSDs, and therefore (de-facto) to Windows, Linux, and OS X.
But no, it's probably not going to make you very happy as a desktop operating system.
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Small and stable, I'll grant you. Fast as hell though? Got repeatable benchmarks for that? I'll accept benchmarks comparing to the speed of Linux, FreeBSD, XP, OS X, or yes, Hell --- which ever you prefer ;)
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My five minutes of googling may not be able to conclude much, but what they say about the various BSDs seems to be true: NetBSD for portability, OpenBSD for security,
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What advantage does NetBSD give me over Linux?
You get to be a big fish, because the pond is so little?
Or security/simplicity - and most importantly in many minds - dedication to a defined vision of code correctness.
That's my .02troll.
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NetBSD has been my choice of operating system for years. I continue to use it both as a desktop and as a secure, stable and mature operating system for mission critical servers.
If I would have to pick one more reason why, that could be the purity surrounding all aspects of the system. This is evident even when compared to other BSDs. From an engineering standpoint NetBSD is nearly perfectly designed and assembled operating system.
Keep up the good work.
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any specifics on how the design is better? its nice to say that but i think GP was looking for information not anecdotes
Re:So, why should I care? (Score:5, Interesting)
If you have old or somewhat unusual hardware, NetBSD does quite well.
I have a Sun Ultra 1, circa 1995, that I pulled out of the closet for fun recently. Debian installs on it, but 1) is sluggish, and 2) doesn't support certain hardware. My machine has a PCMCIA adapter in it, and I have an old 802.11b PCMCIA card, so I thought I'd be able to use wireless on this machine.
Turns out no Linux drivers exist for the PCMCIA adapter, whereas in NetBSD they do. After a kernel recompilation, the Ultra 1 is up and running on the wireless network.
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The main one is that NetBSD is famous for running on many archictures -- even some toasters. Also, a lot of people would say that Linux is a bit ad-hoc and messy, whereas the BSDs are more thoroughly designed and coherent. For example, instead of lots of messy drivers with different tools that work in different ways, you tend to get a system that includes all drivers of a particular class. Man pages tend to be more up to date and more professional**, which is nice. I'm sure there other benefits to NetBS
Re:So, why should I care? (Score:4, Informative)
The main problem is that they're such a hassle to install, compared to a modern Linux distro. Last time I checked it out, NetBSD was worse than FreeBSD in this regard, and probably tied with OpenBSD.
I installed NetBSD a few weeks ago, and it's not all that bad. It doesn't seem any worse than Debian. Sure, you have what size partitions you want and stuff like that, but if you can't handle that, you probably shouldn't be installing a new operating system.
OpenBSD is essentially proprietary as they charge for CDs (IIRC), so I just avoid that.
Huh? Pretty much everyone charges for CDs, but you can of course download OpenBSD free of charge.
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Ah, that's good to hear :)
No, with OpenBSD, they actually won't make public ISOs for download even. They charge you for an installable image. They claim to "copyright the CD layout" of the official CDs. Which "Theo does not permit people to redistribute images of". According to their FAQ, which I just checked
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Yes, but the same could be said for Windows or OS X.
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They copyrighted the ISO to make people's lives more difficult, so they would just pay. To me, that's not OK.
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>OpenBSD is essentially proprietary as they charge for CDs (IIRC), so I just avoid that.
You're a moron. You can get the source to OpenBSD from their ftp site (pub/OpenBSD/$RELEASE), as well as a boot cd that includes everything you need to install it, minus third-party packages (pub/OpenBSD/$RELEASE/$ARCH/install$RELEASE.iso).
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Yes, the CD layout is proprietary, NOT the source or documentation. You can build a custom install CD layout which produces the exact same on-disk system, and it's then up to you how you use it, and they make this explicitly clear.
Re:So, why should I care? (Score:5, Interesting)
Here are some reasons:
1) Linus "Testing is for someone else" Torvalds isn't running the show, and therefore you're more likely to get a properly tested kernel.
2) You can download an official kernel and expect for it to not only build using your old configuration, but to not have a previously-working driver not work any longer.
3) It has nice tools for doing #2, whereas in Linux, 'make oldconfig' has been seemingly abandoned in the name of progress and "let the distros handle it"
4) Slower, more thorough release cycle which is still aware of "development" and "stable" branches
5) You can still run a usable system on top of old hardware that only has 64Mb of RAM (or 32Mb, as I did recently with netbsd 4 - and yes, 32Mb is 'just barely' functional)
Parent
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Back in the 80s my first computer had 640k of memory. After having owned this computer for some years, I remember talking to another kid in school and he said he was going to build a PC with 8 megs. I couldn't fathom such a thing, either that it was possible or why you would want all that memory.
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What advantage does NetBSD give me over Linux? Other than avoiding monoculture, of course. People must obviously think it brings some set of advantages if they continue working on it and using it, I'd like to hear what they are.
It's a different UNIX-like platform. People use NetBSD over Linux/FreeBSD/OpenSolaris/OpenBSD/Windows/Plan9/Darwin/etc. for the same reason you might use one of the umpteen billion Linux distros over the others: it's a personal choice that suits your style, interests, and the way you want to utilize your system. In my experience some Linux users believe that the Linux kernel is the end-all-be-all of computing, and when that view is challenged by the existence, adoption, and successes of other UNIX-like syst
NetBSD is awesome (Score:5, Interesting)
I have a lot of hardware that would have been relegated to scrap if it hadn't been for NetBSD. Hmm...can I still do anything useful with that Mac SE/30? Sure, I'll run a small mail server for internal use so I can learn how Postfix and Sendmail work. And the multitude of bots trying to hack my Internet-facing machine wouldn't know what to do with a Vax-based NetBSD machine even if they got in.
That said, of course these machines are outrageously slow by today's standards; the Vax alone has been relegated to the basement 'cause it's so freaking loud. But hey, I happened to have the hardware, and since of course it runs NetBSD, it's a learning experience if nothing else.
But how green is it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Recycling is good, of course. But is it worthwile? How much power do all those old computers drain, compared to a new server with the same processing capacity?
Where I work, we replaced a couple of PDP-11 computers with PCs for the energy savings alone, even if there was a cost associated with migrating the software.
Parent
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How much power do all those old computers drain, compared to a new server with the same processing capacity?
Good question in theory, in practice you just can't find a PC with Pentium I power (is VIA making any?). And if that is more than enough, why upgrade?
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There are Via Eden's clocked at 400MHz draws 2.5W maximum, whereas a Pentium I clocked at 200MHz draws almost 16W.
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Maybe any netbook?
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But is it worthwile?
You're thinking too practically. Is it worthwhile for me to spend $20 in components on a project attempting to modify the value on the stored-value copy cards I use? Considering I can count on one hand the number of photocopies I've had to make, no. But it's fun :-)
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Where I work, we replaced a couple of PDP-11 computers with PCs for the energy savings alone, even if there was a cost associated with migrating the software.
Especially since your phone probably has more power than a VAX, if not I/O capacity.
A month's worth of electricity for your VAX (Score:2)
would probably buy you an entry-level modern PC.
Re:A month's worth of electricity for your VAX (Score:4, Interesting)
A month's worth of electricity for your VAX would probably buy you an entry-level modern PC.
Depends on the model. Not all VAX machines are huge beasts like an 11/750 or an 8600. My VAX are a 3100 Microvax and a 4000 VLC Vaxstation - the former is the size of a desktop PC and the latter is the size of a medium pizza box. Power consumption is lower than the quad core PC sat next to them, even though the Microvax has three SCSI drives in it (with /, /usr and /home split across them). The VLC was a web server in the not too distant past. Why? Low power consumption and minimal noise.
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raises his glass (Score:4, Interesting)
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The topic is a BSD variant, which gets the BSD category on Slashdot. BSD's logo is a red demon, so the color scheme for this category is red.
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Close, but from what another poster said, the red articles are ones that have just become visible to non-subscribers, and for whatever reason it doesn't pull the red styling off until some random time later.
Anyway, it's not like anyone would credit the Slashdot web devs with making a masterpiece here. Why don't we have a public discussion about how Slashdot trying to embrace "Web 2.0" is actually giving the site a really difficult to understand interface and honestly, makes the site seem schizophrenic at ti