NetBSD 1.5 Review

Patrick Mullen writes: "The Duke of URL has just posted its review of NetBSD 1.5. The review covers everything from installation, to its features, as well as how it ranks up in security and against the other *BSDs."

Re:netbsd 1.5 vs 1.4.3.

[abs0]

There was a bug in one of the mac68k scsi drivers, which was fixed soon after the release in current and pulled up into the 1.5 release branch. I'm pretty sure it didn't affect any other m68k ports.

Re:netbsd 1.5 vs 1.4.3.

[FyreFiend]

Oops! You are right. I ment mac68k not m68k.

Re:netbsd 1.5 vs 1.4.3.

[FyreFiend]

The NetBSD m68k mailing list was full of reports of SCSI problems with 1.5. Most were with Quardas but IIRC there were some with older '030 machines.
The newer snapshots have the fixes in them and the upcoming 1.5.1 update will as well. Now I think most of the work on m68k is towards converting it over to ELF.

Re:Corrections

[Dahan]

I may be wrong on this, but I could've _sworn_ Apple used FreeBSD as the core for OS X.

Yeah, kernel based on FreeBSD, but most userland utilities are from NetBSD.

The author also says that NetBSD has no SMP support, although SMP on the Alpha has been working for about a month now.

I guess it would've been nice if he mentioned that SMP support was forthcoming, but it is a review of NetBSD 1.5, which doesn't support SMP.

netbsd 1.5 vs 1.4.3.

[saintlupus]

the only problem i had with 1.5 was an issue with the architecture. i was running the m68k port of 1.4.3 on a mac quadra 700 with no trouble at all. unfortunately, the 1.5 build apparently has some sort of conflict between the video and scsi drivers on that particular model, so it won't even bootstrap completely. and, being a mac, there's no way to get around using the video driver, even though i run it headless. sigh.

what i ended up doing was moving my webserver to the i386 port instead, using a 486 a friend of mine donated. the built in ssh and postfix and such was definitely worth the trouble, but i thought i'd just post this as a cautionary tale for anyone else with a 700 out there.

--saint
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Corrections

[methodic]

In the aricle, the author says NetBSD runs on 10 different architectures, when in fact its a little closer to 20.

I may be wrong on this, but I could've _sworn_ Apple used FreeBSD as the core for OS X.

He makes mention of the 'ports' section, when in fact it's called packages instead (pkgsrc). This is obviously not to confuse ported software with ported architechtures.

The author also says that NetBSD has no SMP support, although SMP on the Alpha has been working for about a month now.

All in all, the article was not bad. A little generic, but it did touch upon a few good points, like mentoning that NetBSD had the first full ipv6 implementation. I give it 3 stars out of 5.

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