NetBSD 2.0 Released

Quique writes "NetBSD 2.0 is the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, and has just been released. It can be downloaded from one of the mirror sites. NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty four different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more. NetBSD 2.0 continues the long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals." The release announcement is also available.

Re:What are NetBSD's strengths?

[Nirbo]

NetBSD is often used in porting software and OSes to other processors, due to the wide range it runs on.

As a result of the massively postable code though, it has a footprint relatively smaller than most ofther OSes, and tends to be quite fast.

For servers, I'd stick with FreeBSD, and for ultra secure servers, OpenBSD...

Or Linux :p, whatever floats your boat. Hell, you could even use Windows 2003 Server if you've got a few thousand burnig a hole in your pocket and the server isn't too important :D

Re:Yeah but,

[canadianjoe]

The addition of a native threads implementation for all platforms and symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) on i386 and other popular platforms were long-standing goals for NetBSD 2.0. Both of these goals have now been met--SMP support has been added for i386, SPARC, and PowerPC, and the SMP support on Alpha and VAX has been improved.

RTFA?

Re:Yeah but,

[little_fluffy_clouds]

Yes.

$ uname -a
NetBSD odyssey 2.0_BETA NetBSD 2.0_BETA (ODYSSEY) #1: Sun Aug 8 19: EST 2004

$ w
10:58AM up 121 days, 9 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.37, 0.24, 0.26

$ dmesg | grep cpu
cpu0 at mainbus0: apid 0 (boot processor)
cpu0: Intel Pentium III (686-class), 701.63 MHz, id 0x681
cpu0: features 383fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SE P,MTRR>
cpu0: features 383fbff<PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX>
cpu0: features 383fbff<FXSR,SSE>
cpu0: I-cache 16 KB 32B/line 4-way, D-cache 16 KB 32B/line 4-way
cpu0: L2 cache 256 KB 32B/line 8-way
cpu0: ITLB 32 4 KB entries 4-way, 2 4 MB entries fully associative
cpu0: DTLB 64 4 KB entries 4-way, 8 4 MB entries 4-way
cpu0: calibrating local timer
cpu0: apic clock running at 100 MHz
cpu0: 8 page colors
cpu1 at mainbus0: apid 1 (application processor)
cpu1: starting
cpu1: Intel Pentium III (686-class), 701.59 MHz, id 0x681
cpu1: features 383fbff<FPU,VME,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,SE P,MTRR>
cpu1: features 383fbff<PGE,MCA,CMOV,PAT,PSE36,MMX>
cpu1: features 383fbff<FXSR,SSE>
cpu1: I-cache 16 KB 32B/line 4-way, D-cache 16 KB 32B/line 4-way
cpu1: L2 cache 256 KB 32B/line 8-way
cpu1: ITLB 32 4 KB entries 4-way, 2 4 MB entries fully associative
cpu1: DTLB 64 4 KB entries 4-way, 8 4 MB entries 4-way
cpu1: CPU 1 running

Re:54 hippy architectures

[pchan-]

No hits for OMAP or PXA families which are well supported by Linux

Both the TI OMAP and the Intel PXA are ARM-architecture [netbsd.org]. The OMAP is pretty much a standard ARM-9, and the PXA is specifically mentioned on the evbarm page.

Ah. Blissful clean architecture.

[pschmied]

NetBSD is _the_ most underrated free OS project.

Do not be distracted by the fact that it can run on most every architecture. This is only a side effect of an uncompromisingly elegant design and clean implementation.

NetBSD is quite performant on modern hardware. It keeps pace with other operating systems in most areas, and exceeds in others. Remember, NetBSD was probably the first 64-bit clean open source operating system. It had USB support before Linux. It had IPv6 before... well... anybody.

NetBSD makes a great all around OS. NetBSD tends to be willing to break with tradition where others aren't. Proof is in things like its re-engineering of the BSD init system. It's so simply correct, that I can barely remember the traditional BSD inits. Hence, FreeBSD (and OpenBSD?) have adopted it.

So, run. Don't walk. Download, install, and enjoy.

-Peter

P.S. NetBSD's pkgsrc is only thing that comes close to a truly cross platform package management/build system. It supports Irix, Solaris, NetBSD, Linux, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, OS X, and (to a lesser degree) AIX. I'm sure I'm leaving out a few.

Torrent

[ethzer0]

Here's a direct link [netbsd.org] to the torrent for the x86 Binary ISO.

Re:Ah. Blissful clean architecture.

[srvivn21]

Proof of performance (Coralized for politeness) http://bulk.fefe.de.nyud.net:8090/scalability/ [nyud.net]

The benchmarks on this page are a year old, but still show a very interesting picture of network socket performance.

Re:Great for mini-processors

[kjs3]

One of the few hard-and-fast requirements of NetBSD is that it have an MMU. It can be a really brain damaged MMU (see arm26), but it's got to be there.

Thus, it's not going to be useful for an 8086.

Re:What are NetBSD's strengths?

[bob beta]

OpenBSD forked off of NetBSD and thus ceased to be NetBSD. That is different from certain other OSes, which are 'ported to other platforms' by creating forks that seldom merge back together ever again, yet are claimed to still be the same OS.

They are quite clear on this.

[Anonymous Coward]

The site tells you how many archs, and how many CPU families that is. You still have to do the work porting to a different arch with the same CPU type, as the booting is different, there are different devices, etc.

And the real problem is that 90% of these arches are not really supported, they just have some untested code that has been cross-compiled on x86. Actually attempting to use most archs netbsd "supports" is a sad experience.

Re:Let me know when...

[Miffe]

IIRC, they already have. Just press Scroll Lock and user Page Up and Down to scroll.

Re:Ah. Blissful clean architecture.

[setagllib]

The benchmarks are a year old, the system used is even older. Anyway, what's your point? They didn't bother with scalability until recently. You'd be amazed at what NetBSD 2.0 can do. Go try it yourself. Condemning an OS based on not being scalable at one point in time is just stupid. Linux wasn't scalable until 2.6, have you condemned that too? "Look at these benchmarks from 2 years ago - it shows a very interesting picture of Linux sucking".

On a related note, it isn't just NETWORK socket performance, since you can use sockets over loopback too. In NetBSD, being so supportive of systems which need as much space as possible, can even compile a replacement pipe mechanism which uses sockets to be smaller but slightly slower.

Re:Not the most portable OS at all.

[Anonymous Coward]

You are not quite right.
bus_space(9) and bus_dma(9) are kernel interfaces which achieve
NetBSD's extreme portability.
And although both FreeBSD and OpenBSD incorporated these interfaces
from NetBSD already, they haven't finished to convert all their
drivers to use these interfaces yet. Thus, the portability of
FreeBSD and OpenBSD is still limited, and isn't comparable with
NetBSD at this point.

Linux still don't have these abstractions.
Its portability is achived by i386 emulation (e.g. cli, inb, outb),
and very limited compared with *BSDs.

Re:What are NetBSD's strengths?

[Anonymous Coward]

You are missing point.

Note that NetBSD disables *ALL* services by default, but OpenBSD opens some services by default. Thus, obviously NetBSD is more secure by default.

> -no propolice

You can use gcc-ssp (newer version of proplice) on pkgsrc for any daemons you'd like

> -no W^X

You are just wrong. NetBSD 2.0 already has this. See below.
NetBSD supports PROT_EXEC permission [netbsd.org]
(depends on platform, though)

Verified Exec

[Per Wigren]

Verified Exec verifies a cryptographic hash before allowing execution of binaries and scripts. This can be used to prevent a system from running binaries or scripts which have been illegally modified or installed. In addition, Verified Exec can also be used to limit the use of script interpreters to authorized scripts only and disallow interactive use.

I've been looking for something like this for Linux but I haven't found anything.. Anyone know if it is possible?

Re:Let me know when...

[setagllib]

This, folks, is an example of a clueless newbie insulting an operating system based on his own ignorance.

/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/conf/GENERIC:
# console scrolling support.
#options WSDISPLAY_SCROLLSUPPORT

It's not on by default because it's too new a feature. BSDs work on 'method of least surprise'. If you uncomment that and build a fresh kernel, it will use the Shift+PgUp/Down mechanism that Linux has, no worse.

Anything else you want to be owned on?

Re:Upgrade experience

[setagllib]

You could have gone one better and fetched netbsd-2-0 tagged CVS source, and built it locally WITH the code optimizations and post-release improvements that a source build offers.

Who else thinks that, for such a gloriously large and powerful OS, a 200MiB ISO is just amazing? Well, all the BSDs have very small install ISOs (at least, if you compare with FreeBSD's "minimal install", not the with-packages ISO), really.

Re:They are quite clear on this.

[setagllib]

That's FUD. You would be more right in saying 90% are very stable and 10% less so, but I would say the share is even more towards stable. If you look at the ports page and the mailing lists, almost all systems (save those that nobody expects much from, e.g. Playstation 2) have numerous users with success stories, and where there are problems, solutions come up.

I personally have seen many, many reports of NetBSD on exotic machines being very useful and stable. Googling is the least amount of work needed to find more.

Re:Printed documentation (diff NET/FREE BSD)

[setagllib]

You can print the NetBSD handbook yourself :)

There are many similarities between FreeBSD and NetBSD thanks to their mutual heritage, but FreeBSD's documentation doesn't usually apply equally to NetBSD. The differences are well covered in NetBSD's own online documentation, though.

I had been using FreeBSD since 4.8 or so, and was able to pick up NetBSD almost instantly. Only one thing held me back (for weeks even), and that was my use of CFLAGS= instead of CFLAGS+= in mk.conf, which made world builds break. Entirely my fault, but could use a warning in documentation. But the basic idea is, if you're willing to read a couple of items of documentation and ask questions, it's very easy to learn.

Re:What are NetBSD's strengths?

[dogwarrior]

No, sendmail is on by default. Try "netstat -a | LISTEN" after a fresh install. You need to put "sendmail=NO" to /etc/rc.conf if you don't need sendmail.

Re:Printed documentation (diff NET/FREE BSD)

[MrBoombasticfantasti]

You can print the NetBSD handbook yourself :)

I just now downloaded the PDF, expecting a messy collection of readme's and cryptic notes in horrid layout. But none of that! It's a beautifully designed document! At first glance the contents seems to be very complete as well.

but FreeBSD's documentation doesn't usually apply equally to NetBSD. The differences are well covered in NetBSD's own online documentation, though.

I'll look into that, but I must say I'm pleasantly surprised by the documentation so far.

Thanks!