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BSD Operating Systems News

NetBSD Ported To MIPS-Based Cobalt Machines 53

Posted by Nik from the NP:-Boy-in-the-bubble dept.
After our earlier story about this, hubertf writes: "Soren S. Jorvang has done a port of NetBSD to the Cobalt Networks MIPS-based Qube and RaQ Microservers which is now available. Originally the Cobalt machines ship with a custom version of Linux, and now everyone can run his favourite Open Source operating system on it." More information from the NetBSD/cobalt ports page.
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NetBSD Ported To MIPS-Based Cobalt Machines More

NetBSD Ported To MIPS-Based Cobalt Machines

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  • Hmmm (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This looks an awful lot like another story we've seen around here. http://slashdot.org/bsd/00/03/20/1482 30.shtml [slashdot.org]

  • Re:Operating System on a Cobalt? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    It is. I think the real only legit reason to spend time developing the NetBSD port to the Cobalts (besides that silly "it was there and I had time" reason) is that if you inherit a few cobalts (along with other servers) if you change into a job with them or what not, is that you can get ALL your servers running the same OS, NetBSD, which can be adventageous in some respects or whatever. Easy administration?

    Buying a cobalt only for the sake of porting it to NetBSD is crazy because you pay alot of money just for the ease of use factor for the easy to use Cobalt web admin stuff.

    ----
    A sign of the end of days? The End of Grits [geocities.com].
    Use it as your sig.

  • This is great news! Now we can buy hardware from Cobalt. I hope they aren't going to insist on bundling Linux with the hardware, as consumers should have the freedom to choose which OS is installed on their system.

    I'm looking forward to the protest rally for the Linux refund from these guys. And shouldn't the DOJ get involved somehow, since it seems they're illegally tying their hardware product to a specific OS? They should be REQUIRED to offer the choice of either NetBSD or Linux (and obviously, nobody should be foolish enough to use Linux on such fine hardware)

    For that matter, maybe they should be required to offer support for the NetBSD port. It seems to be the fashion these days to demand such a thing.

    Liberation from the Gnu Public Virus is something to celebrate!

  • Cobalts are great. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We own 2 of them and they are minimum maintenance, with little or no problems.

    Does NetBSD support the LCD interface?
  • Actually, to make a small correction to your history: NetBSD and FreeBSD were both created at a similar time as descendents of the 386bsd patchkit (aka Jolix, by Bill Jolitz). The patchkit was based upon the free (later taken to court regarding :-(, so not as "free" as it should have been) 4.3BSD NET/2 release.

    Anyway, the point is that NetBSD isn't the originator of FreeBSD. OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD, but FreeBSD was always a separate project from NetBSD.

    --

  • Actually, your spaghetti goto C++ program is both syntactically and semantically correct (well, if you write it correctly ;), but not stylistically correct. Stylistic correctness is much more qualitative than syntactic correctness, but still definable. Think of object-oriented, procedural, etc. as programming styles; C(|++) riddled with many gotos is definitely not proper C(|++) programming style, either procedural or object-oriented.

    --

  • With a little time and attention, "he" begins to seem awfully non-representative. The whole "he or she" construction is so freakin' awkward as to distract attention from the point in hand .. particularly in spoken conversation.

    So what is it then? I *hate* the he or she construct. They or their is equally broken most of the time. In classes where people are sensitive about the pronoun-gender nonsense I end up restructuring things so I can use "individual" or some other wordy kludge.

    I understand the point they make about "he", but for the most part English is gender neutral. There are many other languages which are structuarlly gendered, and I don't hear complaints about them.

  • Except it's a bit hard find one for next to nothing...

    A few weeks ago I was looking at the prices for the Cobalt machines (in New Zealand), and they were, well, terrifyingly expensive - $2500NZ (about $1500 US) for someting with a 250MHz CPU and 16MB RAM, and 4GB IDE HD) What irks me is the fact that all their spec sheets seems so geared at the clueless manager types that they don't even tell you what CPU it's running (MIPS R4x00 series?)

    Also, a microserver might not be the best thing for development and testing when every thing you do deals with server side scripting and database queries... :)
  • And now if we can just find a way of forcing the *BSD zealots to quit making unrealistic (for ANY operating system) claims, and just generally annoying the hell out of everyone. Then perhaps we can start letting them come to the good parties again...
  • Since a NetBSD port is now done, an OpenBSD
    port cannot be far behind.


    However the NetBSD mips tree has diverged somewhat from the OpenBSD mips tree. So doing a port would require porting most of the NetBSD mips tree over to OpenBSD and updating the arc and pmax ports.
    I've long wanted to do this, but I've not had the time it takes to actually do the work to make this happen.


    Warner Losh

    OpenBSD/arc maintainer

  • Well, I'll certainly admit that e2fs is fragile in power loss. Way more then FAT, or FAT32 even, in my experience. But I don't really see what that has to do with a server's over all stability. If the power goes out, its still going to stop responding :P

    As for the stability issue, I'm not sure your right. Linux handles huge websites pretty well.

    And as far as whether or not it crashes, that has just as much to do with code complexity as it does with CPU load. I mean, I could run A: jmp a;, and in a preemptive multitasking OS, not worry about it crashing (the only non preemptive multitasking OS in wide use now is MacOS). I would imagine that and FTP server probably isn't a very complex, unstable application.

    And the other thing is, why would anyone want to run a 6000 user FTP server from a single CPU computer? I mean really. Wouldn't it make a lot more sense to run cdrom.com as a bunch of smaller servers separated geographically, and possibly even by content? As it is, CDROM.com chokes when a new release of quake or whatever comes out. What's the purpose of having them all on the same, uniprocessor box, unless, of course, you want to show how 'l33t, and non-SMP enabled your OS is, at the exspense of people who use the server. cdrom.com can't always keep up with the load. I guess that means that freebsd is a failure.
  • Umm...the English language uses the masculine form of third person pronouns to indicate either male or female subject/objects when the distinction is ambiguous or irrelevant

    Maybe you havn't had an english class in the last 20 years, but, No, it dosn't...
  • OOG,

    for a person such as yourself, who must have been witness to some kind of linguistic evolution, I'm surprised you take that position. A human language is defined by how it's spoken, not how it's written. When speaking 'English' people use the word 'they' and 'their' to refer to single entities now. Is it grammatically wrong? Yes. Can you still understand the sentence? yes. So, who cares? The English language is going to change; there isn't anything you can do about it. Unless you want to try and get people to use another word, then shut up. (I'd rather read they then him/her any day, personally)
  • Well, technically he may be right, however, it is not something that you are supposed to do. In my English class you'll loose points for it, and that is based on university wide guidelines, not some PC thug teacher. It's like writing a C++ program with nothing but GOTOs, Syntactically right, but Semantically wrong.
  • According to Walnut Creek CDROM, it is not the servers that choke, but rather the pipes being clogged. The old system changed the same for years as the bandwith was increased, without problems. For a P6-200 and lots of ram/storage, not bad. The redundancy aproach (one that is more of a popular NT-point than UNIX point), is not as important if the hardware is redundant itself, and the OS is stable. This doesn't mean that it shouldn't be redundant, but then as a free service that has hardware redundancy and the software designers maintaining it, its never been a big issue.
  • Like I said, the old system. That system handled a maximum of 3000 users, I believe. When they upgraded the pipe, they also upgraded the server. The new server is a single CPU 500mhz Xeon P3.

    Whether Linux is superior or not probably wouldn't be an issue. FreeBSD right now has proven itself for the server, and as your saying Linux may soon catch up. Yet, when Linux finally does edge FreeBSD, and here I'm pretending in every form required for the system (as just having a superior stack is not the sole reason), then the system still would not be switched. Three reasons: Linux has not proven itself where FreeBSD obviously has, the code is in Linux may be fresh and untested, whereas the FreeBSD equivelent would have been proven and evolved to its state, and that the maintainers of the systems are also key developers. By knowing the system in and out, and what to improve if needed, then those issues would be quickly remedied. It would be illogical to switch when the maintainers know the code in and out, which is perhaps the largest benefit. Oh.. and why change when nothings broken?
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Now if a BSD'er did something like this it would surely be flamebait. Not to mention this was moderated +1. And who says slashdot isn't for the ignorant zealots? Looks like this will be given a score of -1 for me. Hypocrisy in action.
  • Relating user base to OS quality is such a pathetic analogy.
  • Is Cobalt going to modify the hardware so people can run BSD and make everone that buys in after a certain date pay $21.95 for their online service?
  • Well, I'll certainly admit that e2fs is fragile in power loss. Way more then FAT, or FAT32 even, in my experience. But I don't really see what that has to do with a server's over all stability. If the power goes out, its still going to stop responding :P

    the fragility has nothing to do with the fs and everything to do with fs caching. fat and fat32 are primitive fses on primitive oses (windows) that have no write caching. that added reliability (which log based fses have, as well) is not worth the large performance hit.

  • They don't even bother to keep their Linux variant up to date, so I don't think they'll preinstall NetBSD.

    After all, these maschines are positioned for the network appliance market, the customers aren't even supposed to know which OS is running on these boxes.
  • Well, you're proving that there are indeed neanderthals roaming 21st century Slashdot.

    It isn't so much that using 'he" is incorrect, it's just damned impolite if you think about it. But I suppose that's too much to ask.

  • Actually, it's not non-sensical at all. It's just non-sensical if you insist that "they" and "their" is plural. Their's no reason for it not to be optionally singular, as well.

    Ironically, there is evidence that they/their may have been the dominant verbal form of the gender neutral singular pronoun and only fell out of favor when certain religious orders began to record the first grammar books. Guess who attended schools and universities? They had exclusively male attendees. For such a closed demographic, there wasn't a high need for gender inclusive grammatical examples in the textbooks.

    What comes around goes around .. and it's about time.

    With a little time and attention, "he" begins to seem awfully non-representative. The whole "he or she" construction is so freakin' awkward as to distract attention from the point in hand .. particularly in spoken conversation.

  • Hey, great idea!

    Lets create open source Unix for the HP 48.

    A nive webserver over the infrared port.
    Teachers Nightmare.

    Also:Any ideas for Reverse Polar Perl?
  • Porting software to new environments is a good test of its portability, and according to Kernigan and Pike in The Practice of Programming [aw.com] portable software tends to be more robust and better designed. Their comments revolve around the following ideas:
    • Programs tend to be used in unexpected environments. Planning for software to be more general results in easier maintainance later. (Similar to Brooks "Plan to throw one away. You will anyway.")
    • The development and deployment environment will change. Making a program portable to many different currently available environments will help against changes in future environments.
    • The techniques for creating portable software are similar to the general techniques for good programming. So the effort writing portable software will your software better.
    So just think of the Cobolt port as a good test to make linux a better product in the future, even if you don't buy a cobolt.
  • Whether or not OpenBSD/cobalt will happen soon depends a great deal on how much bandwidth they get downloading the NetBSD code. 8-)

    - Hubert
  • re: Merced: where can I/anyone buy this?
    NetBSD's not targetting the overhead
    projectors of any marketing groups
    as a supported platform (yet :-)

    re: S/390: As far as I understand, Linux doesn't
    run on the plain hardware either. It
    just runs as some virtual machine.
    Sorta boring to need one OS to emulate
    some other OS on top of it.

    re: size of userbase: see the comment on windows
    user numbers and the (unrelated)
    comment on flies somewhere else. :)

    - Hubert
  • Microsoft discontinued NT quite some time ago on the MIPS platform, so no go for either NT or Win2k there.

    For installation, the Cobalt machines come pre-installed, and the only thing you need to do is to enter their IP-number via the front panel. You do all the rest via some web-gui.

    For installing "any flavor of linux": you won't find many distros for MIPS, and if you do, they will probably lack device drivers - AFAIK Cobalt did not make them public.

    For "monitor", IIRC some machines come with a VGA port, others don't. Why, though, if they all have ethernet. Oh, and I'm not sure about sound either - so much for MP3. 8-)

    - Hubert
  • unused qube? where? sendme! :-)

    Serious, if anyone has an unused raq or qube that he would want to donate to the NetBSD project, I'd be happy to take it. Main purpose would be to make third party software available.

    Contact me via mail if you're interrested (see www.feyrer.de for a contact address! :)

    - Hubert
  • Can you recompile the whole OS or just the kernel from scratch? How about that new 2.4 kernel that'll be out soon, and that you sure want to use?

    - Hubert
  • I'm not really familiar with the cube servers but does this mean that you can throw NT or 2K on one of these things?

    Not that you'd want to, but maybe you should. And if you want to be able to load up any flavor of linux do you have to rely on one of the little LCD screens in order to install it??

    In order to get full functionality of the box itself maybe you should be able to throw a monitor or display adapter of some kind.

    I dunno maybe I should just buy one. But has anyone tried making one of these into like a carMP3 player? ... sounds like the right size ...

  • up at the isp where i work we rarely have a really bad problem with one of the raq2 or 3's we rent out. I very rarely have to reboot one of them. What the main problem is with them is the web interface they have. see, we rent em out to idiots. they work fine for a while, but everyoncee in a while something a customer puts into the web interface will not be whats accually going on with the server. overall, i think they are pretty cool, except for the configuration issues through the web interface. web interfaces suck anyway. heh
  • the only non preemptive multitasking OS in wide use now is MacOS

    dude, contrary to popular belief, windows 9x is not a pre-emptive multitasking environment. sure, it has threads, and applications can multitask somewhat. still, most application-level tasks are serialized via the event queue. and definitely things running in ring 0 (read: using VMM services) are single-thread, execute to completion tasks that can block all other processes on the machine.

    as for nt/2k, i've never written any device drivers there, so i don't know. it would not surprise me at all for there to be kludgey legacy-type code in there that forces execute to completion

    My name is Alan, and I am a recovering VxD author.

  • Originally the Cobalt machines ship with a custom version of Linux, and now everyone can run his favourite Open Source operating system on it.

    Assuming, of course, that everyones favorite Open Source OS is ether Linux or NetBSD. And that everyone who might want to use one of these things is a guy.

    Btw, does anyone know if these things can run Java, or Java Servlets? or is it just the webserver and perl or something?

    Amber Yuan 2k A.D
  • WHO THINK IT FUNNY THAT OOG THINK THAT BEST PERSON TO GIVE GRAMMAR LESSON IS OOG?
  • WHO THINK IT FUNNY THAT OOG THINK THAT BEST PERSON TO GIVE GRAMMAR LESSON IS OOG?
  • PHRASE SAYS "EVERYONE CAN RUN HIS FAVORITE OPEN SOURCE OPERATING SYSTEM!!!" EVERYONE BE SINGULAR PRONOUN!!! WHEN USING POSSESSIVE ADJECTIVE WITH GENDER AMBIGUOUS WORDS, GRAMMATICALLY CORRECT THING TO DO IS USE "HIS" FOR SINGULAR AND "THEIR" FOR PLURAL!!! AND SINCE "EVERYONE" BE SINGULAR PRONOUN, USAGE OF "HIS" BE CORRECT!!! OOG KNOW MANY GRAMMATICALLY IGNORANT SLASHDOTTERS SAY THAT "THEIR" GO WITH "EVERYONE," BUT THAT ONLY DUE TO RECENT POLITICALLY CORRECT NONSENSE AND IS GRAMMATICALLY WRONG!!! HOWEVER, HAD AUTHOR CHOSE TO BE POLITICALLY CORRECT, HE SAY "ALL THE PEOPLE CAN RUN THEIR..." WHICH BE RIGHT SINCE "ALL" IS PLURAL. BUT SINCE AUTHOR CHOOSE TO USE "EVERYONE," "HIS" IS CORRECT!!!

  • Operating System on a Cobalt? (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought the idea, and the selling point of the cobalt boxes was that they were very easy to configure via the web interface and you didn't need to worry about things like Operating Systems and the like.
  • I wanted to turn spare 486 boxes into exta heads for our alphas. I recalled having heard of NetBSD four or five years earlier, and went looking.

    I stumbled across linux along the way, and thought that that must have been what I was after.

    Later I came to realize that what I'd heard about was BSD386, and that I'd apparently combined *that* with nethack, which *was* created on the usenet (like I thought netbsd had worked) from five years further back, along with a bit of what would become GNU which was also flying around (at the ten years back stage when I had usenet access).

    Then I stumbled across netbsd when I got my paws on a mac that the department would have disposed of. It was my main
    machine for a year or so, and when I went back to linux, I discovered that I much preferred the bsd way than the gnu stuff.

    So now it's FreeBSD on my K6 at home, debian on this office box (because it doesn't have the resources to compile for itself), and an older debian on my labptop (it works, so I'm not messing wiht it).

    So what is this windows thing, anyway? I know it's something about dos. Is it like the way you made a window on the screen with the Apple II, poking the borders into memory (12-15, was it???).
    Or is it more like CCP/M's way of dividing the screen, so that you can flip back and forth between a little screen and a big one? That was useful prior to X, but running multitasking ms-dos programs on an 8086 kind of used a lot of power. Maybe that's why it's only in CCP/M and not ms-dos?

    :)

    hawk, sure that that next innovation from microsoft is coming any day now . . .
  • >What's the point of paying the extra $ to get a >Qube instead of a regular IA-32

    How about those of us who already have Cobalt hardware and are bored with the software that
    comes with it? Sometimes the money isn't a concern at all.
  • This looks an awful lot like another story we've seen around here.

    Sure does. That's why Nik put the exact same link in the article. The difference is that the earlier article says that Soren has a port working while this one announces that the port is available. Note the difference.

    This news probably isn't very interesting to you (which explains your lack of attention), but it's pretty exciting to someone who inherited a Cobalt Qube and wants to put it to work in a way the original plug-and-go configuration didn't anticipate. That's what the 'net is all about--creating and taking advantage of new options. Not everyone with an unused Qube will want to try this (much less put it in production), but there are a lot of them around, so this release is a good thing.

    If you're not interested, just move along...

    -Ed

  • Why? (Score:2)

    by hey! ( 33014 )
    Why do you like these boxes?

    I looked at Cobalt's products. I like the cases, and I like the net appliance idea, but it seemed like the prices were high for what you get. I mean, 2K$ for a headless box with 64MB of RAM and 8Gig IDE? This would also all you to run with binary only software such as Oracle.

  • That's the argument that Microsoft has been trying to sell you for a while now. Why take the time to put something else on this PC? It already has Windows. Why bother doing something else, something risky, or experimental, even if you stand to gain quite a bit from the experiment?

    Sorry, don't mean to jump on you -- but this sort of thing (porting something from one platform to another) is exactly what advances the state of technology. Being able to take an OS and customize the shit out of it (which you only really do with source code access), to me, justifies bying a limited functionality box like this one and only building exactly what you need on it.

    darren


    Cthulhu for President! [cthulhu.org]
  • >>The choice could be her OS du jour as well.

    -- Umm...the English language uses the masculine form of third person pronouns to indicate either male or female subject/objects when the distinction is ambiguous or irrelevant. The sexist thing to do would be to specify a particuar gender by using "she/her/those gals."

  • Granted it's good to see another port of Net BSD, but what is the practical use of such a port? Don't people buy Cobalts because they're (supposed to be) easy to maintain and require less administration? Custom installing a new OS onto them seems to defeat that purpose - not to mention you might as well get something with better price/performance (PC) if you're gonna end up customising it yourself. If they get those web based administration functionalities ported as well, that'd be great (can't seem to find any info on that particular direction).

  • Important question! (Score:3)

    by Jeffrey Baker ( 6191 ) on Monday April 03, 2000 @06:30PM (#1153440)
    Does BSD have driver support for the LCD?!?!?!? Nothing is more useful than a rack full of RaQs, scrolling stock quotes across their LCD panels :)

    -jwb

    (FYI: In their Linux distro, the writelcd command twiddles the font panel display)

  • Re:Nice work, but... (Score:3)

    by hey! ( 33014 ) on Tuesday April 04, 2000 @04:27AM (#1153441) Homepage Journal
    Well, that assumes that the only reason to buy a Cobalt is for the ease of configuration.

    I like the small form factor quite a bit. If I had to run a fifty servers, I'd much prefer to run them on two or three 19" racks than have to take up good sized room. Neatness counts. Go into a typical (awful) ISP, and you'll literally see piles of equipment grown willy-nilly connected with rats nests of cables; their service sucks because they can never put their finger on the piece of equipment they need. The best ISP I know handles huge volumes of traffic with an astonishingly small volume of equipment and a tiny but very competent staff.

    The blue plastic is nice too. A lot of time in small offices a server is left out in the open. It should be both unbotrusive and pleasing to look at, not like a hulking piece of industrial equipment.

    En masse, racked up by the dozen, these things would look impressive. I know this is stupid, and what counts is whats inside, but the bossman likes to show off to his pals and clients, and if you can keep him happy, your life is easier.

  • OpenBSD up next (Score:3)

    by tmu ( 107089 ) <todd-slashdot@re n e s y s .com> on Monday April 03, 2000 @06:42PM (#1153442) Homepage
    Cobalt has seen a number of fairly serious security problems in the past six months. Since a NetBSD port is now done, an OpenBSD port cannot be far behind.

    OpenBSD is my favorite, secure out-of-the box distro for general purpose, outside the firewall use.

    Then again, the Cobalt hardware is far from cheap, given what it is. What you're really paying for is the integration and ease of management. Get ride of that, and I'll take a cheap intel clone in a rackmount case any day.

  • Cobalt web-boxes. (Score:3)

    by jon_l ( 115133 ) on Monday April 03, 2000 @05:42PM (#1153443)
    Oh, those delightful 19" x 1" blue boxes. Cobalt Linux would *always* crash under heavy load. During a freeze you had to re-configure them with their tiny LCD screen and 4 directional arrow buttons (that didn't always respond).

    Good idea, bad implementation. A stable kernel will now render these once-ghetto boxen useful/efficient for web hosting providers.

  • NetBSD is good stuff. (Score:4)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 03, 2000 @06:25PM (#1153444)

    It's good to see publicity for this little-known and under-appreciated OS, which, despite it's relative obscurity, was the originator of the other two BSDs.

    Right now, about the only thing NetBSD doesn't run on is my HP48, but I hear someone's working on it. That's the truly great thing about NetBSD: it'll run on anything. The moment you get your new Internet-enabled refrigerator, NetBSD will be waiting for you as Linux developers scramble to produce working code. But I think the relationship between NetBSD (and BSD) in general and Linux is a friendly one, with each sharing ideas and (most importantly) applications. Sure, there are some idiotic zealots on both sides, but they're restrained to making fools of themselves on Slashdot, so no real harm is done.

    But just keep in mind that that next gizmo you buy may well carry a Daemon inside...

  • Good news! (Score:4)

    by DeathBunny ( 24311 ) on Monday April 03, 2000 @05:49PM (#1153445)
    This is good news! The Cobalts (Qubes at least, I haven't worked with a RAQ) use a forked version of a really old kernel, and have some wierd limitations. For example, according to Cobalt tech support, thier version of the kernal can only support 256 open file descriptors. Because of that, Samba is set up to only allow 100 simultanious open files. That's fine if your only using it to serve up Word and Excel files, but their are many programs that need that many files open for even 1 user. (almost any Cobal program, for example, including 3 accounting packages I've tried to install on Qubes).

    The Qubes are really cool little devices. I'd love to see Cobalt integrate support for thier hardware into the main stream Linux kernel so that Qube users could more easily upgrade to greater functionality. This NetBSD port at least provides one good option for Qube users who are outgrowing the cute little web-interface and need a little more flexibility that what comes "pre-packaged" in the Qube. I'd rather be able to update them to a newer Linux kernel, or better yet a new version of a fairly stock Linux distro, but this is pretty darn good.

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