NetBSD 2.0 Status Report

Daniel de Kok writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team has sent a report covering the status of the NetBSD 2.0 branch to the netbsd-announce mailinglist. The report contains a schedule for the release cycle, and a list of 2.0-specific bugs that need to be closed. This is still a good time to help us making this the best NetBSD release ever, by trying out the latest snapshots, and reporting bugs."

Trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, so far all posts here were trolls. Where's the mods now ? Can't Slashdot create a special filter for the BSD section ?

Re:Trolls

[MrHanky]

It shouldn't be too hard. Just filter out all posts containing the acronym BSD, give them an automatic -1 and ban the poster's subnet for a couple of days.

Then the BSD section would be left for us to discuss what we were meant to discuss here: Beowulf clusters of hot grits.

To summarize:
1) Ban BSD
2) ???
3) Hot grits!

Re:Trolls

[Chris Scott]

Why not eliminate anonymous posting, then ban the account of those who continue?

IP Filter bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

I found it interesting that most of the bugs in the 2.0 branch were with IP Filter.

Re:IP Filter bugs

[debilo]

Not most, but quite a few. I wonder why they don't start working on importing pf from OpenBSD, FreeBSD started working on that a long time ago. Maybe it's a NetBSD vs. Theo thing, which would be a shame. I'm looking quite forward to pf on FreeBSD, which should be quite stable on 5.3 (and it's only around the corner! Code freeze is scheduled for Aug. 15th, as far as I know).

Anyway, I've used OpenBSD and FreeBSD for quite some time now, and only recently tried out NetBSD. What can I say? Their hardware support is amazing, it pretty much recognized everything on my Samsung X10, and it's been very, very stable this far. I'm quite in love with it. :) The only thing I don't like is the bloated GENERIC kernel, it takes way longer to boot that with OpenBSD or FreeBSD but that's probably the price you pay for good hardware support on installation, and you can always roll your own kernel. I'm pretty excited about NetBSD 2.0. Hurry up, guys!

Re:IP Filter bugs

[alan_d_post]

PF is already in -current. It won't be in 2.0, though.

Bloated GENERIC kernel

[LizardKing]

If you're finding that the GENERIC kernel is too bloated, then the quick fix is to create a custom kernel usung the adjustkernel [netbsd.org]script. This parses the output of dmesg, and creates a custom kernel config file with only the devices found on your machine enabled.

On my laptop, I was able to pare the kernel down to 1.8Mb. Not such a big deal on a machine with 512Mb of RAM, but it's useful on something like my Vax which only has 24Mb.

Re:Hardware support

[Anime_Fan]

FreeBSD makes all devices without a hitch. I even have sound working on it! Something I can't say about RedHat or any of the other 'user-friendly' Linux distros.

I could say the same of OpenBSD. Granted, it is an old (AMD K5) machine. I would expect NetBSD and FreeBSD to do the same.

Re:Hardware support

[torstenvl]

Oops *blush*

Yeah I'm willing to give it a try. I've always liked NetBSD's philosophy better than FreeBSD's.

Besides...
"Congratulations, NetBSD! NetBSD now has better scalability than FreeBSD." http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/#netbsd2 [bulk.fefe.de]

We'll see. I may like it better. Or not. Never know.

Re:Absolutely fascinating for people following Net

[vesamies]

I think it's mainly that the 1.6 branch is so old, about two years.

2.0 has many new stuff, like newer compiler GCC3 (1.6 had GCC2), native threads library, SMP, this is just new stuff, what everybody else has too

I was also hoping to get OpenBSD's packet filter but it's not there :(

Of course, one should not wait but download 2.0_BETA immediately from releng.netbsd.org ;)

Re:Absolutely fascinating for people following Net

[bccomm]

That poor, poor, server...it's already sluggish. But then again, CVS isn't much better.

The way to try NetBSD 2

[dimss]

Two days ago I compiled NetBSD 2 on Slackware Linux and created bootable release CD (no X, ~112MB). Then I sucessfully installed it at home on qemu.

Is there any other OS with mobility like this?

Is the site down?

[evilviper]

Is it just my corner of the internet that can't get packets routed through? Or has NetBSD.org been down for over a week now?

Re:Is the site down?

[Neil]

www.netbsd.org has been working fine for me recently. I've been consulting the pkgsrc pages frequently this week, and the last, and have not noticed any problems.

Do you perhaps have a browser with (possibly broken) IPv6 support, but no connection to the 6-bone?

www.netbsd.org is slightly unusual in that it has a AAAA DNS record (IPv6 address) as well as a A record (IPv4 address). I recall seeing some older Mozilla builds that tried to contact www.netbsd.org over IPv6 and failed to fall back to using IPv4

Re:Is the site down?

[evilviper]

Does a numeric IPv4 address work for you?

http://204.152.184.116/

No, I'm afraid not.

I've tried with Firefox 0.8, as well as links and lynx, but no luck. I've tried from this, and 3 other boxes on my home network, including the firewall itself.

I'm able to ping them, as well as nmap and see the open ports.

nmap www.netbsd.org

Starting nmap 3.50 ( http://www.insecure.org/nmap/ ) at 2004-07-31 01:03 PDT
Interesting ports on www.netbsd.org (204.152.184.116):
(The 1651 ports scanned but not shown below are in

Re:Relatively slow pace...

[LizardKing]

The slow pace of recent releases is down to the amount of work going into NetBSD 2.0. This will feature decent SMP support and high performance threading using Scheduler Activations. The improvements in performance compared to the 1.6 branch are extraordinary, and unlike Linux, where reecnt work has been aimed at improved performance on high end hardware, the NetBSD improvements are generally applicable to all classes of machines.

It's actually quite amusing to see NetBSD development labelled as "slow" com

Re:Relatively slow pace...

[eeg3]

"[...] the NetBSD improvements are generally applicable to all classes of machines."

It's good to see people still caring about older hardware; DragonFlyBSD developers (Note: not Matt Dillon or anyone incredibly highup) basically wrote off the idea of supporting anything other than new hardware when I was talking to them. That's silly practice, in my opinion, and I hope that's not the mantra of the higher up developers, but I digress.

"It's actually quite amusing to see NetBSD development labelled as "slo