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Announcements Operating Systems BSD

NetBSD Goodies: 2.0 RC1 Tagged, New pkgsrc Branch 55

Posted by timothy from the recently-ported-to-difference-engine dept.
jschauma writes "The NetBSD Releng Team has announced that the first Release Candidate for NetBSD 2.0 (ie NetBSD-2.0_RC1) has been tagged. This is a major milestone in the much anticipated release of NetBSD 2.0: from now on, any pullups must address some form of show-stopping issue to even be considered. The NetBSD Project encourages all users to test the binary snapshots that will soon be available on the release engineering ftp server. If no pullups are necessary, then the 2.0 release should occur around the middle of October. Any fixes resulting in pullups will cause a second RC cycle to begin and add approximately 1-2 weeks more to the timeline." Further, "The NetBSD Packages team announced that a new pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch was created, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc trunk is now over. This branch, which includes a total of 4959 actively-maintained and supported packages, deprecates the last stable pkgsrc branch (pkgsrc-2004Q2); all maintenance will take place on this new pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch. Please see our online documentation of the NetBSD Packages Collection for details."
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NetBSD Goodies: 2.0 RC1 Tagged, New pkgsrc Branch More

NetBSD Goodies: 2.0 RC1 Tagged, New pkgsrc Branch

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  • Cool! (Score:3, Interesting)

    by torstenvl ( 769732 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @12:19AM (#10370519)
    I'll be really interested to see what NetBSD 2.0 is like. It seems like FreeBSD gets all of the attention (and all of the user base); I myself use FreeBSD on my laptop. However, there are some benchmarks that place NetBSD above FreeBSD, and you certainly can't beat the hardware support! Imagine... I could put it on my SPARC and be in the exact same environment as I have on my x86 laptop!
    • I could put it on my SPARC and be in the exact same environment as I have on my x86 laptop!

      As you could with FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux I"m pretty sure. IIRC the point of constantly porting the NetBSD kernel is to make sure the code is flexible and robust and doesn't build-up any system dependent kludges. I'd consider the platform independence as a sign of good design rather than as a goal.

      • Re:multi-platform (Score:4, Informative)

        by 0racle ( 667029 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @01:34AM (#10370891)
        FreeBSD only supports sparc64 aka UltraSPARC not the earlier sparc chips. NetBSD seems to have the best support for both sparc32 and sparc64, with Linux distros in a close second only because they don't all seem to be updated as often, except debian which is your best bet for linux on a sparc. OpenBSD's sparc support is excellent except for SMP which hopefully will come sometime, it just doesn't seem to be much of a priority.

        • Re:multi-platform (Score:4, Informative)

          by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @05:10AM (#10371714)

          OpenBSD has ported the SMP work from NetBSD, giving it multiprocessor support in an amazingly short amount of time. I think this porting was largely the work of one programmer, which is some achievement. From postings on the OpenBSD Journal [undeadly.org] it appears that support is available for SMP on sparc and i386 at least.

    • I could put it on my SPARC and be in the exact same environment as I have on my x86 laptop!

      I have not used NetBSD much. I mostly use OpenBSD.

      So keep that in mind when I say...

      I hear a lot of people say that the user experience across architectures varies a lot with NetBSD. Even between popular archs like x86, macppc and sparc64.

      I use OpenBSD on those and find it very familiar on each, including the use of X.

      I can't wait for NetBSD 2.0 though.

      • Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)

        by LizardKing ( 5245 )

        I hear a lot of people say that the user experience across architectures varies a lot with NetBSD. Even between popular archs like x86, macppc and sparc64.

        That's peculiar, as one of NetBSD's strengths is the consistency across platforms. I use it on machines as diverse as a VaxStation VLC, SparcStation 5 and a Dell laptop - the installation, configuration and use of NetBSD on all of them is identical. Of course, I wont be running Mozilla on the Vax, but it makes a great little webserver.

        • That's peculiar, as one of NetBSD's strengths is the consistency across platforms.

          Yes, that is what I thought prior to hearing the opposite. I'm too busy to back it up with any links, so I hereby retract the statement! ; )

          I wouldn't want to be the cause of any unfounded rumour, especially against any BSD.

  • From a user and soon-to-be commiter (Score:5, Interesting)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @02:56AM (#10371208) Homepage
    For those of you that don't know, NetBSD 2.0 is going to be _awesome_

    I run -current on 3 machines (x86,sparc32,sparc64) and it's just cool. One of the features that come to mind (really don't think it's in 1.6.2) is FFS2 (FFS being their file system)

    SMP is still being worked on, I don't know about the status of the i386 port, but for sparc64, SMP is to the point where the kernel will spin up that second CPU.

    (Of course, we never paid a developer full time to hack SMP ::cough:: ::cough:: ;) [mods, it's a joke])
    • I don't suppose you know if LKM has been improved...

      I've got a nice little Cobalt Qube 2 that is very under utilized due to the fact that it cannot load the PPTP module mppe, it fails with

      "Mmpe.o: ld: /usr/pkg/lkm/mppe.o: Not enough room for program headers (allocated 3, need 4)"

    • Re:From a user and soon-to-be commiter (Score:5, Informative)

      by LizardKing ( 5245 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @05:06AM (#10371692)

      I'm running -current on sparc, vax and i386. I also thought about putting it onto my NeXTstation, but I'd miss NeXTstep too much.

      FFS2 is not totally trustable yet, although I do use it on my laptop. As for SMP, it now works on a number of ports including i386. I'm sure I also saw someone mention that it could spin up a second processor on an SMP Vax(!) machine. On the more popular SMP ports (i386, sparc, sparc64) the SMP support actually *uses* the extra processors as well as recognising them.

      The other big feature in NetBSD 2.0 is the native threading support. This is based on scheduler activations, which is far more scalable than more common threading implementations. It took a while to get stable, but has uncovered numerous bugs in multithreaded applications. This is because the pthread implementation that sits on top of scheduler activations was quite exacting in it's conformance to the POSIX specification. This meant that sloppy thread programming that was acceptable on other platforms showed up more readily on NetBSD.

      The only outstanding issue that I ahve with thr release candidates is that gdb seems to be a bit flaky. This may be a problem with missing support for SA threading, but it's not something that I have any time to look into.

      • >The other big feature in NetBSD 2.0 is the native threading support.
        >This is based on scheduler activations, which is far more scalable than
        >more common threading implementations.
        Just cause it has a cool name, does that make it better ?
        Where are the benchmarks backing your claims.

        If it's just about the mixing of scheduling in both user and kernel space,note that Solaris has this and is moving away from it. IBM made NGPT a m:n thread library for linux, but the new NPTL (kernel space only schedulin

        • Re:From a user and soon-to-be commiter (Score:2, Insightful)

          by Anonymous Coward
          The problem for the other architectures compared to NetBSD concerning scheduler activations is the fact that NetBSD has a smaller and cleaner core.
          This is the same reason NetBSD is so simple to port; as a *BSD programmer I can tell you that NetBSD code is so clean you can eat it.

          I'm not using NetBSD, I only code for it, but with the release of 2.0 I will move away some of our production machines from FreeBSD. I love FreeBSD, it's what I use, but the code is no where near as clean.

          I don't really want to me

        • Solaris has a poor threading implementation, even Sun's own engineers admit that. However, that shouldn't be taken as proof that all M:N implementations are poor. In a demonstration at BSDCon Japan 2003, NetBSD's scheduler activations outperformed FreeBSD 5 and Linux NPTL. See the tech-misc mailing list thread that starts from here: http://news.gw.com/netbsd.tech.misc/701 [gw.com].

  • oddness with ipf 4.1.3 and 2.0_BETA (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I have a few 2.0_BETA machines doing NAT and running squid - I rebuilt one after the ipf 4.1.3 update (couple of weeks ago-ish) and NAT stopped working properly - for example, a webpage that pushed the user through from http to https would never get to the https page. The was other odd brokenness with NAT too, but this one stood out for the users :/

    I moved the machine back to a build a couple weeks before that, before the 4.1.3 update - no problems so far. (Nothing else changed on the machines, though I di

  • New logo? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Zetta Matrix ( 245803 )
    I want to see the new logo already. They announced the contest about six months ago... how long does it take to choose a logo, even with open source bureaucracy? :)

  • Changelog (Score:2, Informative)

    by ozzmosis ( 99513 ) *
    Here is the Changelog [netbsd.org] from 1.6 to 2.0

  • BSD Trilogy (Score:3, Informative)

    by bsd4me ( 759597 ) on Tuesday September 28, 2004 @08:32PM (#10379768)

    Has anyone else noticed that the three major BSD variants are all going to have major releases within about two weeks of each other?

    FreeBSD 5.3 is scheduled for a Oct 17 release. NetBSD 2.0 is scheduled for a mid-October release. OpenBSD 3.6 is scheduled for a Nov 1 release.

    Hmmm?

    • OpenBSD's done releases on every May 1st and Nov 1st for years... They didn't do it. :)

      NetBSD and FreeBSD tend to release when what they're working on is ready. Must be their doing. :)
  • From NetBSD's website [netbsd.org] :

    NetBSD does it again. After the original Internet2 Land Speed Record set in 2004 May 3 [netbsd.org] was broken, NetBSD shines again: researchers at the Swedish University Network (SUNET) have broken once more the Internet2 Land Speed Record, using the upcoming version, NetBSD 2.0.

    The new records are 124.935 Pbmps in a single stream (was 69.073 Pbmps), and 122.367 Pbmps in multiple streams. NetBSD was used once more due to the "scalability of its TCP code".

    More information about this record includi

  • There was some nasty NFS glitch n RC2, which led to RC3.

    - Hubert

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