NetBSD 2.0 RC4 Tagged and Released

agent dero writes "According to recent news at NetBSD.org, NetBSD 2.0 Release Candidate #4 has been tagged and released to the release engineering server Check out the announcement for more info on changes since RC 3. Also note worthy, the final release has been pushed back a few weeks to allow for testing of RC4"

Question

[GypC]

I don't want to dig through the mailing lists, and I can't find anything on the website so...

What are the new changes in NetBSD 2.0 that warrant the major vesion number change?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

Significant changes from NetBSD 1.6 to 2.0
http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/changes-2.0.htm l

Re:Question

[noselasd]

2.0 major new features [netbsd.org].
+ they've decided to change the versioning scheme ;)

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

They decided long ago to call the first version with decent SMP support (on i386) version 2.0. So here it is :-) (almost...).

Re:Microreleases

[Anonymous Coward]

The release candidates require lots of testers to work the final bugs out. Slashdot has people that can do that, if they will. While it may be pedantic/boring/whatever to have each release candidate posted, if it catches one bug, then it's been worth it.

uh... yeah. why not.

[ulib]

Since this is the *BSD section, it makes perfect sense to make the readers aware that a new micro/macro/mini/maxi/nano/mega/pico/giga-release is out.

Re:Microreleases

[Dahan]

I tend to agree, but Slashdot posted a series of articles about Linux kernel 2.5.n and FreeBSD 5.3-BETAn, so I guess beta OS releases are deemed newsworthy here.

For a moment I read the headline as..

[Anonymous Coward]

"NetBSD 2.0 RC4 Bagged and Tagged"

It's a joke.. laugh. :)

Bagged and tagged will be linux IP stack. :-D

[ulib]

NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep) [netbsd.org]

Heh... the harsh truth of software development (and many other sci/tech fields as well): quality and quantity often don't walk hand in hand. :-)

Verified Exec

[Per Wigren]

From the Changelog:

2.1.6. Verified Exec

As the name suggests, 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 some time ago. Anyone here know if it exists?

Re:Verified Exec

[noselasd]

>I've been looking for something like this for Linux some time ago. Anyone here know if it exists?
here [yazzy.org]

Re:what happened to the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

"all the trolls"... uh, did you count them? It's probably 1 AC...

Anyway, the poor kid is very, very ill [netcraft.com]. I really don't know [distrowatch.com] what I can do [netcraft.com] to help him to recover [netbsd.org].

Networking question

[ulib]

I've never experienced putting NetBSD (or OpenBSD) machines in a FreeBSD ethernet. I guess everything should run smoothly after some configuring. But are there any potential issues I'd have to watch for (file system compatibility, etc)?

Re:Networking question (doesn't matter!)

[ulib]

Uh... don't consider the question I asked 10 minutes ago.

I quickly decided I feel like experimenting it directly :-P

Sounds nice but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Will it finally run on my toaster?

Re:Sounds nice but...

[hubertf]

Of course it runs NetBSD! [netbsd.org]

- Hubert

Re:So?

[setagllib]

Simple. NetBSD has infinitely higher quality and cleanliness. While it is reputed that Linux is now "more portable", not all of the ports are in the main source tree, not all are actively maintained and support all the features (let alone a userland, which NetBSD has for every arch). NetBSD's ports are, with few exceptions where things are just impractical on a device (e.g. Playstation 2 wouldn't really go far), all equally functional and stable, and all are in the main source tree, without needing to apply hacks and do unheardof installation procedures.

NetBSD's stability and cleanliness even put it ahead of FreeBSD, and leave Linux in the dust. Performance that stems from this same cleanliness and the developers' understanding of hardware and good software is pretty hardcore, especially in 2.0. SMP is supported but I haven't heard much about it.

Seriously, try it, you'd be amazed. NetBSD is not just for portability, that happens to be its edge against other BSDs (with OpenBSD close behind, for obvious historical reasons). It is the leader of cleanliness and code perfectionism, and hardware support is right up there (especially the way it handles USB devices is much better than FreeBSD and on par with Linux, albeit with less devices).

I got trolled, I have lost, I'm having a nice day, but at least I got that out there.

Fear this: http://netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/ [netbsd.org] - and those were much older releases.

Re:So?

[setagllib]

Nonsense. If that were true then trees would be the cleanest and most pure things around because they are passed by every day by dozens of gardeners. Didn't make sense, did it?

Seriously, your comment is stupid. BSDs have lots of developers, and moreso, the elitist attitude displayed by many is exactly what makes the code bases pure and clean.

I said it before and I'll say it again: Linux development is a hack orgy. They care about what they can say about things ("more interactivity to rule the desktop,

Re:So?

[setagllib]

"Lifting" isn't too far off - the ULE scheduler was based at least in part on the O(1) scheduler, but without the problems (there were exceptional cases where the O(1) scheduler in Linux performed erratically, but ULE had much cleaner behavior). It had its own problems later, we know, but it doesn't really matter now.

What's your point though? Who cares if a BSD takes something from Linux? The number of things that Linux has taken from the BSDs is mind boggling. Early code bases didn't have network suppor

Re:So?

[ulib]

I agree with your post, but I really think this FUD-spreading troll wouldn't deserve such a long answer.

As far as I know, *BSDs are committed to technical excellence, and have an academic spirit that's light-years away from all the proprietary-hating political crap that infests (and sometimes, sadly, characterizes) the linux commmunity.
Spreading FUD is a disgusting political act, and it has gone on for so long, and steadily, on this board. Clearly this "troll" has an agenda... But I don't think it's worth t

Re:So?

[setagllib]

I won't bother replying at length to this one. It can only be a troll.

Fact: All of the BSDs were working decades before Linux was bootable, written [b]only[/b] by the best and brightest comp sci and soft. eng students (and above), and the UNIX before that by companies and some university contribution. Linux was, with all due respect to Linus Torvalds, a hack to have a non-BSD UNIX-like that worked on i386.

If you'll note, FreeBSD was much more scalable than Linux up until 2.6 arrived, and since no othe

Re:So?

[DashEvil]

Case in Point:

Microsoft has many many more Computer Science Ph.D.s working on Windows than Linux does.

Hmmmmm..... :)

Re:So?

[ulib]

Our troll writes:
>Linux kernel code is much cleaner than BSDs',

In your dreams.

>because it's peer-reviewed by a huge number of programmers.

This is very true. The fact that 1) there's a huge number of linux programmers and 2) they're peers.
That pretty much sums it up about their skills. I couldn't have said it better myself. :-)

Here you are

[setagllib]

I didn't have to look far. Driver for Broadcom 440x network cards (like the one in the laptop I'm talking from)

Linux 2.6.9-rc4-mm1: drivers/net/b44.c
NetBSD 2.0: src/sys/dev/pci/if_bce.c

Come on. The Linux one can even pass as bloated:

44K /home/nbsd/src/sys/dev/pci/if_bce.c
48K /usr/src/linux/drivers/net/b44.c

A colossal 4kb larger. And a lot of the code within is dirty, but you asked for file names only, right? The Linux one even uses spinlocks where they are completely unnecessary. It has many

Re:Here you are

[setagllib]

Actually, while I'm here, may as well remind all Linux cleanliness evangelists: DEVFS

Core devs agree it's a crap sandwich and needs to be pulled out if not too many users base their lives on it. It clutters every driver with a device node, it is flaky and undermaintained, and flawed by design. Read the mailing lists.

FreeBSD 5.x has a devfs that is not overbearing, that is clean (including /dev itself, which is as clean as 'pure udev') and stable, entirely in kernel-land (unlike udev), and doesn't nee

Re:Here you are

[setagllib]

Oh, right, missed that 'core' in your post. It was lost in the waves of arrogance and ignorance.

Well what's your point? Code is code. Core or fringe doesn't matter, it all still compiles into one binary. One very dirty binary. How often routines get called doesn't justify not cleaning an infrequent algorithm.

I think your point was that you knew (or thought) that core code would be the focus of maximal effort, and so I wouldn't have a point there. But I said just code. And I showed you kernel code - no

Re:Here you are

[setagllib]

Except that NetBSD is slower in basic operations than Linux, like network packet tx/rx overhead, syscall overhead, context switching, fork, page fault, page allocation, etc.

Really? Show us. No, I'm not saying you're wrong (I saw an *old* bench showing that Scheduler Activations had pretty slow context switching compared to Linux, and a note saying it would be worked on), but I just haven't heard of this, let alone seen conclusive and objective figures to back it up.

On a related note, I don't think any

Re:Insightful?

[setagllib]

I can't speak for every port out there (having only tried i386 myself, due to my own hardware limits), but I'd have thought that page at the end with the in-action shots of NetBSD on unbelievable hardware would have served as enough evidence. Of course you can't have every bit of software work everywhere - X on graphics calculator? - but enough does to get something interesting done. Look, there's one shot there of a guy running NetBSD on his StrongArm-based MP3 jukebox, capable of using the audio adapter a

Re:So?

[Anonymous Coward]

As far as I know, Debian GNU/Linux is the only Linux distribution which supports comparable number of platforms with NetBSD. Note that if you mix multiple linux distributions, you cannot have uniform operation among the platforms.

And it seems next Debian release (sarge) lacks amd64, sh3 and vax. NetBSD have all of those.

What To Do?!?!?!

[devphaeton]

Gosh, with all these delicious BSD releases about to happen, (nbsd 2.0, fbsd 5.3, dbsd 1.0) it makes it hard for a guy to decide which one to play with.

I need some more harddrives so i'll have a place to install them!

Re:What To Do?!?!?!

[Homology]

Gosh, with all these delicious BSD releases about to happen, (nbsd 2.0, fbsd 5.3, dbsd 1.0) it makes it hard for a guy to decide which one to play with.

I need some more harddrives so i'll have a place to install them!

OpenBSD 3.6 is, as usual, to be released 1th of November. Better make an extra primary partition available for install :-)