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Operating Systems Software BSD

NetBSD Status Report January - March 2005 111

Posted by Zonk from the howzitgoin? dept.
jschauma writes "The NetBSD Foundation published its first quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months January through March of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers the addition of TCP/SACK and PAM support, the opening of the Foundations Online Store, the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items."
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NetBSD Status Report January - March 2005 More

NetBSD Status Report January - March 2005

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  • Wow, that's a bit slow (Score:2, Interesting)

    by vadim_t ( 324782 )
    PAM has been available on Linux for ages. And it doesn't look as a very complicated thing either.

    Just curious, have there been problems with the adoption of PAM, or it just wasn't a priority?

    • Re:Wow, that's a bit slow (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward on Saturday April 09, 2005 @05:16PM (#12189320)
      PAM has been around for a while, but it's a huge pain in the ass to get working right. It was around when I was building my LFS-4.0 system, and the only thing it served was to confuse me. It's used by some apps, but not by most, although the apps not using it could be blocked by apps using it if you didn't have the settings correct.

      Since this is a BSD PAM, at least we know there'll be good documentation concerning it (ie, more than what it is and what it can do).
    • AFAIK, Slackware doesn't use PAM.

      I've setup linux pam on NetBSD, and it works okay (for LDAP auth).
      • correct Slackware doesnt use PAM, and GNOME has been dropped from Slackware, and that was one of the reasons, because so many things need none-PAM GNOME and soem need PAM GNOME, so its been dropped so people can choose to install which ever they want after completion

    • Re:Wow, that's a bit slow (Score:5, Interesting)

      by sudog ( 101964 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @06:03PM (#12189534) Homepage
      It wasn't adopted because PAM is a steaming pile, and the people on the NetBSD mailing lists have been arguing ceaselessly about the only benefit that PAM has over other, technologically superior schemes: support for closed-source binary authentication modules.

      Part of the reason for the push for PAM adoption has been the recent commercial slant of the decisions of NetBSD core. I wouldn't call it "selling out" per se, but I would say that it is no longer just about the code.

      It's unfortunate. It's reluctance to incorporate things like PAM, or use Linux-like exploding version numbering, was the primary reason I was such a pro-NetBSD supporter. Now that those attractions are gone and the NetBSD foundation seems to want to play catch-up with Linux, I might as well just go with FreeBSD, or a version of Linux.

      I believe the reason for the recent commercial slant is simple: I think the commercial customers of Wasabi Systems are pushing them to build an OS which is as close to Linux as possible but is not encumbered by the GPL. The commercial advantages of that are obvious, but disheartening.

      NetBSD's old niche of extreme portability and purity is now overshadowed by these commercial interests. Too bad.
      • huh?

        Now, I'm perfectly willing to believe that PAM is crap, provided good evidence (which you didn't). I've written a PAM module myself, and didn't see anything majorly wrong with it. So, please tell me what exactly is wrong with PAM and why, as I'm very interested.

        However, I strongly disagree with the closed source part. Why exactly should the authentication system a closed thing, and what's the good in it? Unix has a well designed mechanism - it's perfectly well known, the password database can be left
        • The big problem with PAM is that it wants to stay in control of the thread and only use callbacks when it needs some information from the user. This cause several problems if you're not willing do dedicate a separate thread to authenticating. If you for example have periodic tasks or want to support multiple users at the same time, you have to make various hacks to make PAM return control of the thread to you.

          I think you misunderstood the closed source part. It was about corporations pressuring to be able
      • Is that really what bothers you? I have to report that in spite of the PAM inclusion, NetBSD 3.0-beta is still a world of performance and efficiency, and EVERYTHING works properly. Things that always broke on Linux 2.6.11, for instance.

        It's good that it's moving to be able to replace Linux, that means it can gain market share while still retaining its quality. What the hell is wrong with you? If implementing features of questionable design (even though the implementation, Open PAM, is about as good as you

        • Re:Wow, that's a bit slow (Score:1, Interesting)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Interesting troll.

          Care to provide any examples of a "decrease" in quality, or things that "always" break under the most recent version of the Linux kernel? Or are you too much of a juvennile to back yourself up?

      • Re:Wow, that's a bit slow (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Now that those attractions are gone and the NetBSD foundation seems to want to play catch-up with Linux, I might as well just go with FreeBSD, or a version of Linux.

        Have you considered OpenBSD? I think we can safely say that OpenBSD will never "play catch up" by going against core project ideals. They'd rather implement from scratch if the need arose.

        If only OpenBSD had Unified Buffer Cache I might be using it 100% of the time, as opposed to 90/10 Open/Net.

        At least I can rest assured that OpenBSD moves

  • Robustness of Xen support (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LaughingLinuxMan ( 872028 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @05:40PM (#12189439) Homepage
    Regarding Xen support, is it robust enough to "jail" applications like web servers or ftp servers? Or, at least, can it be used to provide multiple personal "servers" as we have seen with VMware? -LLM
    • [disclaimer: I'm a Xen developer]
      Xen 2.0 itself is pretty robust by now, plenty of people running it in production environment. The tools could do with some work but they are quite nice to use.

      I can't say I've played with the NetBSD port yet but NetBSD will have vested interest in making it work well, since they use Xen internally.

      You should also be able to boot virtual machines running Linux 2.4 / 2.6.

    • Re:Robustness of Xen support (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      That's exactly the point of Xen. As it says on the Xen page, each domain is a completely separate virtual machine. So no only are you "jailing" the web server application, your jailing the entire OS image that it is runnning on. In this way it's just like VMware. The difference is that by requiring some small changes to the guess OSes, Xen can avoid needing to trap and emulate any protected instructions which results in much better performance.

  • So... (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...what are the differences between the various BSDs, out of curiosity?

    • Re:So... (Score:5, Informative)

      by Stween ( 322349 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @06:05PM (#12189541)
      http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html [daemonnews.org]

    • Re:So... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by DarthBart ( 640519 ) on Saturday April 09, 2005 @06:05PM (#12189543)
      FreeBSD - Originally started out as an x86 only port. Screams on x86 hardware. Other ports are kinda lackluster. Its the BSD for people who don't want to run Linux. NetBSD - Runs on everything from a Sun Ultra 60 to a toaster. Has an extremely robust IP stack and a very well designed architecture independant framework for both host machines and device drivers OpenBSD - Supposedly "secure out of the box" via large amounts of code review for security holes. Eh. The biggest thing with OpenBSD is Theo's ego. Yes, I'm kinda partial to NetBSD.

      • Re:So... (Score:1, Offtopic)

        by DarthBart ( 640519 )
        Sigh. I must learn to use preview.

      • Re:So... (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        OpenBSD - Supposedly "secure out of the box" via large amounts of code review for security holes. Eh. The biggest thing with OpenBSD is Theo's ego. Yes, I'm kinda partial to NetBSD.

        Funny. I've been using OpenBSD since 2.5 and just recently started using NetBSD 2.0 quite heavily. NetBSD is fast. However it's documentation (user guide and man pages) are nowhere near as clean and complete as OpenBSD's.

        I have found myself checking OpenBSD man pages for hints that I just don't get from NetBSD man pages.

        If yo

    • Re:So... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Qwerpafw ( 315600 )
      there's also Darwin [apple.com], which is the BSD-core of Apple's Mac OS X. Darwin is Open Source, though Apple is pretty finnicky about who they let contribute for obvious reasons (it's the core of a commercial Operating System). There's also OpenDarwin [opendarwin.org] which is basically a community controlled branch of Darwin that occasionally serves as a testbed for standard Darwin features. Darwin is based on a Mach 3.0 microkernel, though it's more of a hybrid than that simplistic description would suggest.

    • Re:So... (Score:2, Informative)

      by aliquis ( 678370 )
      BSD/OS is commercial.

      FreeBSD _was_ performing very good on x86 hardware (only), FreeBSD 5.x is often slower on single-cpu machines because they try to improve SMP performance and functionality. 5.x supports quite a few architectures aswell.

      DragonFly is a fork of FreeBSD 4.x, better performance than FreeBSD 5.x but not for production (if you ask them), if I've understood everything correct their goal is among others fast IPC and beeing able to run the OS on a cluster. Right now they are going x86 only I th

  • BSD??? (Score:2, Funny)

    by PhotoGuy ( 189467 )
    But I thought....????

    -d
  • It's dead. We...Think?

  • Sorry, I'm trolling... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by pp ( 4753 )
    TCP SACK was introduced in 1996. Linux introduced it some time between 2.0 and 2.2 (that is, around 1999-2000). It's quite useful if you have a high-bandwidth link with some packet loss, since you can now retransmit only those packets that actually did get lost.

    Good to see that the we-are-the-defacto-internet-standard-tcpip-stack people are finally catching up. NetBSD does get some very impressive single-CPU TCP/IP benchmarks though. Oh. They forgot fine-grained locking in their network stack. I suppose pe
  • This Pam [google.com]? What took the BSD guys so long?

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