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NetBSD 8.0 released

netbsd.org

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Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#81

Post by bitofhope »

holistio wrote: post #77
Cyphase wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the NetBSD About page[0][1]: > Why the name? > The “BSD” in our name is an obvious recognition of our heritage as a derivative of 4.4BSD and 386BSD. > Our contributors communicate primarily via email and Internet-based chat systems; many of us have never met each other in person. We also use a remote source code management system called CVS which enables a large number of developers to do independent work on the…

wow this must be a good few years old describing remote software development as if it was novelty

First release of NetBSD was in 1993. It was more novel back then.

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#82

Post by nbsd4life »

scythe wrote: post #65
cpeterso wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Playing armchair software architect here, I wish NetBSD and FreeBSD would join forces. The NetBSD developers could bring their portable architecture to FreeBSD's more featureful kernel and userland. What other value does NetBSD have over FreeBSD besides portability? IIUC, macOS uses NetBSD's userland though it has FreeBSD bits in its XNU kernel, so there must be benefits to NetBSD beyond its portability that I am jus…

The BSD organizations of today are more about researchers making an operating system for OS research as a field and less hacker idealists trying to bring a free OS to the people. Nearly all of the latter people go to Linux these days.

It isn't a zero sum game with a finite number of FOSS idealists. Linux's popularity grew rapidly in what were previously proprietary software users. It didn't take away that much from BSDs.

Linux and other FOSS software becoming popular makes using NetBSD a lot more convenient, not less. There's a top tier FOSS browser that will accept NetBSD related patches, several really good document editors, graphical tools. We can even take some driver code from Linux itself.

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#83

Post by kqr »

cpeterso wrote: post #54
avar wrote: post #2

> USB stack rework, USB3 support added. I didn't realize NetBSD was that far behind on some basic features like USB support. "The Linux kernel mainline contains support for USB 3.0 since version 2.6.31, which was released in September 2009"[1]. "FreeBSD supports USB 3.0 since version 8.2, which was released in February 2011.". So they're getting USB 3.0 almost 10 years after it was released for Linux. 1. https://en.w…

Playing armchair software architect here, I wish NetBSD and FreeBSD would join forces. The NetBSD developers could bring their portable architecture to FreeBSD's more featureful kernel and userland. What other value does NetBSD have over FreeBSD besides portability? IIUC, macOS uses NetBSD's userland though it has FreeBSD bits in its XNU kernel, so there must be benefits to NetBSD beyond its portability that I am jus…

Just based on history and culture, that sounds like a really awkward combination. It's trying to merge "run on every imaginable platform at all costs" with "fuck all the platforms and let's concentrate on building a rock solid operating system for the x86 because that's the only thing people use anyway."

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#84

Post by Keyframe »

davegauer wrote: post #62
Keyframe wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you go a bit more in detail why Net vs Free? I would LOVE to replace Linux (Fedora) with one of the BSD's. It's philosophy and everything basically suits me far more than anything else, but I need CUDA, I need Nvidia drivers, I like to play with ML, I need few more things like that which makes it a no go as far as I'm aware.

Forgive me if you've already heard this a lot, but Slackware is often described as being a very "BSD-like" Linux and might be another way to get some of the philosophy you're seeking.

Now, that's a name I haven't heard of in years, decades even! I'll check them out!

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#85

Post by Koshkin »

cpeterso wrote: post #54
avar wrote: post #2

> USB stack rework, USB3 support added. I didn't realize NetBSD was that far behind on some basic features like USB support. "The Linux kernel mainline contains support for USB 3.0 since version 2.6.31, which was released in September 2009"[1]. "FreeBSD supports USB 3.0 since version 8.2, which was released in February 2011.". So they're getting USB 3.0 almost 10 years after it was released for Linux. 1. https://en.w…

Playing armchair software architect here, I wish NetBSD and FreeBSD would join forces. The NetBSD developers could bring their portable architecture to FreeBSD's more featureful kernel and userland. What other value does NetBSD have over FreeBSD besides portability? IIUC, macOS uses NetBSD's userland though it has FreeBSD bits in its XNU kernel, so there must be benefits to NetBSD beyond its portability that I am jus…

> portable architecture

Incidentally, hasn't Linux been ported (eventually) to more architectures than NetBSD has?

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#86

Post by 8bitsrule »

A podcast I recently heard - hosted by long-experienced Linux hands - reported that installing BSD was a nightmare. Some discussion of which distros avoid that nightmare might be helpful.

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#87

Post by kev009 »

vasili111 wrote: post #23

Have you used NetBSD and if yes: 1. Why did you choose it? 2. What are your impressions?

I used it in production along together with Linux at a startup as it was a fairly robust Xen guest circa 2008-11. I was having a ton of stability issues with CentOS and Fedora DomU on PV Xen with CentOS 5 as the dom0. For some reason NetBSD ran great as a DomU on the same Dom0 so I went with it. I liked how Postifx was the base MTA, and was able to configure a useful systems with pkgsrc pretty easy.

The strongest case today is probably for embedded use. build.sh is unlike any other OS build system, you can happily do development of a firmware on a Linux or OS X machine for instance and splat out results for a target device.

It's also one of the better choices for learning about OS development because of build.sh, small size, fairly clean codebase etc. And those skills are fairly transportable to Linux (which is a bit of a fire hose and probably not the easiest to start out on) or commercial operating systems like OS X or real time for a career path.

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#88

Post by krylon »

8bitsrule wrote: post #86

A podcast I recently heard - hosted by long-experienced Linux hands - reported that installing BSD was a nightmare. Some discussion of which distros avoid that nightmare might be helpful.

Installing NetBSD is not for the faint of heart, but installing Arch Linux is a lot harder, if that is helpful. I would say it is a little harder than Debian, unless you want to cover exotic scenarios like a diskless workstation.

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#89

Post by kev009 »

8bitsrule wrote: post #86

A podcast I recently heard - hosted by long-experienced Linux hands - reported that installing BSD was a nightmare. Some discussion of which distros avoid that nightmare might be helpful.

The one BSDish distro with an easy GUI installer and desktop friendly settings was TrueOS which is undergoing a metamorphosis at the moment.

For the most part you can just hit enter through the installer for any of them and have a working system. To set up a graphical environment you will need to do a little reading. I would generally say any of the BSDs are easier than Arch and Gentoo to set up but offer similar capabilities if you dig in. Slightly harder than Debian text installer, maybe 1:1 with slackware.

Re: NetBSD 8.0 released

#90

Post by aaronmdjones »

Am I the only one feeling a little bit disappointed with some of the software versions listed there?

I don't use NetBSD, so perhaps I'm not in "the loop", and please forgive me if so, but;

- GCC 5.5 is only one major version higher than the oldest supported version; 6 or 7 would have been a better choice while you're banging out a whole new operating system release, 6 is still fully supported, 8 was released early this year. I understand newer compilers can sometimes introduce regressions in the build process for something as large as an entire operating system, but surely they could have tested it and gotten those bugs fixed if any?

- Similarly for Clang/LLVM 3.8.1 (Really? The oldest version of Clang that you can get on a modern Linux distro? Really?).

- OpenSSL 1.0.2 is only supported for another 17 months, 1.0.2k (the version they're shipping) is 3 versions older than the current 1.0.2o, and 1.0.2p is going to be released any day now. There are at least 4 CVEs patched between 1.0.2k and 1.0.2o; I hope they're applying those patches on top of 1.0.2k manually.

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