I hope AI will help niche operating systems like BSD reach a point where they can be used as practical daily drivers
NetBSD 11.0
91–100 of 172 posts
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
NetBSD supposedly supports 486, I don't think you're going to have much luck with USB there.
There are some ISA USB cards with custom drivers to support them and present them as normal drives under MS-DOS. Never tried it myself, but they exist and seem to work! Other commenter is correct, there are some late 486 boards with PCI support that would allow USB 1.0 or even 2.0 cards to be installed and used. Probably slow, but should work. On the topic of modernizing a 486-class machine, there also exist a few wi…
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Re: NetBSD 11.0
#93Re: NetBSD 11.0
#94I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?
I wouldn't be surprised if some of the BSDs got an increase in users purely due to AI models making it far more accessible / easier to hack on. i.e. your PC is unsupported for some specific driver, such as bluetooth? stick AI on the problem.
But you could say the same about using Linux. Just stick AI on the problem.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#95Re: NetBSD 11.0
#96Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't like GPLv3. The other BSDs used similarly old versions until they moved to clang, but netbsd is pretty tied to the gnu toolchain and aims to be as portable as possible, so they kinda have to stick to gcc
This is not the reason. We created this branch in July 2025 (GCC 12.5 was released on 11 July, 2025) and spent a year stabilizing it. A new system compiler is considered far too much of a risky, incompatible change to backport. Especially since lots of C code no longer compiles with GCC 14+ without significant changes. Each time we upgrade the system compiler, it requires extensive work to keep all of our supported a…
Why would the C code no longer compile if it conforms to the spec?
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#97NetBSD feels like a high quality, ancient relic from the University of California, Berkeley, from the 1970s, made for munks, secret FBI databases and special military operations.
As someone who has used old BSDs, I can say from direct experience that it does not. For starters, on the old BSDs there was no Almquist shell, unless you went to Usenet, grabbed the shar, and built it. The TENEX C shell was the hot new thing, as were BIND and Sendmail. And we got genuine Joy+Horton vi. Whereas modern NetBSD does not have Sendmail any more, has nvi2, and supports access control lists. And of course u…
IMO an operating system in 2026 that still has a command which, when run without any arguments ("ldconfig"), silently bricks your entire system without warning... is probably due for some changes.
The same command on other OSes does not cause such damage.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
NetBSD supposedly supports 486, I don't think you're going to have much luck with USB there.
There are some ISA USB cards with custom drivers to support them and present them as normal drives under MS-DOS. Never tried it myself, but they exist and seem to work! Other commenter is correct, there are some late 486 boards with PCI support that would allow USB 1.0 or even 2.0 cards to be installed and used. Probably slow, but should work. On the topic of modernizing a 486-class machine, there also exist a few wi…
I did a lot of work on a custom option ROM for the ISA USB card type you mention. It exposes an INT 13h interface, so systems that access discs through the BIOS will work (DOS, probably CP/M-86 or ELKS, Minix might require you to specify BIOS disc access). More sophisticated operating systems that directly poke the IDE registers are not going to find what they're looking for.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#99I often wonder what the current status is of the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD). Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so? How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc? Is their usage/development happening at a relatively constant level, or is it growing/shrinking?
I do think all the BSD, despite how niche it may seems are doing well and in an ongoing development stream. And at least they seem larger than Solaris / Illumos, despite some of the cool tech solaris branch has.
All your Netflix video streaming from Open Connect CDN Edge are served by FreeBSD. [1] Serving at 800Gbps per Server.[2] This was 4 years ago, drewg123 also hangs around on HN so I hope he read this and there are some 1.6Tbps update soon :).
NetBSD runs on everything. So it's part and sometimes NetBSD itself is running only vanity of embedded systems. A lot of these information are pre 2020. But given how slowly the embedded industry moves I wouldn't be surprised if it is still largely the same. I do wonder if it was grown though. It is also the only Rump kernel implementation that I know of.
OpenBSD ends up a lot on HN, many part of our every day internet usage are done with components maintained by them. There are a lot of network appliance and server usage using OpenBSD.
I think BSD deserves more credit, but for its license and philosophy I guess is it mostly working as intended.
Re: NetBSD 11.0
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
They don't like GPLv3. The other BSDs used similarly old versions until they moved to clang, but netbsd is pretty tied to the gnu toolchain and aims to be as portable as possible, so they kinda have to stick to gcc
wasn't that around gcc4 or something era? gcc12 is pretty new
Indeed, 4.2.1 was the last GPLv2 version. OpenBSD still uses it (w/ patches) for a few platforms, for example.
/bsd.own.mk:GCC4_ARCH=alpha hppa m88k sh sparc64
The rest have already been migrated to LLVM/Clang 22 by default (except sparc64 below, that's experimental).
./bsd.own.mk:CLANG_ARCH=aarch64 amd64 arm i386 mips64 powerpc powerpc64 riscv64 sparc64