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NetBSD 11.0

blog.netbsd.org

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141–150 of 172 posts

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#141

Post by LargoLasskhyfv »

JdeBP wrote: post #115
sunshine-o wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am tempted, how do you deal with the non journalized filesystem? This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.

For comparison: NetBSD, as headlined, supports Berkeley LFS and WAPBL journalling on FFS.

A long time since I've looked into LFS on NetBSD. At the time reading up on it, out of curiosity, wanting to try it out, I got the impression that it is very experimental, and nobody was really using it in production/as a daily driver. Something about the cleaner-demon crashing over and over again. So I noped out.

Has that changed meanwhile, or is that just one of the things that are still advertised as somehow supported, while in reality that happened in a galaxy a long time sideways, in some Jedi hideout?

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#142

Post by TacticalCoder »

haberman wrote: post #29

I 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?

> Who uses them, who works on them, what is their motivation for doing so?

FreeBSD (and all the BSDs really) do not use systemd.

> How do they compare to Linux these days

They don't use systemd.

> How do they compare to Linux these days, in terms of size, feature set, security hardening, etc?

Security harderning? They don't have systemd. So there's no backdoor in SSH because somehow sshd is linked to some compression library because a Microsoft employee decided Linux should use compressed logs.

Really: no systemd is a big one.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#143

Post by [deleted] »

mattbillenstein wrote: post #57
somat wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use obsd as a desktop system, I would not necessarily recommend this to anyone, you give up a lot, but obsd is my ultimate comfort system, it is small but full featured. I feel I understand the system far more than I ever did linux, which is one of the good guys. Compare to windows where despite using it my whole life I always feel I understand barely at all. But openbsd is so well put together I love using it, So…

For a firewall/router I use Ubuntu - it's what I use for everything else, so it's comfy. I do believe OpenBSD is very very good software, but I do wonder if just given it's small install base if there are vulnerabilities simply nobody knows about. I guess may it doesn't matter since Linux is so much more widely deployed, perhaps that's just a better platform for hackers to spend their time.

[deleted]

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#144

Post by guenthert »

microtonal wrote: post #46
mghackerlady wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there, and the project maintains many pieces of software people take for granted, like pf, openssh, and libressl. FreeBSD is definitely the most robust, and is a very good server OS. NetBSDs niche is how many platforms can run it. If it's supported by GCC, theres a decent chance NetBSD will run on it

OpenBSD is the most security hardened OS out there, I think this requires a lot of additional qualifications. For instance, AOSP and Android are much more hardened when it comes to isolation between GUI applications.

Among those qualifiers would also be 'free open source'. I'd think there are hardened operating systems which are not much, if at all, talked about in public. Perhaps, in the age of LLMs finding most security vulnerabilities, those are actually demonstrably more secure now than the well reviewed public ones.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#145

Post by guenthert »

adrian_b wrote: post #136
sunshine-o wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am tempted, how do you deal with the non journalized filesystem? This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.

Nowadays, the journalized filesystems of Linux, and also NTFS of Windows are quite mature and many of their early bugs have been fixed. Many years ago that was not true. In the early years after 2000, I have witnessed a great number of computer crashes caused by power failures. All the HDDs using journalized filesystems were corrupted sooner or later, including NTFS, ext3, reiserfs, XFS. The only filesystem that was…

> The only filesystem that was completely unaffected by any power failure was UFS, on FreeBSD (obviously with "soft updates" enabled).

And with "completely unaffected" you mean the internal (meta-data) consistency was maintained, recent user data changes were silently lost however.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#146

Post by jmclnx »

jballanc wrote: post #104

When I was in graduate school, I was doing a lot of molecular dynamics simulations, but I did not have access to a lot of high-performance hardware. The math department had a 4-node Cray that was impossible to reserve time on, and the CS department had a 16-node Dell cluster that ran SGE and was decently reliable. When those resources ended up not being enough for my crazy array of tasks, I got resourceful and starte…

Very nice, I know how things like this go. You are in a hurry and documentation is something never gotten to. Plus it is a "one-time" setup, to be thrown away when complete. That is fully 100% full understandable :)

I am sure there are other impressive stories about what people did with NetBSD, too bad these really never get published. Things like this would have been nice to show up here:

https://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#147

Post by PerditionC »

hakfoo wrote: post #98
accrual wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

do you have any more info on this posted anywhere? what ISA USB card? Thanks.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#148

Post by shrubble »

ranger_danger wrote: post #97
JdeBP wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

https://man.netbsd.org/ldconfig.8 states that it checks the contents of /etc/ld.so.conf - what is the default configuration of that file when it is installed? Is it empty?

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#149

Post by fouc »

fhn wrote: post #94
fouc wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I meant more in the sense that it's less of a blocker if you wanted to use a different OS altogether. Many people are on Linux because it's the most well supported, but if you happen to be on BSD and you're missing something from Linux then you can theoretically just have AI port the thing.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#150

Post by sunshine-o »

adrian_b wrote: post #136
sunshine-o wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am tempted, how do you deal with the non journalized filesystem? This is the one "modern" comfort that makes me hesitant to try.

Nowadays, the journalized filesystems of Linux, and also NTFS of Windows are quite mature and many of their early bugs have been fixed. Many years ago that was not true. In the early years after 2000, I have witnessed a great number of computer crashes caused by power failures. All the HDDs using journalized filesystems were corrupted sooner or later, including NTFS, ext3, reiserfs, XFS. The only filesystem that was…

This is very interesting !
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