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NetBSD 11.0

blog.netbsd.org

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Re: NetBSD 11.0

#161

Post by stonogo »

ranger_danger wrote: post #153
stonogo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more than one C specification, and with each new release of GCC several things that used to emit warnings are newly treated as errors.

but if the correct standard is specified as an option, shouldn't that prevent conformant applications from failing to compile in newer versions?

Sure, that's one approach. Testing those changes takes time when you're working on a whole operating system and a ports tree. More time than cutting a new gcc release, as it turns out.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#162

Post by hulitu »

CodeCompost wrote: post #62
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?

The current status? If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs. But ... if you want to teleport back to the 90s and go back to an era before Linux took off on a rocket ship to universal dominance then the BSD are for you. You will find a much more curated experience when people thought that documentation mattered. It is the…

> you should use Linux

Too bad the _fat_ penguin was not a lie. Linux has become a diabetic infected with cangrene wounds.

Trying to make the kernel smaller (by removing modules/features) results in non bootable system.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#163

Post by hulitu »

ranger_danger wrote: post #96
washbear wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Because, for some reason, someone at gcc decided that some warnings shall be treated as errors. Good luck finding out which those are and which flags you need as a countermeasure. Of course it has documentation. Of course it is useless.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#164

Post by hulitu »

ranger_danger wrote: post #153
stonogo wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more than one C specification, and with each new release of GCC several things that used to emit warnings are newly treated as errors.

but if the correct standard is specified as an option, shouldn't that prevent conformant applications from failing to compile in newer versions?

> shouldn't that prevent

it should. It doesn't.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#165

Post by hulitu »

wormius wrote: post #55

Not about BSD, but anybody else using side tabs in FF with that site? Somehow the rendering of that dashed line at the top runs across into the "pinned tabs" section. (Linux/Wayland/Debian). Curious if anyone else is seeing it.

> Somehow the rendering of that dashed line at the top runs across into the "pinned tabs" section

Graphics programming is very hard. Borland tried to improve the situation in the 90s with it graphics library, but little progress has been made since then. One of the most difficult things today is finding out the coordinates of the drawing area. /s

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#166

Post by hakfoo »

PerditionC wrote: post #147
hakfoo wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's a many, many post thread here https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/isa-usb-board.7697... where a lot of the discussion took place, both my efforts and some other devs working on a DOS-based driver.

https://gitlab.com/hakfoo1/ch37x-bios is the actual code.

Post 394 shows a picture of the card I used, which at the time was sold in like 500 AliExpress storefronts for about USD25. The magic word is "CH375" or "CH376" (two chips, overlapping functionality, different enough to be annoying to support in software)

As mentioned in the thread, it tends to fit a weird niche.

For 8086/8088 machines, the other main option is XT-IDE cards, which are like $40+ and they're sort of finicky with some drives.

For a 286+, usually installing a standard IDE drive (or a more modern CF->IDE or SD->IDE adapter) is the easy mode with wide software support.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#167

Post by pjmlp »

mghackerlady wrote: post #43
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?

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

It definitely isn't, when placed against IBM and Unisys mainframes/micros, where security leads OS design for decades.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#168

Post by pjmlp »

user3939382 wrote: post #74
mattbillenstein wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've mainly heard of successes of the networking stack in FreeBSD at Netflix and Whatsapp - but largely, I don't know anywhere else that uses it in production.

PS3 and Nintendo Switch OS use FreeBSD components.

Urban myth regarding the Switch, Nintendo uses its own in-house microkernel based OS.

And Orbis OS uses as much FreeBSD as Android/ChromeOS use Linux, in what gets exposed to devs.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#169

Post by pjmlp »

soapdog wrote: post #133
bas wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ditto for PS4 and PS5.

Isn’t that choice mostly dictated by BSD license allowing them to keep things proprietary instead of GPL requiring them to release their changes?

Yes a big part of that, is being able to design Orbis OS whatever they feel like without caring about upstream, same with using clang on the devkit.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#170

Post by lproven »

Narishma wrote: post #108
ranger_danger wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They said Linux distros , not the kernel itself. Many distros have or are about to drop x86 support.

Yes, I think the only somewhat big distro that still has x86 support is Gentoo.

Alpine Linux supports x86-32.

It's the basis of Docker and has tens of millions of copies in production use.

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