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NetBSD 11.0

blog.netbsd.org

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Re: NetBSD 11.0

#81

Post by mvanveen »

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?

One of NetBSD’s strengths and emphases is portability. They have a motto- “of course it runs NetBSD.” IIRC NetBSD was ported to Apple Silicon slightly before Asahi Linux succeeded.

Another cool corollary to this ethos is the portability of their portage, pkgsrc. I’ve personally used it as the basis of my user space packaging system on a Linux From Scratch distribution I made during the pandemic and the results were awesome. I could be wrong but it is the only package ecosystem I’m aware of that currently supports MacOS, Linux and the BSDS.

As far as the health of the ecosystem pkgsrc uses a rolling quarterly release process, has built in mechanisms for identifying vulnerable packages and a dedicated (volunteer?) security team and packages are about as up-to-date in many cases as, say, arch or gentoo.

Additionally pkgsrc can run rootless and my understanding is it finds itself used in a lot of high performance scientific computation settings as a result.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#82

Post by toyg »

bch wrote: post #64
CodeCompost wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If you're considering doing anything serious with Unix, absolutely you should use Linux. No question. Don't waste your time with any BSDs. Can you expand on that?

Compared to Linux, all of them lag pretty badly in one or multiple areas (performance, features, hardware support, available software...).

They can be excellent in very, very niche use-cases. I run my personal site on openbsd, because I want to do minimal admin for what is a super-basic setup; but that's it.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#83

Post by toyg »

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.

OpenBSD exploits (defined as bugs in both OS and typically-deployed applications on top of it) are (or used to be) low-value but scarce and hence prestigious.

Linux exploits can be extremely valuable in monetary terms, but the attack surface is so absurdly vast these days, that they are seen as banal.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#84

Post by chungy »

imoverclocked wrote: post #5

> CD-ROM media Wow, I just learned that I can still buy a pack of new CD-RW discs. This is an almost 30 year old format that is still published for! Long live ATAPI! Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write. Are there systems that can boot CD-ROM interfaces that don't have USB boot capability still?

> Seriously though, why still publish CD formats when a usb-stick is far more ubiquitous and much easier to actually write.

You can make ISO images that boot fine from both CD and USB sticks, when written to either format. Why "Fix" something that ain't broke?

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#85

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#86

Post by SoftTalker »

sunshine-o wrote: post #67
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…

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

I've used OpenBSD for probably 20 years and never had any problem with the filesystem. What is your concern?

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#87

Post by somat »

sunshine-o wrote: post #67
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…

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

On desktop,I use a NFS home dir to a freebsd(zfs) fileserver. But I have to admit, that is not so much concern about the filesystem quality as I want a good(backed up, raid) storage system, and rather than trying to build good storage on all my system I just did it once (the fileserver) and use that as a home dir for almost everything. For instance. I have a laptop that only syncs intermittently to the main file server, but i have never had it fail due to unexpected shutdown.

As for actual usage, it largely depends on how hard the filesystem is used at the time of the sudden unexpected outage, A router will fsck, find a few superficial problems(mostly log file) and be done. A desktop with 50 tabs and applications open has a scary amount of fsck problems found(most of them in the web cache). Not saying it does not happen but I personally have not had a sudden unexpected power outage kill a filesystem.

And this is incidental(because it was removed) but obsd used to have a facility for it's filesystem called soft dependencies, which was supposed to work sort of like a reverse journal, where a journal writes twice(write what you intend to do, the journal, than make the changes to the filesystem, softdeps delayed writes until the changes could be written in order with every intermediate stage valid. It sounds like a good idea, but my understanding is, it was a very complicated system spanning several logical layers making it harder(scary) to work on filesystem code, too easy to mess something up far from where you are working. So it was removed. Also: softdep had some nasty fail states with a full busy filesystem.

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#89

Post by [deleted] »

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?

[deleted]

Re: NetBSD 11.0

#90

Post by irusensei »

> Improved support for vintage and misc. hardware: alpha evbppc hp300 hppa m68k mac68k macppc mips x68k

It is interesting to see that as Linux drops support for legacy computers NetBSD still welcomes them. This is a NetBSD thing as it's not so much for FreeBSD.

As of now NetBSD is probably the go-to operating system for vintage hardware.

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