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NetBSD 4.0 Has Been Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Wed Dec 19, 2007 12:59 PM
from the so-long-and-thanks-for-all-the-stacks dept.
Operating Systems Software BSD
ci4 writes to tell us that NetBSD 4.0 has been released and has been dedicated to the memory of Jun-Ichiro "itojun" Hagino. "Itojun was a member of the KAME project, which provided IPv6 and IPsec support; he was also a member of the NetBSD core team (the technical management for the project), and one of the Security Officers. Due to Itojun's efforts, NetBSD was the first open source operating system with a production ready IPv6 networking stack, which was included in the base system before many people knew what IPv6 was. We are grateful to have known and worked with Itojun, and we know that he will be missed. This release is therefore dedicated, with thanks, to his memory."
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Submission: NetBSD 4.0 has been released. by ci4 (98735)
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  • Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

    by angryfirelord (1082111) on Wednesday December 19 2007, @01:05PM (#21753856)
    Time to upgrade my toaster!

        • Re:Yes! (Score:5, Funny)

          by TheRaven64 (641858) on Wednesday December 19 2007, @01:33PM (#21754248) Homepage Journal

          FreeBSD lost 93% of its core developers
          Do you have any kind of source for that? The FreeBSD core team consists of 9 people, so losing 92% of them would mean losing 8.37 of them, which doesn't really make sense.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by ByOhTek (1181381)
            or it once had 128 or 129 devs...

            *shrug* Given the way the last two releases have progressed, and the fact that it's been a while since the releases have been anywhere remotely on schedule, it wouldn't surprise me if they took a huge dev hit.

            Personally, I don't care how popular my OS is, as long as it gets the job done, and does it well. So for for me, FreeBSD does that.
            • Well, since the issue of popularity (and probably an ensuing flame war) are inevitable, I might as well ask what advantages NetBSD kernel has over the Linux kernel (meaning the Linus tree)?
              • If you're only counting Linus' tree then the most obvious benefit NetBSD has over Linux is Xen support (domU and dom0). That's not really a fair comparison though; comparing NetBSD to something like Fedora would make more sense.
              • Easier to port onto a toaster :-)

                On a more serious note it tends to be more stable on the more obscure architectures. Its internal guts are also considerably cleaner so it is easier to get going on various specialised platforms.

                It is more of "it ain't fancy, but it works and does exactly what it says on the tin" philosophy compared to Linux.

                I always keep a tree around (and a freebsd one) for a reference so I can look up how some things are implemented at the low level. You cannot do that with linux (or god

                • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                  by TheRaven64 (641858)

                  I always keep a tree around (and a freebsd one) for a reference so I can look up how some things are implemented at the low level. You cannot do that with linux (or god forbid Slowarez) without arming yourself with a couple of aspirins and a bottle of vodka.
                  I'd agree with Linux, but the Solaris code is often very, very clean. The parts I've looked at have been close to OpenBSD standard, which is the most readable kernel I've come across.

                  • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

                    by mi (197448)

                    I'd agree with Linux, but the Solaris code is often very, very clean.

                    Solaris kernel may be clean. Solaris' user-space programs, however, are a disaster. For example, even in the most-modern Solaris 10:

                    • awk could still complain about "input line too long"
                    • vi which would allow multiple editing sessions of the same file and, also, complain about "screen too wide"
                    • the castrated /bin/sh (no wonder, Sun's own scripts use /bin/ksh!)
                    • find, which does not have the -print0
                    • make that can't parallelize jobs
                    • no out-o

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by sremick (91371)
                The 2nd edition of Michael Lucas' "Absolute FreeBSD" just came out. I haven't had a chance to go through the 2nd edition though, but the 1st ed was very good. This would make it the most-up-to-date FreeBSD book currently available. Other older ones I can recommend are FreeBSD Unleashed, The Complete FreeBSD, and FreeBSD: The Complete Reference.

              • Re:Yes! (Score:5, Informative)

                by ByOhTek (1181381) on Wednesday December 19 2007, @02:48PM (#21755186) Journal
                I was nervous to - I had so many Linux users tell me how bad it was, that it was harder to use and learn than Linux, etc.

                I found it wasn't the case. The more you have experience coding and building from source in Linux, the better off you'll be, but here goes:

                (1) I didn't buy any books or anything, I had a friend who was into FreeBSD tell me about it. She gave me a few hints and tips on how to start and what to avoid. She said I should try it since I'd rather use Windows than Linux, and it'd be nicer for me to use a FOSS OS if I could. I listened, and tried, and was hooked on the OS within a day of installing it.

                So the best resource you can have is a friend who knows what he or she is doing (or at least has a bit more of a clue than you).

                (2) The handbook is your friend. under /usr/share/doc/en/books/handbook/index.html is the system documentation. You can look at it on the freebsd website under the handbook section. It is actually EXTREMELY useful, and fairly well written/comprehensive. Unless you are looking for VPN stuff, they you're sporked.

                (3) The Mailing list and it's archives are invaluable. Don't worry, the people there don't eat babies or penguins (if they did, I wouldn't use the OS, I have a friend who I love to hang out with who'd never speak to me again if I talked to people who ate penguins!). Actually they are a friendly and easy going bunch. They don't like people picking on them for their OS choice, but they don't mind people preferring different OSes. If you have a question, let them know your background when you ask, so they can better tailor the advice. You'll be asked to read some stuff, but they'll tell you what you need to read, and not just give you a blind RTFM. Heck, one user recently said he wanted to migrate to Linux, and asked which distro would be easiest for a FreeBSD user, no flames came.

                (4) The errors are typically useful, and if you read them, they'll point you to a file or directory that's a problem. Using that you can figure out if something needs to be edited, deleted, etc. When making packages, if something is described as "marked" (ex. "Marked as broken on AMD64", or described as "conflicts", it is the packages make file, and you may need to modify that (or find another package that does the same thing, usually there are hints, but not always). You can sometimes find documentation related to these files either in the man pages for the program that uses them, or with the file name itself. Sometimes the error messages will actually tell you what to type or give you options on what to do to fix the problem - they don't fix it automatically because they'd assume you'd rather chose the fix option rather than have the choice made for you.

                More practical (basically the advice my friend gave me, aside from the location of the handbook):

                1. Until you are confident in your ability to get your system up to the poing of getting a web browser out to the internet from a fresh install (read: have done it at least once), only install freebsd if you have a system you can access the internet from, preferrably while running freebsd (i.e. install FreeBSD to a virtual machine, or on a spare computer).

                2. I've found that the non-minimal installs tend to be a bit confused in their setup. I just do a minimal install, and install everything else manually. Read up on the section about partitioning your disk, FreeBSD does this in an odd manner, and you'll want to be familiar with it.
                2.1. Ports - Compiling your own stuff
                2.1.1. Familiarize with "csup", under /usr/share/examples you'll not run this often, but it updates your ports tree. typically you just type "csup -g -L 2 [path to supfile]", there's a sample supfile in the /usr/doc/examples directory somewhere, probably in a csup or cvsup directory, and the man page is fairly useful. In fact, most BSD man pages are (weird). They usually have good examples.
                2.1.2. to build a package, go to /usr/ports, find the pac
                • A few things I'd add:
                  • You say 'Read up on the section about partitioning your disk, FreeBSD does this in an odd manner, and you'll want to be familiar with it.' This highlights an important difference between BSD and Linux. Linux tries to look like the most common operating system on the platform in question. On x86, this means that it uses the DOS partition scheme and system call convention. BSDs tend to try to make every machine look the same. Understanding this difference in philosophy will help a

                • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

                  by eronysis (928181)
                  Hmmmm

                  You claim to knwo a female into BSD?
                  This is not a fan fiction thread man.
                  • I've not done much ports development (read any), but with the helpfulness of the mailing lists (and they are nice, even I'll admit I ask some pretty inane questions, and they are never rude), and what I've seen in the documentation, developing ports (applications) is not hard unless the original application (if you are porting and not writing from scratch) isn't well written.

                    Porting the entire OS, if that's what you mean, I dunno, I've never done that :-)
                    I stick with i386 and AMD64.
                    • Allow me to state that all of the port maintainers I've interacted with are very friendly and helpful. I've had some of my ports and port patches sucked into the mainline ports tree in under 24 hours.

                      I love FreeBSD. It is a great community that values stability over flashiness and features. Everything is documented as a man page, and if you get lost, FreeBSD.org is your portal (as apposed to linux, where the question "where do I even start" is a big one).

                      My only fear is that people try to turn FreeBSD in
                    • Oh, you can access any language.

                      Once that is done, there's a fairly simple process to get it into the ports tree (if it's distribution worthy), someone usually makes sure it isn't obscenely bug ridden and will compile, at which point it is out to the public.

                      Though the ability to compile may eventually be lost over time (see: boson)
                    • I see what you are asking. Okay... think like this:

                      1) You are writing an application that will run on unix. This means make; ./configure; make install. This means writing code that doesn't assume a specific compiler (people targeting linux are notorious for assuming gcc exists). This means you are distributing a source code tarball that looks and works just like all the other source code tarballs you are used to working with.
                      2) You happen to be offering it to FreeBSD users with a port. Ports are nothin
                  • I'm not sure what you mean by "port development", but in terms of learning programming, Unix is the way to go.

                    All the tools you need are included in FreeBSD. Get some familiarity with the command line and shell, and learn a good non-GUI text editor like vi or emacs. GUI editors are great, but being able to edit a file over an ssh connection is an invaluable skill. The other tools you need, like make, gcc, etc., are included in the basic install.

                    FreeBSD has a programming book included. Really! It's called "F

              • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

                by CleverDan (728966)
                The Complete FreeBSD is available from the author, Greg Lehey, online here: http://www.lemis.com/grog/Documentation/CFBSD/ [lemis.com] Greg's site itself is pretty interesting, too.
              • The new version of Absolute FreeBSD just came out. I picked up a copy and thought: "I wish I read something like this when I was learning FreeBSD... it would have saved a lot of headaches" http://www.absolutefreebsd.com/ [absolutefreebsd.com]

              • Re:Yes! (Score:5, Insightful)

                by coryking (104614) * on Wednesday December 19 2007, @08:05PM (#21759412) Homepage Journal
                You'll love it here. We are chill.

                The folk behind FreeBSD are all just professional people trying to get real work done. You will not find your next religion when you use FreeBSD. Nor will you find saints who preach to you about how you should and should not use your computer. Nor will you find people telling you how you should and should not value your labor.

                We dont give a shit if you like Vista. We dont care make FreeBSD work with your Windows Server. We dont care if you embed FreeBSD in your Tivo or Playstation. We are more than happy if you take our code and use it in your TCP/IP stack. Seriously. Take our code! No strings attached!

                And hey, we all have to eat here in FreeBSD-land and so do you! We don't care if you make money from what comes out of your brain. Many of us are programmers whose livelihood depends on selling the value of our brain. We dont preach to you about the evils of intellectual property. If you sell software, the more power to you! If you become the next Microsoft, sweet!

                And at the end of the day, FreeBSD works. It is the most boring OS you'll ever find. It is about as exciting as your water heater. And that is the best part about it.
          • You don't want to see the ninth guy...

          • Re:Yes! (Score:4, Funny)

            by eclectro (227083) on Wednesday December 19 2007, @03:46PM (#21756086)

            so losing 92% of them would mean losing 8.37 of them, which doesn't really make sense.
            It does if you make him get a haircut and shave.

  • Holy crap, they've removed Sendmail... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Saint Aardvark (159009) * on Wednesday December 19 2007, @01:05PM (#21753868) Homepage Journal

    ...and replaced it with Postfix. Sendmail's still available from pkgsrc, but it's no longer the default. Man, never thought I'd see the day when one of the BSDs finally did this...

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by morgan_greywolf (835522)
      'bout frickin' time!

      Look, the rest of the world has moved on to Postfix, which is much smaller and less bloated than sendmail, easier to configure, and, most importantly, a ton more secure.

      Why have the BSDs taken so long to realize this simple fact of life?

      • Why have the BSDs taken so long to realize this simple fact of life?

        Well, in the case of OpenBSD, it's because they've gone over the Sendmail code with a fine-toothed comb and patched up any problems they found along the way. It's pretty well vetted by people who care intensely about such things. Therefore, replacing Sendmail with anything else would be a case of the devil you know being better than the devil you don't.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Doesn't quite look like the rest of the world got your memo.

        http://www.securityspace.com/s_survey/data/man.200711/mxsurvey.html [securityspace.com]

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Fweeky (41046)

        Why have the BSDs taken so long to realize this simple fact of life?
        Well, *I* think the colour of the bikeshed should be exim^Wblue!

        Or maybe the base system should just not come with an MTA. Keep that stuff in ports where it belongs.
        • Or maybe the base system should just not come with an MTA. Keep that stuff in ports where it belongs.

          You need something to deliver your daily/weekly/monthly run logs, cron output, alerts etc to the right person.

          But as you know, installing GREEN!^Wpostfix from the ports collection is hardly rocket science if you take all the default settings, plus that it can be updated without having to worry that an system upgrade will put everything back to an ancient version.

        • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

          by morgan_greywolf (835522)
          1. Good for you. I'm talking about what comes installed by default, not what you can install yourself after the fact. And, yes, it matters, because people, even experienced, seasoned, veteran administrators are likely to use what's installed by default rather than install something extra manually. It's usually the path of least resistance.

          2. I'm sorry you don't like my posts. I tend to make a lot of jokes with heavy, sarcastic humor and it's one of those things that either people love or they hate. M

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...and replaced it with Postfix. Sendmail's still available from pkgsrc, but it's no longer the default. Man, never thought I'd see the day when one of the BSDs finally did this...

      As a reference, sendmail is still good. But given the lack of desire of the maintainers of sendmail to be more proactive in anti-spam and further development of SMTP, many people have switched to Postfix. I view this as a highly progressive move.

      I switched my systems to postfix last year. Love it. Even though I mastered the s

  • Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0 (Score:5, Informative)

    by NeoManyon (953080) on Wednesday December 19 2007, @01:10PM (#21753928) Homepage
    Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. Also, system security was further enhanced with restrictions of mprotect(2) to enforce W^X policies, the Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements of the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, which can be used to harden the system against trojan horses and virus attacks. Please read below for a list of changes in NetBSD 4.0.

    http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-4/NetBSD-4.0.html [netbsd.org]

    Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0

    The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES and CHANGES-4.0 files in the top level directory of the NetBSD 4.0 release tree. Some highlights include:
    Networking

    * agr(4): new pseudo-device driver for link level aggregation.
    * IPv6 support was extended with an RFC 3542-compliant API and added for gre(4) tunnels and the tun(4) device.
    * An NDIS-wrapper was added to use Windows binary drivers on the i386 platform, see ndiscvt(8).
    * The IPv4 source-address selection policy can be set from a number of algorithms. See "IPSRCSEL" in options(4) and in_getifa(9).
    * Imported wpa_supplicant(8) and wpa_cli(8). Utilities to connect and handle aspects of 802.11 WPA networks.
    * Imported hostapd(8). An authenticator for IEEE 802.11 networks.
    * carp(4): imported Common Address Redundancy Protocol to allow multiple hosts to share a set of IP addresses for high availability / redundancy, from OpenBSD.
    * ALTQ support for the PF packet filter.
    * etherip(4): new EtherIP tunneling device. It's able to tunnel Ethernet traffic over IPv4 and IPv6 using the EtherIP protocol specified in RFC 3378.
    * ftpd(8) can now run in standalone mode, instead of from inetd(8).
    * tftp(1) now has support for multicast TFTP operation in open-loop mode, server is in progress.
    * tcp(4): added support for RFC 3465 Appropriate Byte Counting (ABC) and Explicit Congestion Notification as defined in RFC 3168.

    File systems

    * scan_ffs(8), scan_lfs(8): utilities to find FFSv1/v2 and LFS partitions to recover lost disklabels on disks and image files.
    * tmpfs: added a new memory-based file system aimed at replacing mfs. Contrary to mfs, it is not based on a disk file system, so it is more efficient both in overall memory consumption and speed. See mount_tmpfs(8).
    * Added UDF support for optical media and block devices, see mount_udf(8). Read-only for now.
    * NFS export list handling was changed to be filesystem independent.
    * LFS: lots of stability improvements and new cleaner daemon. It is now also possible to use LFS as root filesystem.
    * vnd(4): the vnode disk driver can be used on filesystems such as smbfs and tmpfs.
    * Support for System V Boot File System was added, see newfs_sysvbfs(8) and mount_sysvbfs(8).

    Drivers

    *

    Audio:
    o Support for new models on drivers such as Intel ICH8/6300ESB, NVIDIA nForce 3/4, etc.
    o Added support for AC'97 modems.

    • Re:Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0 (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2007, @01:13PM (#21753980)

      Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor...

      Ah, so it does run Linux. I was going to ask.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheRaven64 (641858)
      The new bluetooth stack from NetBSD has now been ported to DragonFly BSD and OpenBSD, so others benefit from this work, not just those running NetBSD. Looking through the new features list, I see a lot of things that I recognise from both OpenBSD and FreeBSD, so the sharing goes both ways.

      NetBSD is, I believe, the second kernel to officially support running as a Xen 3 Domain 0 guest. Both Solaris and NetBSD have been able to do this in prerelease versions for quite a few months, but I believe NetBSD is t

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by demon (1039)
        Does it support PAE this time? I'm not seeing anything in the release notes, so I'm guessing the answer is "no"; unfortunately if it doesn't, that makes it (still) useless to me. I'd love to run NetBSD in a Xen domU, but all my production Xen hosts use PAE - 4 GB on a VM host box is just not enough, and NetBSD's continued dogged insistence that PAE is an ugly hack (yes, it is, but that's *beside* the point) is getting really obnoxious. I'd just go with the x86_64 Xen kernel, except that they don't even have

    • ...many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs.

      Translation: now it really does run on your toaster... and your refrigerator.

    • Works well in VMware; and some thoughtful soul created a pre-built VM. [vmware.com] Now my testing VM menagerie is complete.

  • Oh Boy! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday December 19 2007, @01:14PM (#21754002)
    An OS that supports more platforms than it has users.
    • NetBSD is a great OS. I've used it since version 2 and it really has improved dramatically. I've found it to be very, very useful in resurrecting old hardware, and it also runs great on current platforms, too.

      NetBSD's support of so many hardware architectures speaks something about how it's designed, if you ask me. No other OS I know of supports even 1/2 as many architectures as NetBSD.

    • Oh Boy! An OS that supports more platforms than it has users.

      Oh Boy! Another user that doesn't know what OS's he's using. If your firewall isn't running NetBSD, and your gateway router isn't, and you don't own any appliances that run NetBSD, the chances are your internet packets, at least are making their way through one or more NetBSD boxes. NetBSD has plenty of users, it's just most of them don't know they are users because they use NetBSD systems as black boxes.

  • Netcraft is dead (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    this new release of NetBSD confirms it.

  • Released? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Huntr (951770) on Wednesday December 19 2007, @02:26PM (#21754892)
    Does that mean they spread its ashes around somewhere or what? ;)

    • Some actual information (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. Also, system security was further enhanced with restrictions of mprotect(2) to enforce W^X policies, the Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements of the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, w

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by trybywrench (584843)
      Sad to hear about itojun. This is the first time i've heard of this news. Anyone know how he passed away?

      yeah you'd think that would be in the summary.

      I knew nothing of him but rest in peace and thanks for all the hard work

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward
        http://www.itojun.org/resume.html [itojun.org] ... too many activies to summarize from my limited head.

      • I did a little digging and determined that it was almost certainly suicide. I found two blog posts from a google search on Itojun and noticed that the Google cache version was dated one day prior to the date listed on the blog posts. I then discovered that you can actually retrieve old text from the Google cache version of a page by tweaking your search query over and over. I determined that the two bloggers had deleted paragraphs from each of their posts talking about the cause of death, Itojun's menta

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Responding to my own post, apparently he was fighting a long illness and did not make it. Gathered from comments at undeadly [undeadly.org].
      See also http://www.wide.ad.jp/news/press/20071031-itojun-e.html [wide.ad.jp]

      Jeez. The guy was a good guy. Very upset that he is no longer with the community. RIP.
      • If you're on the grid, people who you don't like are getting your money.

        Why should I care? As long as I give my money to them voluntarily through uncoerced economic transactions, it's not longer my money, it's theirs. I gave it to them. On the other hand, if I dislike them so much that I have to rant on Slashdot about it, then I shouldn't be doing business with them to begin with. As the doctor says, if it hurts to do that then don't do that!
        • Yes, but is it uncoerced if the item you're buying is a necessity and you have no other choice because of a government protected monopoly?

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