NetBSD 5.0 Released 129
kl76 writes "The NetBSD Project have announced the release of NetBSD 5.0 after two years of development. Highlights of the seven million new lines of code in 5.0 include a new threads implementation, kernel preemption, a new scheduler, POSIX real-time scheduling, message queues and asynchronous I/O, WAPBL metadata journaling for FFS filesystems, improved ACPI support, UDF write support, X.Org instead of XFree86 (on some platforms — at last!) and lots of driver updates. Binary distributions for 53 different platforms are provided."
Re:7 million new lines of code? (Score:1, Insightful)
[Disclaimer: This comment applies to Vista as well; please don't take it as a rant against BSD in particular.]
Actually for a mature software project, you can bet dollars to donuts that there's always at least one bug per 10 KLOC, even after thorough testing and review. That means we have a very conservative estimate of at least 700 brand new bugs. And if only 1% of the new bugs are security related, then that's 7 brand new ways to get owned.
I really wish OS vendors would start focusing on feature minimization within both the kernel and the privileged support binaries.
Re:Uptime (Score:5, Insightful)
It is interesting, but is it relevant to this thread?
I tried to find a methodology of their statistics. If I recall, netcraft used to perform fancy packet inspection to determine what a site was running and if or when a site rebooted. Today, any site of substance is really a cluster of servers fronted by load balancers. You really have no idea when a server behind it reboots.
Re:Uptime (Score:3, Insightful)
Its fascinating how windows dominates that list.
Re:BSD is compelling (Score:5, Insightful)
BSD is one of those things that I've been interested in doing, especially early on. It is arguably more secure than Linux, is definitely older and potentially more secure.
OpenBSD is - not BSD in general.
2) Although they had similar backgrounds and technologies, the differences were enough that it was almost a complete re-learn. RPM didn't work. Init was totally different. Commands such as ps, at, etc. had different options.
You name three things that one would expect to be different, even without installing OpenBSD:
I guess I don't see why your experience surprised you so much. If you're going to switch Unices, particularly from a (mostly) SysV-based system like Linux to a near-purely BSD-based system like OpenBSD, you should expect that some things are going to be different. It's one thing to say "hey, I tried OpenBSD, found that security is indeed the inverse of convenience, and decided I liked Linux better because it was more familiar to me". But saying that you were surprised to find that RPM didn't work leaves you vulnerable to "well, duh" comments. Like this one ;-)
Re:Also don't forget Debian! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So where is it used? (Score:2, Insightful)
NetBSD is often used for research. See http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html [netbsd.org] for the most important ones.
Re:Uptime (Score:4, Insightful)
I think that it comes as no surprise to anybody that Linux and BSD can have years of uptime, but some people (particularly on /.) have hard time believing that, yes, it is actually possible to configure and administer a Windows/IIS box so that it will keep on par with that, too.
Re:BSD is compelling (Score:5, Insightful)
BSD is one of those things that I've been interested in doing, especially early on. It is arguably more secure than Linux, is definitely older and potentially more secure.
In general, BSDs do have a longer lineage than Linux, and they seem to have better security as well. However OpenBSD is the only one the is exceptionally notable in the security standpoint.
1) At the time, getting stuff installed was more of a chore.
I don't know, I've not used NetBSD. Install from packages on FreeBSD is fairly trivial. As long as you don't go crazy with your make.conf, install from source is pretty reliable and trivial as well.
2) Although they had similar backgrounds and technologies, the differences were enough that it was almost a complete re-learn. RPM didn't work. Init was totally different. Commands such as ps, at, etc. had different options.
Their backgrounds aren't really similar. I wouldn't expect RPM to work any more on *BSD than I would expect it to work on Windows or Mac. Well, maybe a bit more than on Windows. It doesn't even work across all Linux distros (and in my experience, I had better luck with apt on RH, than RPM. The exception being for the Linux Compatibility Layer, I would expect RPM to properly install stuff there (and it does!)
As for init, yes, it is rather different, but there are several different init systems out there for *nix and *nix-like operating systems. You can get two or three of them on Linux.
3) Didn't have support for multi-core systems. (at the time, I believe that's long under the bridge now)
I've had SMP on FreeBSD for a long time, I expect OpenBSD was the same way. However, prior to FBSD7, you had to change some kernel options to get SMP. I'm guessing OpenBSD was the same way.
Bottom line? I'd started to build a business that continues to this day using Linux as my architecture. In order to move over, I'd have to port over all my administration scripts, and much of my software to an environment that was just different enough to make me *think* I knew the answer when I didn't. Porting would have been somewhat expensive, and the case to make for the switch was marginal.
True, but no one is asking you to switch. Keep with Linux, if it works for you, stick with it.
In my experience, I spend less time in a year doing administrative tasks on a FreeBSD box, than I do in a month on a Linux box. But it's a mindset thing. FreeBSD is better designed for my mindset. There are people for whom the Linux mindset is better, or the Windows, or the Mac. It's good we have options so more people can have computers they can use.
Long live BSD!
And Linux, Windows, MacOS as well. May BeOS and Amiga be raised from the dead in the process.
Re:Why NetBSD? (Score:3, Insightful)
hmm... listing pkgsrc as a drawback? Every admin I know sez its better than any other available... perhaps for this reason its been ported to most other platforms even...
Re:So where is it used? (Score:3, Insightful)
NetBSD runs reliably on old hardware that would otherwise be put out to pasture. Don't assume that it's worthless just because it wasn't used to build facebook.
The problem here is that most of the time, someone up the street has a PC with a better price-performance ratio lying in a cupboard than the extra 68k macintosh you're installing netbsd on.