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."
Hajelluleh? (Score:2, Interesting)
Kudos to the NetBSD team. I have a NetBSD machine running as a NAS and media server that's so reliable that even my wife likes it. However, I won't be upgrading for a while. That's an incredible amount of new code they've committed, and while I have enormous faith in the skills of the NetBSD developers, there's a good chance that something slipped through the cracks. I think I'll wait for the bugfix release :) BSD Forever!
Confessions of a Recovering Preppie: The Blog [michaeldemare.com]
Re:7 million new lines of code? (Score:4, Interesting)
Your numbers are off by a factor of ten.
You are far too optimistic when quoting such low bug levels
1 bug / 10K lines?
Jesus H. Coder can't do that well.
So the lesser gods that wrote NetBsd are probably going to have error rates ten times as high.
BSD is compelling (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
So after using Linux for a year or so, I tried OpenBSD for a full month because of its much-touted security benefits before going back to Linux, and I've never looked back. Why?
1) At the time, getting stuff installed was more of a chore.
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.
3) Didn't have support for multi-core systems. (at the time, I believe that's long under the bridge now)
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.
Linux isn't the best at everything, but it does pretty good at everything. Security is decent, reliability is decent, performance is excellent, hardware support is good-to-excellent, etc. all of these well within the range of "commercially viable". So, I stick with Linux, and my hosted software company has grown from a few clients to over 100 client organizations, some with hundreds of users. We've grown from 1 server to 9. Our uptimes are excellent, best in the business, our software is fast becoming an industry standard, and Linux has basically never disappointed us.
But don't get me wrong: I have immense respect for BSD, I live and die by SSH, which is foundational to our administration, backups, and cluster replication technology, and if I were starting over today, I would feel perfectly comfortable choosing *BSD.
Long live BSD!
So where is it used? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why NetBSD? (Score:5, Interesting)
Folks with mod points should bump this (AC) parent up; it's pretty much spot-on.
Here are a few extra data points...
I've been following the NetBSD 5.0 branch since it turned -RC on sparc, i386 and ARM. It's a significant step forward in a lot of ways. For example, on my EEE PC 900, everything works... something not every Linux distro has managed to do.
In NetBSD, there seems to be a stronger realization that developer time is precious. For example, NetBSD suffers a lot less from 'superfluous redesign' than Linux. Many years ago, I wrote a few Linux 2.0 device drivers for a few ISA and PCI data acquisition boards I was using. I had to make fairly significant changes for kernel 2.2, then 2.4, then 2.6. And since then... don't get me started. I've had to fix inane code breakages in the 2.6 series several times. In NetBSD, my driver code didn't need to evolve a tenth as much. Code interfaces are just more stable.
Just the build system alone is a huge time saver on embedded systems. You don't have to go searching around for cross-compilers, toolchains and all the other things that can be painful in Linux (unless your vendor spent a lot of time to assemble them for you). In NetBSD, this stuff is all built right into the base system to begin with.
Admittedly, on the desktop, NetBSD is still more work than it should be, even compared to typical Linux distros. It's about like the other BSDs, and not so different from a basic Debian install, for example. There's a growing realization in the NetBSD community that 'making it easier' to get a functional modern desktop environment running is worthwhile. Hopefully this gains traction.
NetBSD is a really nice system, which undeservedly gets overlooked a lot. It's definitely worth a look.