NetBSD 9.3: A 2022 OS That Can Run On Late-1980s Hardware (theregister.com) 41
Version 9.3 of NetBSD is here, able to run on very low-end systems and with that authentic early-1990s experience. The Register reports: Version 9.3 comes some 15 months after NetBSD 9.2 and boasts new and updated drivers, improved hardware support, including for some recent AMD and Intel processors, and better handling of suspend and resume. The next sentence in the release announcement, though, might give some readers pause: "Support for wsfb-based X11 servers on the Commodore Amiga." This is your clue that we are in a rather different territory from run-of-the-mill PC operating systems here. A notable improvement in NetBSD 9.3 is being able to run a graphical desktop on an Amiga. This is a 2022 operating system that can run on late-1980s hardware, and there are not many of those around.
NetBSD supports eight "tier I" architectures: 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and Arm, plus MIPS, PowerPC, Sun UltraSPARC, and the Xen hypervisor. Alongside those, there are no less than 49 "tier II" supported architectures, which are not as complete and not everything works -- although almost all of them are on version 9.3 except for the version for original Acorn computers with 32-bit Arm CPUs, which is still only on NetBSD 8.1. There's also a "tier III" for ports which are on "life support" so there may be a risk Archimedes support could drop to that. This is an OS that can run on 680x0 hardware, DEC VAX minicomputers and workstations, and Sun 2, 3, and 32-bit SPARC boxes. In other words, it reaches back as far as some 1970s hardware. Let this govern your expectations. For instance, in VirtualBox, if you tell it you want to create a NetBSD guest, it disables SMP support.
NetBSD supports eight "tier I" architectures: 32-bit and 64-bit x86 and Arm, plus MIPS, PowerPC, Sun UltraSPARC, and the Xen hypervisor. Alongside those, there are no less than 49 "tier II" supported architectures, which are not as complete and not everything works -- although almost all of them are on version 9.3 except for the version for original Acorn computers with 32-bit Arm CPUs, which is still only on NetBSD 8.1. There's also a "tier III" for ports which are on "life support" so there may be a risk Archimedes support could drop to that. This is an OS that can run on 680x0 hardware, DEC VAX minicomputers and workstations, and Sun 2, 3, and 32-bit SPARC boxes. In other words, it reaches back as far as some 1970s hardware. Let this govern your expectations. For instance, in VirtualBox, if you tell it you want to create a NetBSD guest, it disables SMP support.
680x0 hardware?!? (Score:2)
Maybe I can get it running on my SE/30!
Re:680x0 hardware?!? (Score:5, Informative)
it's in the list as supported
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/... [netbsd.org]
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Why was this comment modded down? It should be modded way up as Informative because it adds to TFA and this is news for nerds.
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news for neckbeards; sockpuppets that matter.
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Thanks Mods. I should have originally written the Informative comment was at -1 when I posted which was just wrong and unfair.
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It is easy to run on 1980s hardware: all you need is to avoid insane bloat (ie, Windows, systemD, GNOME). You get there once, fix regressions (or don't touch anything :p) -- and that's it.
On the other hand, it's running on modern hardware that takes effort. Take Hurd: 32-bit only, 1-CPU, no NVMe -- what good is that OS for?
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This is especially true for the old BSD operating sytems. NetBSD, unfortunatelly, collapsed when Theo de Raadt threw his hissy fit and left to found OpenBSD. He'd been one of the main contributors. And like Lennart Potterihg leaving Red Hat and taking the "big picture visionary" out of systemd, it killed progress on the operating system. The quesiton is whether NetBD will run on anything built *since* the 1980's. I knew of it's original authors, and the answer is "not consumer hardware". The drivers for mod
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Don't people mainly use it for server or appliance OS anyway? I'm huge OpenBSD fan and have some FreeBSD at work which is great stuff too, but I don't run a BSD desktop.
A little server or appliance running NetBSD on really old hardware is what I'm imagining would be the major use case.
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While BSD didnt grow out of the original code base, it was still designed with modest hardware (at the time) in mind.
You can go back in time and follow along as they develop BSD since a very large portion of it was done within Doctor Dobbs Programmers Technical Journal articles, source code, rationale, etc.
Extremely stable OS (Score:3)
Years ago my personal server/firewall box was a DEC Alpha running NetBSD. It was an amazingly stable OS with great documentation. Only ever had to reboot for the occasional update or power failure. I still fire it up once in a while but it runs a more appropriate operating system, OpenVMS.
Reality is that MOST OF all that hardware (Score:3)
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The reality is that ten dollar microcontroller modules now have more balls than a 68k Macintosh. netbsd is a hobby OS. There's nothing wrong with that, but it literally costs more to run one of those machines than to buy a SBC that is literally orders of magnitude faster.
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The ten dollar microcontroller module does not come with screen and keyboard.
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The same argument applies to a vaguely modern display. I have three LCDs here I'm throwing away, want one? They will probably be palleted up and shipped to the third world for "recycling" anyway.
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How do you make those displays available to those who have no funds to buy new?
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Sometimes people give them away, but IME you can't even give them away in California unless they are big.
Getting them to the third world happens just like I said.
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So nothing. That's exactly why people need to use their old machines. They'd have to spend time and money to travel to you to pick up an old LCD, and then get a microcontroller, and then buy a keyboard... or use what they have.
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You can't even use an old machine to do anything modern. It won't keep up with modern firewalling or routing jobs. You can't run a useful browser on it. Any of the machines that will do those things for you can do everything the antique machine will do in addition to whatever else they are doing. Even a pathetically weak smartphone by modern standards will run rings around anything like that. Anyone who can't afford a better machine can't afford enough power to run that machine. If they could afford to upgr
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A Mac SE/30 will happily perform text editing and spreadsheet tasks, and does not use over 30 watts in normal use.
A used phone also does not come with usable screen for desktop tasks or keyboard.
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A Mac SE/30 will happily perform text editing and spreadsheet tasks, and does not use over 30 watts in normal use.
A Mac SE/30 uses 100VA minimum [lowendmac.com]. How could you even think it would use that little power with a CRT in it?
A used phone also does not come with usable screen for desktop tasks or keyboard.
You can plug a keyboard into the vast majority of phones with a dumb adapter if you really need to do that much typing, although I've done quite a bit of text entry on phones anyway. The screen is small, but not unusable for most tasks. I wouldn't want to do DTP on it, but that's probably not a big concern for most people in this situation. If they're stuck trying to use a SE/30, they probably don't hav
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I love this stuff too and I want people to have access to less expensive computers and be able to keep things working, but this just a practical way for a person who is strapped for resources to get a functional computer in 2022.
Everything they want to do is on the web, and more importantly, everything they *know how* and *need* to do is on the web. A computer that can't access the Department of Motor Vehicles website or log into gmail is not a practical device in 2022, it's a hobby device.
The best option f
Diversity means a robust ecosystem (Score:1)
I'm glad there are alternative OS's around. I only wish there were more of them. (Maybe there are. Maybe somebody is building a new OS the way Linus Torvalds built up Linux originally. Maybe there are school projects to roll your own OS.)
When things go sour with a particular product, you want to be able to go somewhere else. When I finally ditched my Atari ST for a PC, I was dismayed at having to use Windows 3.1, then somebody clued me in to Linux, and what joy that was. I don't want to dump on linux
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I don't want to dump on linux now, but sometimes I feel like I'd really like to try something else. What stops me of course is that so many apps don't run on new or marginal systems.
That's still a thing for sure. I recently tried to install some of my old Loki games just for laughs and Loki_Compat no longer makes them work. On the other hand, there is pretty good support for 3d graphics translation in some of the virtualization solutions, especially when it comes to older features. So you can run an old Linux distribution in a VM for that kind of software, if you really must run it.
I remember in the old days with linux I'd have to carefully check for compatibility before I bought a new motherboard, graphics card, disc controller, sound card, ethernet device.
That's still a thing too, you just don't have to be as careful as you used to. For example you can use pr
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2022 OS? (Score:4, Funny)
NetBSD Isn't a 2022 OS. It's a 1990s OS patched up with minimal and sleek functionality, released in 2022. But it doesn't qualify as a 2022 OS until it requires a high end GPU just to render a taskbar coded entirely in a language you dad hasn't heard of using an API that is less than 5 years old and thus almost ready to be depreciated.
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All you've proven is that you're not a real Scotsman.
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API that is less than 5 years old and thus almost ready to be depreciated.
5 years and only ALMOST ready to be deprecated?
OK boomer.
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5 years and only ALMOST ready to be deprecated?
OK boomer.
Hey whippersnapper, not all of us work at Google!
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Yes, pretty much. In 2022, efficient OSes are simply not acceptrable anymore. This thing probably does not even phone home!
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My original comment was snark, but you raise a good point. However, what is an efficient OS?
I could fire up some Linux from Scratch, build it with a very cut down kernel that only supports audio and network interfaces, load in MPD, grab a keyboard type some commands, and have music playing from a $1 bottom of the line ARM processor with only a couple of MB of RAM.
Or I could run iOS 13 and shout "hey siri, play some music" across the room.
The latter for all it's bloat, complexity and hardware requirements is
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Displaying the weather is not an OS job. Putting it into the OS is an attempt to cover up a cheap make and fundamental deficiencies. This approach is well known with tool-makers, but it works there as well for customers with a very limited clue.
and all this from a single source tree (Score:3)
all of those hardware platforms are compiled from a single source tree. ...
there is a lot of hardware abstraction to get all platform specifics under one hood.
which is a big difference from many (*cough* well) other open source systems,
which come with source tree A for platform X, source tree B for platform Y, patchiest C for
you get it. That's not the case for NetBSD.
The benefit of this is, if there's a new feature that affects all/many platforms,
there is no need for further propagation to other source trees.
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The difficulty is that new platforms or features cannot be added to that increasingly lumbering source tree, and have to be integrated with the rest of the software and hardware suite. One end result is a "waterfall" release schedule, where updates are large and likely to be incompletely tested with every use case. Fortunately for NetBSD, the number of users is so very small that there are few use cases to test.
Nice article, but (Score:2)
Nice article, but I think there are some minor issues with the article. But good to see some press for NetBSD.
We found NetBSD quite a challenge to install. It's a three-step process. First, install the OS, which did (unexpectedly) result in a graphical login, to an extremely basic window manager and terminal. Then, we had to run sysinst to configure some more advanced features
I do not know what they did, maybe installing on a VM is different (I am on bare metal). Also I did not get a Graphical Login after my install, I had to update /etc/rc.conf for that. Maybe they selected some install option. This quote from the man page of sysinst(8)
sysinst is a menu-based program that may be used to install or upgrade a NetBSD system. It is usually invoked automatically when the system is booted from appropriate installation media.
For me, it was boot and install, very easy, no separate sysinst(8).
and installing the pkgin command, which installs pre-compiled software from online repositories.
Yes, pkgin(1) is very nice, but not technically needed. People h
New OS for Car (Score:2)
Recently I bought Office 2010 (Score:2)
DEC? (Score:1)