The NetBSD Project announced that NetBSD 1.6.1 has been tagged and the release engineering process has begun. NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance (or patch) release for users of NetBSD 1.6, not to be confused with NetBSD-current (which will become the next major release). As a patch release, it will not be branched off the head of the CVS source tree, but instead includes all security fixes and patches applied to the 1.6 branch.
Also, Jason R Thorpe from WasabiSystems, has checked in some experimental support for RAID volumes found on ATA “RAID” controllers. These controllers are just IDE controllers with a BIOS that can configure RAID volumes, write config blocks to the disks, and do I/O to the volumes, for the purpose of booting. The OS has to implement the RAID in software, using the configuration data that is written to the disks by the BIOS.
I often get the feeling that NetBSD is being isolated by its brethren and their surrounding hype. First we have its stronger twin brother, FreeBSD, which gets all the books and widespread support. Then we have its little brother, OpenBSD, which rides on the security wave, though it really can’t be regarded as much securer than any other BSD, apart from its paranoid pre-configuration.
NetBSD is always being pushed into the portability/research niche in BSD roundups, despite being a capable UNIX just like the others.
OTOH, lack of hype can be rather nice. It doesn’t contribute to the code base by itself; in that case OpenBSD would have a lot more developers than NetBSD. And you don’t get the deadbeats and lusers. People on the NetBSD are always nice. I’ve never seen any flames or heated debates there. Perhaps is that the “research” part? And there is no megalomania involved. People just code and use it, without any objectives beyond making a good, portable UNIX.
I am glad to see NetBSD getting more press lately. It has been so far the less mencioned unix-like system, it deserves much more than that. My favorite OS after Plan9, I like the beauty that comes with the simplicity of the latter, but also the adherence to the old spirit of unix in the former.
> First we have its stronger twin brother, FreeBSD, which gets all the books and widespread support.
This is an overstatement. Yes, FreeBSD is more popular, but it doesn’t do as well as it could either:
http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=2650
Really, all the BSD books out there are about FreeBSD. They get all the books. Judging from the BUS (BSD Users Sweden) list, most people seem to run FreeBSD. Despite Free running on a measly two (as of last week four) architectures, which should realistically give it the slightest user base.
But really, FreeBSD has all the users, developers and support it needs. Striving for any more is megalomania, and that belongs to Linus Torvalds and Richard Stallman, not to any BSD crowd. Developing a UNIX and going for computer world domination are two incompatible goals, and world domination has never been a BSD concern.
Actually, now that I think of it, I remember one BSD developer being put off and other users raising their voices when I once suggested that “ep” wasn’ a good name for 3Com ethernet cards, suggesting “EtherLink” instead. This says much about the BSD philosophy. It’s the UNIX philosophy, nd BSD ausers are BSD users. They couldn’t care less about the desktop or the mobile phone (except for the Nokia Communicator being considered as a NetBSD port target =), they just find that the UNIX philosophy is a good philosophy, so the development is concentrated on improving UNIX/BSD while not straying from the basic design goals.
Naturally, I find UNIX to be an overall bad design philosophy for anything but a programmer’s minimalistic OS, but then again I’m not the average user, I just runn it becaue it runs on my hardware and a UNIX may come in handy from time to time. And it’s free.
I often get the feeling that NetBSD is being isolated by its brethren and their surrounding hype. First we have its stronger twin brother, FreeBSD, which gets all the books and widespread support.
This is very true… FreeBSD has far more mindshare than any other BSD, and consequently tends to get all the toys (i.e. Opera, NVIDIA drivers, a .NET runtime) One aspect which definitely sets this relationship apart from the Linux/FreeBSD relationship however is the amount of collaboration that exists between the various BSD projects. All the code is (obviously) BSD licensed, and all the projects have relatively disparate goals, so they’re all willing to share code and support each other. FreeBSD 5.0’s init scripts borrow greatly from NetBSD, and NetBSD (and OpenBSD) borrowed kqueues from FreeBSD. NetBSD definitely gets overlooked on a technical basis often. It was the first of the BSDs to sport a journaling filesystem, a feature which is still (afaik) unique to the platform in terms of the BSDs.
This says much about the BSD philosophy. It’s the UNIX philosophy, nd BSD ausers are BSD users. They couldn’t care less about the desktop or the mobile phone…they just find that the UNIX philosophy is a good philosophy, so the development is concentrated on improving UNIX/BSD while not straying from the basic design goals.
This definitely shows in all aspects of BSD design, and in the userbase as well. It’s also one of the things I can’t stand about Linux users, especially the zealous ones who not only argue that Linux belongs everywhere, but that it’s already better than the existing solution that they’re attempting to unseat. It’s sheer madness in my opinion, and an attitude which I attempt to countermand as much as possible.
I’ve rarely if ever seen arguments between the users of BSDs. The attitude is more of collaboration, which I described before. BSD users tend to have a mutual respect for each other and their respective operating systems, compared to Linux zealots who have no respect for anything which isn’t Linux, GNU, or licensed under the GPL.
(I’m sorry to drag Linux users into this like I did, but I saw the setup that Iggy Drougge provided as comparing FreeBSD/NetBSD user relations to a microcosm of Linux/FreeBSD user relations)
>>Despite Free running on a measly two (as of last week four) architectures, which should realistically give it the slightest user base.<<
Thats just it though, running on lots of architectures gets you no where after a point. And for the most part that point ends after x86. With the coming x86-64 that will change a bit, i’m sure freebsd will be quick to run on it. After x86 on PPC has much importance. But when you consider the only mass market ppc is Mac’s it’s not much of a place to be. If you own a mac your going to run OSX (unless your some sick twisted person). Yes there is other PPC machines out there but if you buy one of them your going to run the os that it came with.
This is one of the reasons netbsd doesn’t get much press, people just see it as a group trying to get it to run on everything on earth but not something to use. OpenBSD has it’s place in being a vault of a server, freebsd in being everymans BSD. netbsd just doesn’t fit.
NetBSD does fit. Especially if you have one of those uncommon architectures. It also fits if you want a unix like system which is very stable, clean, secure, has a fair share of good application, great documentation, well designed, and a few cool features which somewhat later get ported to FreeBSD. Bottom line, NetBSD is small, clean, consistent, feels right, easy customizable. One might get this with FreeBSD, but try NetBSD also. It just feels more “right”.
i used to follow netbsd, as I continually tried to get it onto my sparcstation, each release I tried 1.4.something, 1.5.1, 1.6, never got past the install. With nothing helpfull cominhg from the sparc list, I dont even bother any more. Solaris has a permanant place on my Sparcstation.
When I get my ultrasparc box, FreeBSD will be going in it, and not NetBSD.
Well, certainly NetBSD has its own nice character. I prefer it to the increasingly bloated FreeBSD (though the FreeBSD people first developed great stuff like Scheduler activations and kqueue, softdeps, etc.).
While FreeBSD wants to have lots of features, NetBSD prefers clean, solutions that wont cause problems later on. Also I feel more safe from Linux-switchers on NetBSD than on FreeBSD…
@Iggy: Have you tried OpenBSD? There’s more to it than just paranoid configuration. My NFS-Server/NAT-Station runs it and I like the fat-removed base system very much, though I miss newer NetBSD features like UBC and the to-be-developed stuff like LFS, better threads, SMP, kqueue etc.
Also I like to have a nice packet filter like pf that doesn’t suffer from license problems like the ipf.
Just a small point-out, OpenBSD has kqueues, and have had them longer than NetBSD.
UBC in OpenBSD would really be neat, I understand Art worked on it, but I haven’t seen anything happening in that departement lately.
NetBSD is probably the most underated OS out there.
It has the cleanest, simplest install, the most sophisticated pkg managment system and dependency handling (pkgsrc, pgkchk etc.), starts nothing on default (in contrast to the two others), as well as the most helpful and best informed user base.
Unfortunately many people that do not run standard i386 HW never look at it. It’s strength is not portability (overstated) but stability and quality of code (understated).
I switched from FreeBSD 1.5 yrs ago and never looked back. OBSD is good for firewalls if you dont’ want to put any thought into it, but the upgrade path for system and ports is suboptimal if you use it as a workstation.
Just my 0.5 cents.
aki
Why did you switch from FreeBSD to NetBSD for the x86 architecture?
I’m just curious. I rarely see anything that really compares the two. I’ve always considered NetBSD as the system for “other” systems, whereas FreeBSD was The BSD for Intel.
Mind you, I never really considered NetBSD a “lesser” BSD, just that I didn’t have any odd processors around that needed it, so I never really pursued it.
So, if you could hilite some of the points in your decision process, that would be great.
@ Ulrich
Yes, I’ve tried OpenBSD. Just like in your case, it served as the fileserver at our usergroup until last month, when it was shut down due to hardware problems and replaced by the “hype machine” (the super modern Linux server of the Linux group), against my will. I’ve done my part administrating it, and it’s just like an old version of NetBSD in most cases. And the installer was just like in the NetBSD 1.1 days; almost medieval.
Once installed it on a DECstation, too, but backed out since it spent most of its time generating useless encryption keys. I’m the anti-security type; I tend to run my systems without root password, so OpenBSD doesn’t particularly suit my case.
As for low-fat distributions, I think that even FreeBSD might be considered lean compared to mainstream Linux versions. No BSD is considered lean by my standards, though. Why do they install SendMail without asking me? What a useless program unless you’re going to run a mailserver. At least a low-fat HTTPd would have done me some good.