> USB stack rework, USB3 support added.
"The Linux kernel mainline contains support for USB 3.0 since version 2.6.31, which was released in September 2009"[1]. "FreeBSD supports USB 3.0 since version 8.2, which was released in February 2011.".
So they're getting USB 3.0 almost 10 years after it was released for Linux.
It was added to other operating systems as the hardware became more readily available, understandably it took some time. USB 3.0 is not simple to implement.
IIUC, macOS uses NetBSD's userland though it has FreeBSD bits in its XNU kernel, so there must be benefits to NetBSD beyond its portability that I am just not aware of. :)
Incidentally, hasn't Linux been ported (eventually) to more architectures than NetBSD has?
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tmux
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dwm
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tcl
I've got a lot of netbsd running machines. The one I use now is a Haswell CPU with nvidia graphics, and everything works well on it (even nvidia graphics!).
Not all machines are so good. I have a too new Dell XPS. It doesn't have graphical acceleration. But it was very cool to have the touchscreen working already (although with rough edges).
On the server side we had it on some old machine with a weird architecture just as a jump host.
The great thing is pkgsrc for package management. I believe you can use it on OS X by now, which was done by the people who make SmartOS.
Here's a tribute/introduction written by Derek Sivers:
As for my own experience, I don't know if I'm ready to give up Debian as my primary desktop OS, but I really like OpenBSD on my coding-or-surfing-on-the-couch laptop.
On the server side, I also use both (as VPS) for personal projects.
$PKG_PATH is set up but commented out in the .profile for root. I'm going for a light window manager and Seamonkey and a few bits and pieces to see how the land lies.
For the most part you can just hit enter through the installer for any of them and have a working system. To set up a graphical environment you will need to do a little reading. I would generally say any of the BSDs are easier than Arch and Gentoo to set up but offer similar capabilities if you dig in. Slightly harder than Debian text installer, maybe 1:1 with slackware.
That was the gist of their complaint. I'm guessing that since these guys (one uses Arch) both worked their way through LF-Scratch last year, they're not up to more reading right now.
It's been a while since I installed NetBSD, but the last time, on-board sound wouldn't work without kernel driver patches. And hardware-accelerated OpenGL on a modern GPU was unsupported.
(That said, I used NetBSD as my desktop OS besides Slackware Linux from ~2001-~2005, and it is an exceptionally clean and nice Unix.)
I can't vouch for how optimized it is; but zfs is definitely there. https://gyazo.com/0f6261cf415b85010fcaa92557d783b4
1. Why did you choose it?
2. What are your impressions?
Why did I choose it? Because at the time, I was still living with my parents and needed to get Internet access working via dial-on-demand ISDN-card. The only OS I found a tutorial for how to do that was NetBSD.
What were my impressions? Compared to, say, Debian, NetBSD takes more effort on the side of the user/sysadmin. But once something was in place, it stayed in place. I also liked the clear distinction between the base system and third-party software installed via pkgsrc (which ends up in /usr/pkg). These days, NetBSD has binary packages for the most mainstream architectures, so it less of a problem.
I liked the system - it was simple enough to get a realistic idea of what is going on under the hood, even for a Unix-newbie, but also powerful enough that it did not stop there. Also when a friend of mine got me a Sun SparcStation he had salvaged from his university's garbage pile, NetBSD was the only system I could get to boot on that machine.
NetBSD's strength is portability (or "ports" not to be confused with FreeBSD's ports collection). So any software written for it, is going to have portability in high regard. If you don't want to live in a monolithic world (example: the PC world went towards x86-32 in 90s, then shifted away to AMD64. ARM/ARM64 are market leader in embedded industry, though MIPS is also still being used) and if you believe in postmarket options (devices shipped with proprietary firmware/OS) though Linux is also strong in that regard. If you like RISC-V existence, software such as NetBSD helps its existence.
Yes, I had hardware on which of recent software basically only NetBSD ran on, or maybe a (broken/outdated) proprietary OS, or "Linux" (but some vague old port, or requiring patches, blahblah). It could be old/ancient hardware, proprietary firmware, obscure hardware. I ran NetBSD for example on Sharp Zaurus, various SGI MIPS (some of which Linux worked less good or not at all on), DEC Alpha (at least a DS10L), and various Sun hardware. The orig. Sharp Zaurus firmware for that specific Zaurus was in Japanese, and the OpenBSD port I couldn't get to work. So I experimented with a lot of alternative firmware, mostly based on Linux.
Back then the package management was slightly different than the other two popular BSDs. They work together a lot, but there's also fractures. For example, FreeBSD and NetBSD don't have unveil, but they do have PF these days. ZFS has been stable on FreeBSD for ages, yet on OpenBSD it isn't available and on NetBSD its only in -CURRENT. Another difference could be amount of binary packages available, or amount of packages/ports (terminology differs per *BSD).
Another choice could be that the BSD license is more attractive than the more strict Linux-related licenses such as GPLv2 or GPLv3.
So yeah, in short, strong focus points of the 3 major BSDs:
Popularity (amount of software, size of community): FreeBSD Security: OpenBSD Portability: NetBSD DragonFly: I've never used this, ever. Can only speculate. I mean, I'm not sure the orig. focus still matters.
See also Wikipedia [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sy...
The strongest case today is probably for embedded use. build.sh is unlike any other OS build system, you can happily do development of a firmware on a Linux or OS X machine for instance and splat out results for a target device.
It's also one of the better choices for learning about OS development because of build.sh, small size, fairly clean codebase etc. And those skills are fairly transportable to Linux (which is a bit of a fire hose and probably not the easiest to start out on) or commercial operating systems like OS X or real time for a career path.
i learned a lot about linking and linker flags by working with it since it didnt use the "standard way", it used something simpler.
Often overlooked while discussing performance impact of context switching; context switching also applies to the FPU. There are two modes in which the OS performs FPU context switching: lazy and eager.
“lazy” FPU context switching leaves the previous context on the FPU until a different context gives it a set of instructions. This saves an unload on the FPU, since not all time splices require the FPU, you may see some performance gains under some application workloads.
“Eager” FPU context switching unloads FPU context whenever a time splice is finished. On a new time splice, the FPU context is reloaded. While this constant reloading of context sounds more expensive, it is optimized in hardware and almost never noticeable on modern architectures.
By default eager FPU is enabled in Linux. You can test its’ impact by passing the eagerfpu=on or eagerfpu=off boot flags (Linux).
Kudos to the NetBSD team for enabling/disabling eager FPU based on FPU model instead. This approach makes more sense to me.
Actually this release enables eagerfpu on all Intel CPUs, because of CVE-2018-3665 (lazyfpu side channel attack).
From the respective home pages, FreeBSD targets high performance, OpenBSD security, but it is not so clear to me what is the focus of NetBSD.
They differ in their development models, families of related operating systems (consider TrueOS, DragonFly, MirOS, et al.), ports and packages mechanisms, extent of kernel APIs, filesystems, and toolsets.
Just three out of many examples:
* NetBSD's and OpenBSD's "wscons" subsystem for kernel virtual terminals is significantly different to FreeBSD's "syscons"/"vt" subsystem.
* OpenBSD's packing list files for pkg are different to FreeBSD's manifest files for pkgng.
* On OpenBSD, /bin/sh is the Korn shell, which is also the superuser's standard interactive shell, and the base toolset contains things such as doas and rcctl. On FreeBSD, /bin/sh is the Almquist shell, the superuser's standard interactive shell is the C shell (and the "toor" user exists), things like sudo come from ports, and the command for manipulating rcconf files is sysrc. /bin/sh is the Almquist shell on NetBSD, and the PD Korn shell on MirOS.
[Edit: landisk platform are various NAS boxes, so nothing of comparable obsolescence as pmax]
The EdgeRouter devices are MIPS and people are still using Loongson laptops.
I don't use NetBSD, so perhaps I'm not in "the loop", and please forgive me if so, but;
- GCC 5.5 is only one major version higher than the oldest supported version; 6 or 7 would have been a better choice while you're banging out a whole new operating system release, 6 is still fully supported, 8 was released early this year. I understand newer compilers can sometimes introduce regressions in the build process for something as large as an entire operating system, but surely they could have tested it and gotten those bugs fixed if any?
- Similarly for Clang/LLVM 3.8.1 (Really? The oldest version of Clang that you can get on a modern Linux distro? Really?).
- OpenSSL 1.0.2 is only supported for another 17 months, 1.0.2k (the version they're shipping) is 3 versions older than the current 1.0.2o, and 1.0.2p is going to be released any day now. There are at least 4 CVEs patched between 1.0.2k and 1.0.2o; I hope they're applying those patches on top of 1.0.2k manually.
The comparison to "oldest clang/gcc you can get in a linux distro" is not right, you can get a lot of different versions as packages. this refers to the base compiler which is used to build everything. GCC 8.1 is available as a package for example.
As for the base GCC versions, NetBSD is a little conservative when updating, but keep in mind that it's doing this on a lot of architectures and problems arise. a complete transition to GCC 5.x was held back somewhat by a tricky mipseb-softfloat bug, GCC 6.x (in -current) was held back by a VAX ICE. Newer GCC kills ARMv4-nonthumb support.
If that is OpenSSL 1.0.2k it probably should be updated, yeah.
If it were free it wouldn't matter, but as you say its held up progress on architectures people actually use.
Is that still a thing? I've had netbsd on my weekend to-do list for years but just have never found enough time or motivation.
What's so great about netbsd?
http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?luactl+8+NetBSD-current http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?lua+4+NetBSD-current