“The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 3.0 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 3.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in stability, performance, networking, security, also includes support for two new platforms (iyonix and hp700), and many new peripherals. Far reaching improvements to the network stack will not only provide better performance but also make NetBSD an excellent choice for a VPN gateway. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) framework adds more flexibility to NetBSD’s user management and simplifies integration into heterogeneous networks. The kernel, libraries and utilities can now handle filesystems larger than two terabytes, and support for Xen 2.0 allows hosting many virtual servers on a single machine.” Read the full changelog here, and downloads are here.
Wow, nice work NetBSD team. It seems like it was just a little while ago that 2.0 was released. Oh wait, wasn’t it?
If I can ever find a second reason to buy an Intel system, I want to install NetBSD compiled with the Intel Compiler on it. Then again, I’ll need reason other than NetBSD.
Given the fact that NetBSD more or less runs on your toaster, I’m hard pressed to come up with what HW you’re using that it would not support. Just free up space for a partition and dual-boot. Or install QEMU (or VMware Player) and try it out.
This is really good news. I was waiting for this release of NetBSD, congrats to the developers again.
Congratulations to the NetBSD team!
Would be nice to see how the new NetBSD and FreeBSD compare to each other and other systems.
I was also wondering whether the BSDs will stick with FFS, or there will be another file system coming to replace it. I am not entirely sure, but I thought that there were problems having FFS on partitions over 1 TB. Also if it continues to be the standard file system, will journaling be implemented for it?
I wonder how well NetBSD performs on multi-processor systems.
UFS2 removes all those filesystem barrieres. There’s no issue with creating/using multi-terabyte filesystems.
Correct, the creating step aint the problem but fscking multiple fully loaded >1TB filesystems is. Yes indeed background checks are possible but costs huge amounts of memory while doing it’s job. Another issue arises when your server crashes *while* fscking.. My experience has been that it takes 45 minutes / 1TB filesystem. I’am not saying UFS2 is bad but can never use it because of the side effects when then go bad. As always YMMV.
Damn my dirty mind! After reading OSNews and Slashdot for some time I started to perceive the word “fscking” solely as an euphemism for another word, and then think “WTF?” when it’s used in its original meaning 🙂
If I remember things correctly journaling isn’t needed for their filesystems.
Edited 2005-12-24 03:02
While softdeps are handy (they give you the speed of async mounts, with much of the safety of sync mounts), most BSD users would like to see FFS/UFS journaling because fsck takes too much time on large disks now. AFAIK Wasabi Systems has a journaling implementation of FFS, but it is not available as opensource.
Some FreeBSD developers are porting XFS to FreeBSD, which is interesting to the average desktop user. But in the end we need a proper BSD licensed journaling filesystem for well known reasons.
(Yes I know that there is LFS.)
Some FreeBSD developers are porting XFS to FreeBSD, which is interesting to the average desktop user. But in the end we need a proper BSD licensed journaling filesystem for well known reasons.
DragonFly is planning on starting a port of ZFS in March or april
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2005-12/msg00040.ht…
and of course for more info on ZFS
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/whatis/
There’s been talk on the DragonFlyBSD mailing lists of porting Sun’s ZFS [1] in the next version; that would certainly be an improvement.
[1]
http://www.opensolaris.org/os/community/zfs/
I hope they soon get support for Xen 3
pkgsrc has been freezed on last 12 december so binaries packages for 3.0 should be released soon.
Keep up the good work NetBSD.
p.s.
They are still using XFree86, part of the base-system.
Any news when they will ship as default with xorg ?
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-x11/2005/12/15/0000.html
no need to install xfree86 at all – just install a base system withouot the x server and libs – which is very easy to deselect .. then once up – use the pkgsrc to isntall X.org – and you can set a system wide setting to make things depend on xorg not cf86
Xen support is VERY cool, but why should I choose NetBSD over FreeBSD? Seriously, I don’t see anything spectacular.
This is *not* a troll
I sort of feel the same way, although if you got weird hardware then NetBSD would be the way to go.
Also, alot of good code comes out of NetBSD and makes it way over to FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and even DragonFlyBSD. When it comes to nice, clean code NetBSD is it!
I’ve read that Uni-Processor performance is killer on NetBSD, but I don’t know how that fairs now. Then again, what’s a few milliseconds here and there. Big deal, right?
Anyway, even though I’m not a NetBSD user myself I do respect that it does have it’s place in the computing world.
Kudos to the NetBSD team!
“…why should I choose NetBSD over FreeBSD?”
I dunno either. Was wondering the same thing. Other than “Of course it runs on NetBSD” – what advantages are there? I mean, if I don’t have some relatively obscure architecture that FreeBSD/Linux/OpenBSD don’t support, then why would I want to run NetBSD? Seriously – just curious. I’m not trolling either.
For various reasons:
– Emphasis on portability usually leads to a strong emphasis on code quality.
– The NetBSD operating system is more minimalistic. I personally find this more elegant (but YMMV).
– NetBSD has veriexec, systrace and cgd. If you want one of these features, NetBSD is a natural choice.
Both NetBSD and FreeBSD are great operating systems, and I think it is largely a matter of taste which one prefers. So, try them both, and see what works best for you.
I don’t speak for all NetBSD users, but here are some reasons why I use NetBSD over Linux or FreeBSD:
VS. Linux
– Simple and Clean: I find NetBSD is very well layed out and organized, at least compared to something like Debian /Ubuntu, which still sometimes confuses me. Even compared to something like Arch, NetBSD is better layed out (no /opt folder).
– RC.D vs SysInit V: Personally, I find the NetBSD rc.d init system a lot more straight forward than the one on Debian systems. I do like Arch’s rc.d system though, which is inspired in part by the BSD RC.D system.
– Fast: Subjectively, NetBSD feels a bit faster than Ubuntu or Debian. Arch feels about the same.
– Familiarity: I feel more comfortable with a BSD system. I tend to get lost on RedHat and Debian systems (especially when trying to edit a system config file), but I can find my way around a BSD system.
– Man Pages: BSD man pages are a lot more thorough and up to date than the Linux counterparts.
– Sysctl vs /proc: Just a preference.
– Kernel: compiling a NetBSD kernel (or a FreeBSD one) is much easier than with a Linux one. I actually understand what I’m doing when I do it with NetBSD.
VS. FreeBSD
– PkgSrc: NetBSD’s pkgsrc is more stable and smoother for me than the ports system. Yes, I know I can run pkgsrc on FreeBSD.
– RC.D system is better supported on NetBSD than on FreeBSD
– NetBSD is a bit more lightweight than FreeBSD
– Familiarity: Of the BSDs, I have more experience with NetBSD
As you can see, a lot of this is subjective. If you don’t have a willingness to learn, then don’t bother with NetBSD. It will just frustrate you and make you hate it, which is unfortunate. Here are some reasons for you to NOT use NetBSD
– Driver support: no proprietary drivers, no DRI, no NDISWrapper (yet, but Google’s Summer of Code is remedying this); that said, if NetBSD does support your hardware, it automagically works. Period. And it works well.
– Software support: you will have to install a linux emulation layer to have stuff like Java or Macromedia flash. I don’t care for either of those, but some people do. Also, with the recent move to HAL for projects like GNOME, you will see a lot of things unsupported on NetBSD (this goes for any non-Linux OS though, as HAL is pretty Linux specific). What I mean, is that Gnome works fine, but a lot of applets, practically hardwares specific ones don’t work because they depend on HAL, and HAL only works on Linux. This is a general trend, as most OSS software tends to be targeted for Linux
– Compiling: If you hate Gentoo, you’ll probably hate NetBSD. Technically, you don’t have to compile everything as there are binary packages, but the same can be said about Gentoo; most NetBSD users, in my experience, build their own packages using pkgsrc. That said, I have my main box build packages and roll them out to my other machines.
– WWW community support: Althought this has improved with more blogs and forums, the main support line for NetBSD is in the mailing lists. There isn’t a big forum or wiki like there is for Arch or Ubuntu.
PS. I run NetBSD on my laptop and my family’s file server, Arch on my headless old laptop (MPD server), and Ubuntu on my tower and most of my family’s machines. I love them all, but NetBSD the most for sentimental and sometimes technical reasons (it was my first successful OSS OS setup).
VS. Linux
– Simple and Clean: I find NetBSD is very well layed out and organized, at least compared to something like Debian /Ubuntu, which still sometimes confuses me. Even compared to something like Arch, NetBSD is better layed out (no /opt folder).
After starting to learn the BSDs, and coming from fedora. the BSDs layed out, are indeed beter then any linux distro out there.
When I first started playing around with NetBSD, I was a bit underwhelmed to be honest. My response was kind of, “this is all there is?”
Since that time, I’ve grown to appreciate the simplicity that comes along with NetBSD. It’s nothing fancy, but it does everything it’s inteded to do well.
Is FreeBSD faster? Maybe, though there are benchmarks that show otherwise for some things, especially on single-processor systems. FreeBSD is probably faster on machines with more than two processors. I’ve also had stability problems with FreeBSD >4.
Is OpenBSD more secure? Probably, but NetBSD does a pretty good job staying on top of security threats; heck, they don’t even enable SSH out of the box. NetBSD and OpenBSD’s codebases are still close enough that NetBSD can often import OpenBSD’s nifty networking improvements (e.g. CARP, PF) more quickly than FreeBSD can. Performance-wise, NetBSD smokes OpenBSD.
Is Linux more buzzword-compliant? Of course it is, but for experienced Unix administrators, the changes the major distributions have undertaken in order to impress Windows converts get in the way. I feel somewhat lost when dealing with Fedora these days (just read their fstab sometime). Even Debian has things in Sarge that serve to annoy — essentially requiring initrd on x86 and ppc, and their borked Exim and Apache setups drive me nuts. If I *had* to use Linux in a production environment, I think I’d probably still choose Debian, or Slackware with pkgsrc for package management. I run Gentoo on my desktop at home, but I really feel like my case doesn’t have enough blue lights inside when I do (and it needs a wing on top, as well as a Type-R sticker). Actually, it’s because setting up MythTV there is pretty simple, and my hardware really demands a custom kernel (funky on-board LAN chip).
So, in the end, NetBSD kind of won me over by default. Where I’ve installed it, it runs unobtrusively and reliably. No fuss, no hassles, just a good quality free Unix.
Is there reasonable ACPI suspend/resume support?
> Is there reasonable ACPI suspend/resume support?
well, no
and you probably know it
and you probably know why
I guess I don’t know why.
What do you mean? Also is FreeBSD better?
because the vendors implement a crippled version of ACPI, that works with Microsoft’s implementation, that is crippled :}
so neither the vendors neither microsoft follow the standard, and open source devs only have the standard available to build the ACPI drivers
and the vendors do not release source or binary drivers to linux, netbsd, freebsd, nor any other alternative OS
and freebsd or netbsd, depends on your taste and on your needs…
I asked the original question.
BTW: Linux and FreeBSD ACPI are pretty good on my computer but NetBSD’s wasn’t when I checked. No need to get defensive.
Since the BSD developers don’t care about the GPL, I don’t care bout them !
you are a f–ktard.
The GPL does not suite everyone so its good that there are alternative opensource licences.
Yeah, it’s such a sin to give stuff away for free and for any purpose or reason with little to no restrictions applied. That’s just plain evil!
My reason for NetBSD…pkgsrc
I am compiling mplayer for slackware as I speak…
I used this guide to get it installed
http://users.piuha.net/martti/comp/slackware/slackware.html
Thanks for the link! 🙂
I didn’t know that pkgsrc can be used on Linux. The best things in BSDs are the “package managers”. I’ve only used ports in FreeBSD but I hope pkgsrc is great too. Need to get this working on my Slackware box.
I’m gald to see 3.0, congrats! Do BSDs only Netwotk /system administrator jobs exist? can’t stand OS that depend too much on the GUI, like Windows and many linux distos
YABSD = Yet Another BSD
Untill this BSD can be installed much EZ’er than what it is right now, then I don’t give a hoot if the Ver’s go all the way to 9.0
I installing linux is so much EZ’er, But I desire the speed that BSD has. Well all I can say is remember what this ole boy is tellin ye. BSD yet go’in no wheres on the DeskTop. Fight and blow snot every way and any way, I just don’t care. YABSD .. yeah right!~ duha.
<OT>It just feels nice when you find a post with a language that instantly makes you feel that smirk coming on. Your point will be considered silly because of the way you write and especially because of the words you use. It is NOT precieved as “cool, hip or funky” to say “EZ’er”. DeskTop seems like a trademark whereas desktop is what most OS’es use.</OT>
If you have issues installing an OS then THAT OS is not for you PERIOD. Installing the various BSDs are dead easy and if you can’t solve any confusion by RTFM then there is Win or OSX.
For your desktop there is PCBSD which is very nice but try to pry FreeBSD from my servers you lamo and you end up dead ;D (j/k for those that don’t know what smilies REALLY means, and sadly that is the clear majority)
Well all I can say is remember what this ole boy is tellin ye. BSD yet go’in no wheres on the DeskTop.
Too bad that Linux on the desktop isn’t going anywhere either.
If you have installed Slackware or Debian (Woody and older), then installing NetBSD or FreeBSD is a breeze. As for being viable on the desktop, they both are but it depends on what you mean by “desktop”.
NetBSD’s list of supported architectures is impressive. How Linux compares is irrelevant, IMO. NetBSD is a smaller group of developers, making it much more impressive.
I suppose there are few people who have a deep understanding of the true nature of more than one or two hardware architectures, and skill enough to create an OS that works well on most of them.
I am a bit worried though, that the current lemmings march towards AMD64 and multicore will have a bad effect on NetBSD and its wide hardware support. I think that outside of i386, amd64 and macppc, the NetBSD community is spread thin. I would love to be proven wrong about this! (I watch only a few of the mips mailing-lists.)
BTW, NetBSD’s installer is pretty nice, old-school and all. Graphical installers are nice, especially for interactive partitioning, but apart from that they are overrated, IMO.
I love and use NetBSD on i386. Fine. But stop spreading this ‘Oh So Portable’ nonsense. Even on a widely spread architecture like macppc, NetBSD is deeply limited. I mean, only one console? Are you kidding me? Yes I know we have ‘screen’, but still… If they can’t manage to make virtual terminals for macppc, I don’t even want to see those other exotic architectures they claim to support…
On the other hand, Linux (which doesn’t seem to care too much about heavy ‘Oh So Portable’ marketing), runs perfectly on my ibook.
What am I missing?
I total agree with you! In 90% of the time people speak with no knowledge of the thinks they believe they knows, with no explanations.
I use FreeBSD the most other than my OS X
Because of HAL and Gnome’s use of it, I have started to look for alternatives. Gnome seems broken and I am unable to get some of the features in FreeBSD (power management for one). Is this an issue with all BSDs? Is Gnome becoming too Linux specific or have the other OSs not been able to keepup with the HAL development?
If you like NetBSD(R)s installer,
you’ll like the one of MirBSD/OpenBSD
even more… it could be used on a true
teletype terminal (i.e. printer and
keyboard)… no progress bar.
But in contrast to NetBSD(R), the
MirBSD ramdisk has tab completion
and a huge set of useful tools on
it (that’s why it’s that big).
True, i386 only at the moment, but
the freshly released #8 could be
ported to sparc as the last formal
release #7 ran on sparc as well.
Just try to do it with only two
developers…
Browser: Lynx/2.8.6dev.16-MirOS (compatible; MSIE 6.0; UNIX) libwww-FM/2.14 SSL-MM/1.4.1 OpenSSL/0.9.7g
“The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 3.0 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 3.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in stability, performance, networking, security, also includes support for two new platforms (iyonix and hp700), and many new peripherals. Far reaching improvements to the network stack will not only provide better performance but also make NetBSD an excellent choice for a VPN gateway. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) framework adds more flexibility to NetBSD’s user management and simplifies integration into heterogeneous networks. The kernel, libraries and utilities can now handle filesystems larger than two terabytes, and support for Xen 2.0 allows hosting many virtual servers on a single machine.” Read the full changelog here, and downloads are here.
>
>
FOR HOW MANY FREAKING *YEARS* NOW HAS PAM AND OTHER SUCH SOFTWARE BEEN INCLUDED IN REDHAT AND OTHER LINUX DISTROS?!?
AND PEOPLE ARE SUPPOSED TO BE IMPRESSED BY NET AND THE OTHER BSD’S?
HA!
THE ONLY THING IMPRESSIVE ABOUT THE BSD’S ARE THE NUMBER OF *COMPLETE* MORONS WHO RUN AROUND CLAIMING HOW SUPERIOR IT IS -MOST OF THEM BEING USERS OF SCO UNIX!
maybe its cause PAM totally sucks as a system?
just maybe
oh wait, you wont beleive that cause you are retarded
… this is the main reason I use NetBSD! Once setup I like my machines to keep running, unless I want to add a new feature/application.
And as someone has stated before, when a feature is added to NetBSD it is well thought out, and engineered into the system, not simply welded on as a hack.
As for the multi-platform support, NetBSD has multi-platform support from the same codebase, just cross build with a different switch.
There are some cool features too, like rc.d, veriexec, systrace. Check
http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/formal-3/NetBSD-3.0.html
I am a bit confused about the release statement “kernel, libraries and utilities can now handle filesystems larger than two terabytes”. NetBSD has been able to handle filesystems up to 4TB on 32/64-bit systems for quite some time. Perhaps there has been some small change to a couple of non-FFS filesystem utils.