
NetBSD 8.0 released - algorithm314
https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-8/NetBSD-8.0.html
======
aaronmdjones
Am I the only one feeling a little bit disappointed with some of the software
versions listed there?

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.

~~~
nbsd4life
NetBSD 8.0 took longer to release than intended.

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.

~~~
slededit
Some of those architectures really need to be allowed to die. VAX was
discontinued in 2000 and was on life support since 1992 when it was superseded
by the Alpha.

If it were free it wouldn't matter, but as you say its held up progress on
architectures people actually use.

~~~
nbsd4life
The way netbsd does GCC updates gives a really wide margin for figuring out
compiler issues:

\- Copy existing compiler into gcc.old

\- Add new compiler as "gcc"

\- Switch architectures one by one

If one architecture is left behind it's not a big pressing issue, you have
until the next GCC update. They're done once 2-3 years hopefully so the GCC
VAX issue taking 6 months to resolve wasn't close to being a problem.

As for removing architecture support, as long as it builds without extreme
intervention, the non-VAX crowd is going to leave it alone. The VAX code is
mostly separate in its own directory so doesn't get in the way.

The people who care about VAX within NetBSD are very knowledgeable and it
would be a shame to alienate them without a good reason. They've contributed a
lot of non-VAX stuff too.

------
avar

        > USB stack rework, USB3 support added.
    

I didn't realize NetBSD was that far behind on some basic features like USB
support.

"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.

1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0)

~~~
cpeterso
Playing armchair software architect here, I wish NetBSD and FreeBSD would join
forces. The NetBSD developers could bring their portable architecture to
FreeBSD's more featureful kernel and userland. What other value does NetBSD
have over FreeBSD besides portability?

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. :)

~~~
scythe
The BSD organizations of today are more about researchers making an operating
system for OS research as a field and less hacker idealists trying to bring a
free OS to the people. Nearly all of the latter people go to Linux these days.

~~~
ripdog
If researchers are working on NetBSD, wouldn't it be receiving more novel
improvements? Everything in this changelog looks like stuff other OS's have
done before. How is that research?

~~~
mrpippy
NetBSD rump kernels come to mind, they've been around for a few years

------
zippie
This release of NetBSD disables eagerfpu on vulnerable FPU’s.

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.

~~~
PeCaN
>This release of NetBSD disables eagerfpu.

Actually this release enables eagerfpu on all Intel CPUs, because of
CVE-2018-3665 (lazyfpu side channel attack).

~~~
qop
This is correct, thanks for fighting the disinformation!

------
kev009
NetBSD was my first BSD and OS development experience in my teens. I'm fairly
entrenched in the FreeBSD camp for commercial reasons now after a very long
run as a Linux user, but there is some nice security stuff in here and happy
to see NetBSD chugging along! Congrats!

------
occamrazor
What are the distinguishing features of NetBSD in comparison to OpenBSD and
FreeBSD?

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.

~~~
wslh
NetBSD supports many platforms:
[https://www.netbsd.org/ports/](https://www.netbsd.org/ports/)

~~~
tbrock
I always thought it was peculiar that the “net” one was not the security
focused one.

~~~
Cyphase
From the NetBSD About page[0][1]:

> Why the name?

> The “BSD” in our name is an obvious recognition of our heritage as a
> derivative of 4.4BSD and 386BSD.

> Our contributors communicate primarily via email and Internet-based chat
> systems; many of us have never met each other in person. We also use a
> remote source code management system called CVS which enables a large number
> of developers to do independent work on the same source tree easily. We
> believe that the Internet was an enabling technology that made NetBSD
> possible. The “Net” in our name was thus chosen as a tribute to the
> Internet.

Also, just as an aside, NetBSD was released in 1993, long before network
security had anywhere near the attention it has today.

[0] [https://www.netbsd.org/about/](https://www.netbsd.org/about/)

[1]
[https://www.netbsd.org/about/#content_name](https://www.netbsd.org/about/#content_name)

~~~
holistio
wow this must be a good few years old

describing remote software development as if it was novelty

~~~
bitofhope
First release of NetBSD was in 1993. It was more novel back then.

------
somethingsimple
Does anyone here on HN have experience running NetBSD as their desktop OS?

~~~
rjsw
I'm typing this on a desktop running NetBSD.

~~~
emgee_1
Can you elaborate a bit? What kind of DE?

Openbsd user here:-)

~~~
rjsw
What do you count as a DE ?

Right now I'm running mwm, emacs, Firefox, NetBeans, a couple of PDF viewers
and lots of xterms.

~~~
fierarul
So, you also have a functioning OpenJDK 8 or so to run NetBeans?

I assume this means an x86 machine, correct?

~~~
rjsw
Yes this is on NetBSD/amd64, with a native OpenJDK 8.

OpenJDK 8 will build for arm as well but it doesn't have a JIT.

------
krylon
Wasn't NetBSD 8 supposed to have zfs? Last time I read something about it, it
sounded like it was practically finished. But the release notes do not mention
it at all.

~~~
nbsd4life
No those changes are in -current, and still a bit rough around the edges but
much better.

~~~
krylon
Thank you! So, maybe next time... ;-)

------
dfox
PaX support on pmax? There is only one reaction I have for that: why? (With
"because we can" probably being the reason)

[Edit: landisk platform are various NAS boxes, so nothing of comparable
obsolescence as pmax]

~~~
rjsw
The pmax is supported by several emulators, if you want to develop PaX for
MIPS then it is as good a starting point as anything else.

The EdgeRouter devices are MIPS and people are still using Loongson laptops.

~~~
dfox
I somewhat realize that availability of good pmax emulators is the reason.
MIPS being far from dead platform is not that much relevant as the
announcement explicitly singles out pmax and does not mention platforms like
evbmips or sgimips.

------
8bitsrule
A podcast I recently heard - hosted by long-experienced Linux hands - reported
that installing BSD was a nightmare. Some discussion of which distros avoid
that nightmare might be helpful.

~~~
mkirschner
I started playing with OpenBSD 6.3 as a desktop (actually laptop) OS a couple
of months ago. Installation was very straightforward. In my case I used the
whole disk, no dual boot.

Here's a tribute/introduction written by Derek Sivers:

[https://sivers.org/openbsd](https://sivers.org/openbsd)

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.

~~~
keithpeter
I've just improvised my way through a netBSD install on an old thinkpad X60
with 1Gb ram and a mechanical hard drive, whole disk, defaults mostly. Seems
generally quite similar to OpenBSD (which makes sense given OpenBSD is a fork
from netBSD).

$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.

~~~
keithpeter
Alas, can't install many packages, dependency errors. Example below for
texlive-collection-all

    
    
         fmtutil [INFO]: Not selected formats: 29
         fmtutil [INFO]: Total formats: 29
         fmtutil [INFO]: exiting with status 0
         pkg_add: no pkg found for 'tex-pgf-[0-9]*', sorry.
         pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgf-[0-9]*
         pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-pgfplots-[0-9]*
         pkg_add: Can't install dependency tex-milog-[0-9]*
         pkg_add: Can't install dependency texlive-collection-langgerman-[0-9]*
         pkg_add: 1 package addition failed
    

This could just be mirror flakiness, $PKG_PATH is resolving to

    
    
         http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/i386/8.0/All
    

There appears to be no native binary for LibreOffice. Investigating.

~~~
rjsw
Building packages can't start until the final release build of the base
Operating System has been done, things like LibreOffice depend on a lot of
other things. Maybe check again in a couple of days.

~~~
keithpeter
Cool, will try again in a bit. Looking very interesting so far.

------
vasili111
Have you used NetBSD and if yes:

1\. Why did you choose it?

2\. What are your impressions?

~~~
krylon
This may be a little rusty, but from ~2002 to ~2008, I ran my modest home
server on NetBSD.

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.

------
Crontab
Yay! I love the smell of fresh Netbsd in the morning. Seriously though,
awesome news.

------
collinmanderson
Does anyone know what version of Python is installed by default?

------
qop
I remember hearing netbsd had support for using Lua to write network drivers
and then never heard anything else.

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?

~~~
sitzkrieg
It's still there, you can create modules with it. there are some examples in
sources

[http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?luactl+8+NetBSD-
current](http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?luactl+8+NetBSD-current)
[http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?lua+4+NetBSD-
current](http://netbsd.gw.com/cgi-bin/man-cgi?lua+4+NetBSD-current)

