
What to expect in NetBSD 7 - fcambus
http://netbsd-news.me/NetBSD7/
======
jmcneill
The article is a few weeks old now. One change since it was written --
Raspberry Pi 2 SMP support has been added to -current and is expected to be
part of the 7.0 release.

~~~
feld
Hooray! I now have a use for my Pi2!

------
bch
The accelerated graphics are heaven-sent (thanks @Riastradh). As much as
having non-accelerated gfx was frustrating before, NetBSD was too charming to
give up as my daily driver. Anybody who's curious to jump in should do it!
Exciting times for a rock-steady well-thought-out OS...

~~~
webaholic
Is there anything which might catch the eye of a regular linux user? (FreeBSD
users would like to point out ZFS, jails etc., OpenBSD users usually point out
pf/security and DragonFlyBSD users point out Hammer FS and an inviting
community).

~~~
bch
That's a thoughtful question.

Let me ramble...

1) I'd say the "fit and finish" is remarkable. But everybody probably likes
what they've got with their OS, so maybe that's not worth much.

2) If you're into firewalling/networking, it does have the venerable ipf,
OpenBSDs pf, and the shiny-new npf for packet filtering -- and the network
stack that held the Internet "land speed" record. Twice[0]

3) there is remarkable kernel research that is going on, that research makes
the kernel available to _YOU_ [1][2]

4) pkgsrc is topnotch. And others use it too, so like the famously portable
OS, the 3rd party software is tested in the realworld on disparate
machines.[3][4]

5) The community is small enough, friendly enough, and smart enough that it's
simple to get into and has a high signal-to-noise ratio.[5]

6) Other interesting security[6], virtualization[7]

7) Good documentation, good code (forged by years of portability -- getting
code running on so many different architectures doesn't happen by accident,
and the lessons are carried on. And to be clear, unlike Linux, the NetBSD code
that runs on (eg) a Vax is from the same codebase than runs on an 8-way
amd64... versus (afaik) Linux where ea. target is pretty much a rewrite.)

8) I could go on... if you have more questions, don't hesitate, or better,
drop in on #netbsd IRC channel on Freenode[8].

[0]
[http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html#internet2-landsp...](http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html#internet2-landspeed)

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

[2] [https://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/](https://wiki.netbsd.org/rumpkernel/)

[3] [http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/](http://pkgsrc.joyent.com/)

[4] [https://github.com/minix3/pkgsrc](https://github.com/minix3/pkgsrc)

[5] [https://www.netbsd.org/community/](https://www.netbsd.org/community/)

[6]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veriexec](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Veriexec)

[7]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#Virtualization](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NetBSD#Virtualization)

[8] irc.freenode.net

Edit: Match my parens, s/to/too/, link to freenode.

~~~
caf
_And to be clear, unlike Linux, the NetBSD code that runs on (eg) a Vax is
from the same codebase than runs on an 8-way amd64... versus (afaik) Linux
where ea. target is pretty much a rewrite._

That is not really an accurate way to characterise how the different Linux
target architectures are supported in the source. As you would expect, the
vast majority of the code is in fact shared.

~~~
bch
Agreed -- and people are proud (NetBSD) or defensive (Linux) of the
characterization I made -- and while of _course_ every single line isn't re-
written, and presumably Linux kernal devs will talk to ea. other, or perhaps
one person maintains multiple architectures and therefore gets automatic
code/idea sharing, NetBSD goes through pains to make sure all the supported
platforms' origin is the one, single repository that is NetBSD.

~~~
caf
That's really not how it is. For example, here the one single implementation
of the madvise() syscall in Linux:

[http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.g...](http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git/tree/mm/madvise.c?id=v4.0#n458)

This entire file is compiled on all architectures with MMUs (madvise() is
pointless on architectures without MMUs and hence without virtual memory).
Everything architecture-specific in this file is abstracted away by macros
like PAGE_SIZE and PAGE_SHIFT.

------
mintplant
[http://netbsd-news.me/](http://netbsd-news.me/) seems to be misconfigured. It
returns a page from [http://www.saveosx.org/](http://www.saveosx.org/).

~~~
yrmt
fixed that, thanks for pointing it out

------
leetNightshade
I didn't realize NetBSD was playing the catch up game with what other distros
have had for some time, like ZFS. That's disappointing.

~~~
feld
What's a "distro" have to do with BSD? The only BSD that has ZFS is FreeBSD.

~~~
leetNightshade
Well it seems I don't use 'distro' properly. I guess it only concerns Linux,
but I personally don't see any reason it can't be used for OS flavors in
general. Hell, the website distrowatch includes BSD and everything in between.
Is there a similar phrase for BSD variants?

And ZFS is on a lot more than just FreeBSD, even if it's not official. ZFS
started on OpenSolaris, not on FreeBSD. OS X has a port. Then FreeBSD got it's
port. Linux has a stable port. And there are NAS OS's shipping with it like
FreeNAS, TrueNAS, and a device called ReadyDATA by Netgear that has it.

I was mostly surprised at this: "The good stuff that probably won’t make it to
NetBSD 7: Stable ZFS." So you're telling me ZFS isn't considered stable on
NetBSD? It seems to be that it's pretty stable on quite a few other platforms,
some mentioned above.

~~~
feld
Linux distros share a kernel -- the Linux kernel. Maybe different versions,
maybe a few different patches here and there -- but unquestionably the same
kernel.

In BSD world they're completely separate OSes. Their kernels have evolved
differently. They may have similar ancestry. You can't just copy and paste
code from one to another and expect it to work.

