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NetBSD 9.0 Coming Soon with Arm64, Updated ZFS, HW-Accelerated Virtualization (phoronix.com)
104 points by rbanffy 23 hours ago | hide | past | web | favorite | 24 comments





"NetBSD 9.0 is bringing with it support at long last for ARMv8/AArch64 64-bit ARM..."

Ironic that the BSD that's legendary for "running on a toaster" and whose slogan is "of course it runs NetBSD" is just now gaining support for these not-exactly-rare chips/architectures.


Hey, if you want netbsd to develop faster you can always donate to it. Edit- and if you have already: Awesome! I’m sure every bit helps.

[flagged]


To me, that reads like the commentor displayed plenty of clue. The use of 'the' here highlights NetBSD in particular while tacitly acknowledging that other BSDs may have gotten there first.

(edited for grammar)


I think not, the commentor states that all BSD's are multipurpose and "system promiscuous" as NetBSD is as it's infamous to be ported to alien platforms such as the Dreamcast.

NetBSD is a little weird, they have all these wonderful features and platforms, but I always had the feeling that things are implemented, almost never properly documented and rarely revisited in the future.

On NetBSD.org there is a link under documentation called: The guided. Neither ZFS nor NVMM seems to be documented. ZFS does have manual pages, but if you want to use NVMM you seem to be on your own.

There's a ton of interesting things in NetBSD, but you don't get the feeling that there's a coherent plan behind it all, like you do with both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.


It even can run as Xen dom0.

Well, that's software developer-led cowboy coding for you: prioritization based on weekend impulses rather than user-driven urgency. Also, the hobbyist and volunteer excuses don't fly because a professional effort with a saleprice of $0 has to compete with non-free and is subject to forking and loss of interest if it founders or stalls. Also, I don't think there are enough NetBSD devs. It's main users are some ISPs for network infrastructure IIRC.

BTW, FreeBSD doesn't even run usably on RPi4, it boots and that's about it. RPi3 support is somewhat better, but still worse than RPi2.

I hope all FOSS OSes, including Linux, get and stay organized and productive, but not heading toward a greater unbalanced power law distribution (pun unavoidable) monoculture where only Linux dominates, because then we're in real trouble.


Volunteers can only do so much. Money is a powerful motivator and hence Linux is head and shoulders above its brethren because it has vast corporate involvement. And it still can't compete with Windows (in terms of hardware support for desktops and workstations) which tells you how much the hardware and software industries are black boxes...

> Volunteers can only do so much.

Opinion: which is why I think the limited volunteer hours available for *BSD projects shouldn't be fragmented across NetBSD/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/DragonFly BSD.


Could you elaborate on hw support? In my experience Linux has much better support for old obscure hardware. Some things got drivers for WinXP, maybe Win 7, but not in 10. Windows can not even boot up on some older x86 processors. And windows on ARM...

> Well, that's software developer-led cowboy coding for you: prioritization based on weekend impulses rather than user-driven urgency.

This makes NetBSD a good choice if you intend to have fun developing an OS, but not a very good one if you want to make a living running software on said OS.


I hear that the biggest problem with FreeBSD/RPi is Broadcom.

> but I always had the feeling that things are implemented, almost never properly documented and rarely revisited in the future.

It's interesting, because if you look at OpenBSD, which forked from NetBSD in the '90s, you see a similarly spartan feature selection that can seem from the outside to be selected on developer whim and sometimes with priorities that don't match everyone who might want to use the system. However, rather than letting the features rot, they often just remove them. So for example, some years back they just went and removed Linux binary emulation; no doubt it was tremendously useful to some people but they weren't interested in maintaining it, so poof, one release it was just gone, and if you weren't paying close attention to the platform this news might have just come as a shock one release. In some ways that's more honest but if you happen to rely on one of these features it can feel destabilizing.

I write this not as a criticism per se; I have generally liked every *BSD system I have used.


These are totally valid points.

I'd just like to add that Qemu can use NVMM (-accel nvmm) in which case almost all of Qemu's existing documentation is still relevant. You do still have to build it yourself however since it's a WIP package[1]

Same with ZFS, I've not found it to be any different than the ZFS implementation I was using on SmartOS previously. I'm sure there are some differences lurking as it's not the latest version of ZFS but on the surface it's behaved as expected.

These are not excuses, NetBSD does not have a lot of resources, documentation could definitely be better. I'm just really excited about this release as ZFS and a type 2 hypervisor have been the 2 things I missed most in other operating systems and both have been working well for me.

[1] http://pkgsrc.se/wip/qemu-nvmm


Yeah the NetBSD documentation is moderately lacking, at least compared to FreeBSD (haven't used OpenBSD). At the very least, I've been able to get help with the less documented stuff on IRC.

I'll be giving this a try when it's out. How does the support and ecosystem compare to FreeBSD, and is there any armhf in sight, or technical challenges around adding it?

NetBSD 8.0 has support for armhf.

> How does the support and ecosystem compare to FreeBSD

Haven't used NetBSD much directly, but used pkgsrc (NetBSD ports) on dragonfly for several years before dragonfly switched back to running their own ports system.

The netbsd ports build system at that time was much cleaner (buildlink to ensure linking only to correct and explicitly managed libraries rather than 'whatever is in path') and the fact that there were pkgsrc 'release points' made it easier to have coherent/reproducible applications (not sure if things have changed on FreeBSD side). There were less ports, but generally most things were covered.

As for the OS side, not so sure (see dragonfly), but the times I have installed it seemed solid enough. Overall it feels more 'clean' whereas freebsd feels more 'cosy'. Not sure how to quantify that. The system build is cool because you can cross-build any system & toolchain, and this works even across OS's (e.g. build NetBSD/arm from linux)


NetBSD 9.0 supporting aarch64 is nice, I believe there's support inbound for the Pinebook Pro[0] as well.

[0] https://forum.pine64.org/showthread.php?tid=8659


Does it allow ZFS on root?

Sadly no.. https://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-9/NetBSD-9.0.html

> Updated ZFS. This is the first release with ZFS usable for daily use, but there is no support for booting from ZFS nor using ZFS as root filesystem yet.


I still have a MIPS-based IBM z50 laptop I got in the late 90's or early 2000's. It runs NetBSD (albeit an ancient version).

Also I think thos release will make UEFI installations easier on AMD64.

I recently, installed NetBSD 9RC1 onto a UEFI system. FWIW NetBSD 8.1 also installed onto that system.

Its supported UEFI, but with 8.1 I beleive you ahd tovmanually created the fi partition and such. I think the installer can handle that now



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