10 ms·

NetBSD 8.0 released

227 points by algorithm314 8y ago

avar 8y ago
> 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
- PeCaN 8y ago
  Most of the machines NetBSD runs on don't have USB 3 ports.
  - hnarn 8y ago
    Also, isn't 3.0 fully backward compatible with 2.0? I imagine this would affect how critical people would classify support to be developed, if everything already works, just slower.
    - floatboth 8y ago
      It's backwards compatible on the device side (you can plug a 3.0 device into a 2.0 port and work at lower speed). But I really doubt that you can use an xHCI controller through EHCI drivers.
      - pgeorgi 8y ago
        > But I really doubt that you can use an xHCI controller through EHCI drivers. Indeed, you can't. xHCI subsumes all USB operation and doesn't need companion controllers, but presents a _very_ different interface. That's different from the USB1/2 transition where USB2 was a separate controller that could take over the ports from a USB1 controller, giving them back if a USB1 device is attached. Some boards/chipsets do that with EHCI and xHCI to support operating systems without xhci drivers, but that's getting rarer.
        kqr 8y ago
        I'm fascinated this has worked so well in all operating systems I've used that I've never had reason to acquire this knowledge. I'm simultaneously disappointed that this is not (as far as I can tell) widely known information. It sounds like the thing that may prevent you from going on goose chase if you ever need to debug it.
        pgeorgi 8y ago
        As soon as you write an USB controller driver, you'll stumble over that quickly. The EHCI and XHCI specs are freely available and describe this in detail. It's just that only few people need to write such drivers. :-) As for it working so well, that's mostly on the EE side: they were _very_ careful to provide this hardware based routing with defaults that make sure that old OSes continue to work while new OSes (or new drivers for old OSes) can make use of the new controllers.
  - agumonkey 8y ago
    and usb3 is such a large piece of interface I'm not sad netbsd is taking its sweet time to make it solid.
    - Scarbutt 8y ago
      just in time it's beginning to be replaced.
      - agumonkey 8y ago
        who's trying to eat usb3 ?
        danieldk 8y ago
        - USB 3.1 - USB-C power delivery - USB-C alternate modes, such as DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3
        agumonkey 8y ago
        aight, I conflated all in usb3
        arthurfm 8y ago
        Thanks to the USB 3.0 Promoter Group, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (a.k.a. USB 3.0) devices have been rebranded as USB 3.2 Gen 1x1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0#USB_3.2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0#USB_3.2 The USB 3.2 standard is backward compatible with USB 3.1/3.0 and USB 2.0. It defines the following transfer modes: USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 - SuperSpeed, 5 Gbit/s (0.625 GB/s) data signaling rate over 1 lane using 8b/10b encoding, the same as USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.0. USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 - SuperSpeed+, new 10 Gbit/s (1.25 GB/s) data rate over 2 lanes using 8b/10b encoding. USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 - SuperSpeed+, 10 Gbit/s (1.25 GB/s) data rate over 1 lane using 128b/132b encoding, the same as USB 3.1 Gen 2. USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 - SuperSpeed+, new 20 Gbit/s (2.5 GB/s) data rate over 2 lanes using 128b/132b encoding. USB 3.2 is supported with the default Windows 10 USB drivers and in Linux Kernel 4.18.
  - cpeterso 8y ago
    But is that a cause or effect of NetBSD not supporting USB3?
    - Fnoord 8y ago
      That was true before USB3 even existed, but USB3 could be part of a greater set of features which suffer from a similar problem. A domino effect perhaps, or the result of finding a niche?
    - PeCaN 8y ago
      A lot of NetBSD platforms predate USB3, so presumably not an effect. Keep in mind it runs on very old stuff like the Dreamcast and OMRON LUNA and very small stuff like tiny ARM boards and MIPS routers.
- donbright 8y ago
  well, toasters didn't start having USB 3 until recently...
- ahoka 8y ago
  TBH I never had or needed any USB3 device.
  - xxpor 8y ago
    You've never used a flash drive in the past 8 years?
    - Narishma 8y ago
      Those work fine with USB 2.0, they're just slower.
    - IshKebab 8y ago
      Most are still USB 2. (Thumb drives that is, not full USB hard disks.)
    - ahoka 8y ago
      No. I just share files over broadband now.
- brynet 8y ago
  Linux also had USB 3 draft support before there were even any consumer products on the market. Intel engineers wrote the XHCI driver for Linux, well before developer documentation was available publicly. 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.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        NetBSD rump kernels come to mind, they've been around for a few years
    - nbsd4life 8y ago
      It isn't a zero sum game with a finite number of FOSS idealists. Linux's popularity grew rapidly in what were previously proprietary software users. It didn't take away that much from BSDs. Linux and other FOSS software becoming popular makes using NetBSD a lot more convenient, not less. There's a top tier FOSS browser that will accept NetBSD related patches, several really good document editors, graphical tools. We can even take some driver code from Linux itself.
  - kqr 8y ago
    Just based on history and culture, that sounds like a really awkward combination. It's trying to merge "run on every imaginable platform at all costs" with "fuck all the platforms and let's concentrate on building a rock solid operating system for the x86 because that's the only thing people use anyway."
zippie 8y ago
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 8y ago
  >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 8y ago
    This is correct, thanks for fighting the disinformation!
- tarlinian 8y ago
  Lazy FPU state restoration almost never makes sense on modern CPUs (regardless of security issues) because the cost of an interrupt for state restoration is so high and because "FPU" registers are used for a lot more than just FP calculations these days.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
somethingsimple 8y ago
Does anyone here on HN have experience running NetBSD as their desktop OS?
- rjsw 8y ago
  I'm typing this on a desktop running NetBSD.
  - emgee_1 8y ago
    Can you elaborate a bit? What kind of DE? Openbsd user here:-)
    - rjsw 8y ago
      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.
      - emgee_1 8y ago
        Well if you are using emacs, like I do, what else do you need? Ok maybe a browser outside of emacs and a pdf viewer:-) And a tmux session somewhere. Someone once said: I just need a bootloader for emacs :-)
      - fierarul 8y ago
        So, you also have a functioning OpenJDK 8 or so to run NetBeans? I assume this means an x86 machine, correct?
        rjsw 8y ago
        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.
  - na85 8y ago
    Which laptop? How's battery life? Does s3/s0 suspend and resume work?
krylon 8y ago
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 8y ago
  No those changes are in -current, and still a bit rough around the edges but much better.
  - krylon 8y ago
    Thank you! So, maybe next time... ;-)
- rnd0 8y ago
  I just now installed 8.0-release in vmware, with two drives, and used zpool to create a new zfs filesystem. I can't vouch for how optimized it is; but zfs is definitely there. https://gyazo.com/0f6261cf415b85010fcaa92557d783b4 https://gyazo.com/0f6261cf415b85010fcaa92557d783b4
  - krylon 8y ago
    Well, what do you know? The command is there indeed. I had only read the release notes, where mention of zfs is conspicuously absent.
vasili111 8y ago
Have you used NetBSD and if yes: 1. Why did you choose it? 2. What are your impressions?
- krylon 8y ago
  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.
- Fnoord 8y ago
  Yeah I have, but that happened 1 or 2 decades ago so take it with a grain of salt. 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_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sy...
occamrazor 8y ago
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 8y ago
  NetBSD supports many platforms: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/ https://www.netbsd.org/ports/
  - tbrock 8y ago
    I always thought it was peculiar that the “net” one was not the security focused one.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
    - Cyphase 8y ago
      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 8y ago
        wow this must be a good few years old describing remote software development as if it was novelty
kev009 8y ago
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!
dfox 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
  - nbsd4life 8y ago
    it's probably a mistake that it got enabled there, I don't think the architecture has support for it. Even the edgerouter shouldn't, but don't quote me on it.
Crontab 8y ago
Yay! I love the smell of fresh Netbsd in the morning. Seriously though, awesome news.
qop 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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
honor123 8y ago
This piece of shit is still alive? Wow! They've added USB 3.0 support very lately, 10 years behind. And a non-working UEFI which requires you to use the shell instead of sysinst. NetBSD is a broken and dead shit. Don't use it. Better FreeBSD.
honor123 8y ago
This piece of shit is still alive? Wow ! They've added USB 3.0 support very lately, 10 years behind. And a non-working UEFI which requires you to use the shell instead of sysinst. NetBSD is a broken and dead shit. Don't use it. Better FreeBSD.
honor123 8y ago
This piece of shit is still alive? Wow! They've added USB 3.0 support very lately, 10 years behind. And a non-working UEFI which requires you to use the shell instead of sysinst. NetBSD is a broken and dead shit. Don't use it. Better FreeBSD!
honor123 8y ago
This piece of shit is still alive? Wow! They've added USB 3.0 support very lately, 10 years behind. And a non-working UEFI which requires you to use the shell instead of sysinst. NetBSD is a broken and dead shit. Don't use it. Better FreeBSD.!
8bitsrule 8y ago
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.
- krylon 8y ago
  Installing NetBSD is not for the faint of heart, but installing Arch Linux is a lot harder, if that is helpful. I would say it is a little harder than Debian, unless you want to cover exotic scenarios like a diskless workstation.
  - danieldk 8y ago
    It depends on whether 'installing' only means the installation or the installation and configuration of hardware. Because once you have installed Arch, configuration is probably easier on the average machine due to wider hardware support. 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.)
    - krylon 8y ago
      By "installing" I meant all the steps until the system boots from the HDD/SSD. I have only ever used NetBSD as a server system, so I have no idea what the hardware support on desktop systems is like.
- kev009 8y ago
  The one BSDish distro with an easy GUI installer and desktop friendly settings was TrueOS which is undergoing a metamorphosis at the moment. 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.
aaronmdjones 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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.
    - 8y ago
collinmanderson 8y ago
Does anyone know what version of Python is installed by default?

227 points by algorithm314 8y ago

avar 8y ago

> 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

PeCaN 8y ago
Most of the machines NetBSD runs on don't have USB 3 ports.
- hnarn 8y ago
  Also, isn't 3.0 fully backward compatible with 2.0? I imagine this would affect how critical people would classify support to be developed, if everything already works, just slower.
  - floatboth 8y ago
    It's backwards compatible on the device side (you can plug a 3.0 device into a 2.0 port and work at lower speed). But I really doubt that you can use an xHCI controller through EHCI drivers.
    - pgeorgi 8y ago
      > But I really doubt that you can use an xHCI controller through EHCI drivers. Indeed, you can't. xHCI subsumes all USB operation and doesn't need companion controllers, but presents a _very_ different interface. That's different from the USB1/2 transition where USB2 was a separate controller that could take over the ports from a USB1 controller, giving them back if a USB1 device is attached. Some boards/chipsets do that with EHCI and xHCI to support operating systems without xhci drivers, but that's getting rarer.
      - kqr 8y ago
        I'm fascinated this has worked so well in all operating systems I've used that I've never had reason to acquire this knowledge. I'm simultaneously disappointed that this is not (as far as I can tell) widely known information. It sounds like the thing that may prevent you from going on goose chase if you ever need to debug it.
        pgeorgi 8y ago
        As soon as you write an USB controller driver, you'll stumble over that quickly. The EHCI and XHCI specs are freely available and describe this in detail. It's just that only few people need to write such drivers. :-) As for it working so well, that's mostly on the EE side: they were _very_ careful to provide this hardware based routing with defaults that make sure that old OSes continue to work while new OSes (or new drivers for old OSes) can make use of the new controllers.
- agumonkey 8y ago
  and usb3 is such a large piece of interface I'm not sad netbsd is taking its sweet time to make it solid.
  - Scarbutt 8y ago
    just in time it's beginning to be replaced.
    - agumonkey 8y ago
      who's trying to eat usb3 ?
      - danieldk 8y ago
        - USB 3.1 - USB-C power delivery - USB-C alternate modes, such as DisplayPort and Thunderbolt 3
        agumonkey 8y ago
        aight, I conflated all in usb3
        arthurfm 8y ago
        Thanks to the USB 3.0 Promoter Group, USB 3.1 Gen 1 (a.k.a. USB 3.0) devices have been rebranded as USB 3.2 Gen 1x1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0#USB_3.2 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0#USB_3.2 The USB 3.2 standard is backward compatible with USB 3.1/3.0 and USB 2.0. It defines the following transfer modes: USB 3.2 Gen 1x1 - SuperSpeed, 5 Gbit/s (0.625 GB/s) data signaling rate over 1 lane using 8b/10b encoding, the same as USB 3.1 Gen 1 and USB 3.0. USB 3.2 Gen 1x2 - SuperSpeed+, new 10 Gbit/s (1.25 GB/s) data rate over 2 lanes using 8b/10b encoding. USB 3.2 Gen 2x1 - SuperSpeed+, 10 Gbit/s (1.25 GB/s) data rate over 1 lane using 128b/132b encoding, the same as USB 3.1 Gen 2. USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 - SuperSpeed+, new 20 Gbit/s (2.5 GB/s) data rate over 2 lanes using 128b/132b encoding. USB 3.2 is supported with the default Windows 10 USB drivers and in Linux Kernel 4.18.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  But is that a cause or effect of NetBSD not supporting USB3?
  - Fnoord 8y ago
    That was true before USB3 even existed, but USB3 could be part of a greater set of features which suffer from a similar problem. A domino effect perhaps, or the result of finding a niche?
  - PeCaN 8y ago
    A lot of NetBSD platforms predate USB3, so presumably not an effect. Keep in mind it runs on very old stuff like the Dreamcast and OMRON LUNA and very small stuff like tiny ARM boards and MIPS routers.
donbright 8y ago
well, toasters didn't start having USB 3 until recently...
ahoka 8y ago
TBH I never had or needed any USB3 device.
- xxpor 8y ago
  You've never used a flash drive in the past 8 years?
  - Narishma 8y ago
    Those work fine with USB 2.0, they're just slower.
  - IshKebab 8y ago
    Most are still USB 2. (Thumb drives that is, not full USB hard disks.)
  - ahoka 8y ago
    No. I just share files over broadband now.
brynet 8y ago
Linux also had USB 3 draft support before there were even any consumer products on the market. Intel engineers wrote the XHCI driver for Linux, well before developer documentation was available publicly. 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.
cpeterso 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      NetBSD rump kernels come to mind, they've been around for a few years
  - nbsd4life 8y ago
    It isn't a zero sum game with a finite number of FOSS idealists. Linux's popularity grew rapidly in what were previously proprietary software users. It didn't take away that much from BSDs. Linux and other FOSS software becoming popular makes using NetBSD a lot more convenient, not less. There's a top tier FOSS browser that will accept NetBSD related patches, several really good document editors, graphical tools. We can even take some driver code from Linux itself.
- kqr 8y ago
  Just based on history and culture, that sounds like a really awkward combination. It's trying to merge "run on every imaginable platform at all costs" with "fuck all the platforms and let's concentrate on building a rock solid operating system for the x86 because that's the only thing people use anyway."

zippie 8y ago

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 8y ago
>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 8y ago
  This is correct, thanks for fighting the disinformation!
tarlinian 8y ago
Lazy FPU state restoration almost never makes sense on modern CPUs (regardless of security issues) because the cost of an interrupt for state restoration is so high and because "FPU" registers are used for a lot more than just FP calculations these days.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]

somethingsimple 8y ago

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

rjsw 8y ago
I'm typing this on a desktop running NetBSD.
- emgee_1 8y ago
  Can you elaborate a bit? What kind of DE? Openbsd user here:-)
  - rjsw 8y ago
    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.
    - emgee_1 8y ago
      Well if you are using emacs, like I do, what else do you need? Ok maybe a browser outside of emacs and a pdf viewer:-) And a tmux session somewhere. Someone once said: I just need a bootloader for emacs :-)
    - fierarul 8y ago
      So, you also have a functioning OpenJDK 8 or so to run NetBeans? I assume this means an x86 machine, correct?
      - rjsw 8y ago
        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.
- na85 8y ago
  Which laptop? How's battery life? Does s3/s0 suspend and resume work?

krylon 8y ago

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 8y ago
No those changes are in -current, and still a bit rough around the edges but much better.
- krylon 8y ago
  Thank you! So, maybe next time... ;-)
rnd0 8y ago
I just now installed 8.0-release in vmware, with two drives, and used zpool to create a new zfs filesystem. I can't vouch for how optimized it is; but zfs is definitely there. https://gyazo.com/0f6261cf415b85010fcaa92557d783b4 https://gyazo.com/0f6261cf415b85010fcaa92557d783b4
- krylon 8y ago
  Well, what do you know? The command is there indeed. I had only read the release notes, where mention of zfs is conspicuously absent.

vasili111 8y ago

Have you used NetBSD and if yes: 1. Why did you choose it? 2. What are your impressions?

krylon 8y ago
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.
Fnoord 8y ago
Yeah I have, but that happened 1 or 2 decades ago so take it with a grain of salt. 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_systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_BSD_operating_sy...

occamrazor 8y ago

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 8y ago
NetBSD supports many platforms: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/ https://www.netbsd.org/ports/
- tbrock 8y ago
  I always thought it was peculiar that the “net” one was not the security focused one.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - Cyphase 8y ago
    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 8y ago
      wow this must be a good few years old describing remote software development as if it was novelty

kev009 8y ago

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!

dfox 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
- nbsd4life 8y ago
  it's probably a mistake that it got enabled there, I don't think the architecture has support for it. Even the edgerouter shouldn't, but don't quote me on it.

Crontab 8y ago

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

qop 8y ago

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 8y ago
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

honor123 8y ago

This piece of shit is still alive? Wow! They've added USB 3.0 support very lately, 10 years behind. And a non-working UEFI which requires you to use the shell instead of sysinst. NetBSD is a broken and dead shit. Don't use it. Better FreeBSD.

honor123 8y ago

This piece of shit is still alive? Wow ! They've added USB 3.0 support very lately, 10 years behind. And a non-working UEFI which requires you to use the shell instead of sysinst. NetBSD is a broken and dead shit. Don't use it. Better FreeBSD.

honor123 8y ago

8bitsrule 8y ago

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.

krylon 8y ago
Installing NetBSD is not for the faint of heart, but installing Arch Linux is a lot harder, if that is helpful. I would say it is a little harder than Debian, unless you want to cover exotic scenarios like a diskless workstation.
- danieldk 8y ago
  It depends on whether 'installing' only means the installation or the installation and configuration of hardware. Because once you have installed Arch, configuration is probably easier on the average machine due to wider hardware support. 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.)
  - krylon 8y ago
    By "installing" I meant all the steps until the system boots from the HDD/SSD. I have only ever used NetBSD as a server system, so I have no idea what the hardware support on desktop systems is like.
kev009 8y ago
The one BSDish distro with an easy GUI installer and desktop friendly settings was TrueOS which is undergoing a metamorphosis at the moment. 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.

aaronmdjones 8y ago

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 8y ago
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 8y ago
  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.
  - 8y ago

collinmanderson 8y ago

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