8 ms·

NetBSD 9.2

126 points by vermaden 5y ago

unsungNovelty 5y ago
Is it just me or are we seeing more BSD based things on HN front page?
- medstrom 5y ago
  Topics come in waves like that here. The first BSD link leads to new people finding more links on their own, and it takes a while to die down.
AJRF 5y ago
Bit off topic but I love the NetBSD logo. It's very pleasing on the eye.
- akira2501 5y ago
  Likewise.. but I love that they just went with the Die Hard reference. https://www.google.com/search?q=die+hard+bsd+9.2 https://www.google.com/search?q=die+hard+bsd+9.2
  - AJRF 5y ago
    Haha I didn't notice the reference, that's great!
- hansor 5y ago
  Before 2004(?) we had other official AMAZINGLY GOOD(in terms of gaining "fame" among fresh hackers) logo: https://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg https://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg I love NetBSD, as it supports about 40+(?) different architectures - back in the they were all listed properly on the main web page (right side) - it was amazing for bragging rights: https://web.archive.org/web/20030422140310/http://www.netbsd.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030422140310/http://www.netbsd... but then suddenly: - they changed the website to "modern" ascetics(and they removed the list of supported architectures from main page so no more bragging rights on landing page!] - they changed numbering systemem of new releases (why?!) - they simplified LOGO (not COOL anymore - just "professional") and suddenly NetBSD was going down [after 3.0 release IMO] in terms of popularity AND funding :( Only hope is in Chinese development who are using it for projects in mainland China.
  - ephaeton 5y ago
    I, too, loved the old logo. Not being of a nationality that has been involved in the pacific war though had kept the iwo jima reference hidden to me. They didn't "suddenly" change the logo. As usual for NetBSD, everything was accompanied by painstakingly detailed discussions on the mailing lists. I always thought their communication practice to be exceptional and good enough to be a role-model for other OSS projects. The list of platforms was partially very obscure bits, and not all supported at the same quality. We / they also had the problem of GCC stopping support for some of these architectures right around the same time. Also, bragging rights ... those to whom you may have bragged about it claimed linux was ported to more, not understanding the concept of an OS (in contrast to a kernel) in the first place ... and left people wondering, "fine, but does it run on today's hardware equally well?" so it was obscuring the system more than it helped, IMO. The message, again, IMO, should always have been: "obscure or in fashion, historic or bleeding edge, we have such a clean architecture and implementation that we scale across all these dimensions for a secure, performant, integrated, well-balanced OS being as close to POSIX-compliant as it makes sense for an OS to be." The list of platforms didn't get that across well. The numbering system of the releases .. Was it 1.6 that was the last one with -current cycling about the alphabet and we had 1.6ZA as next version after 1.6Z? Or was it 1.5? I don't remember. Anyways, it was weird. Don't get me wrong. I too long for a simpler yester-time. But I don't think they've done wrong, as a community found consensus on what to do, went ahead and did that, and they're still rocking no matter the specific version number of their OS.
    - sparcpile 5y ago
      The 1.6 series was the last to use the old-style version of up to three version levels. 2.0 was the start of the version.release scheme. I've been using NetBSD for over 20 years now and I keep coming back to it when I want a coherent and minimal base operating system. I've used for daily driver workstations, file servers, and network services over the years. I loved it when an instructor at Stevens Tech built a class around using NetBSD for a UNIX programming class. I pulled down the youtube videos and website for my own copy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431
  - 5y ago
ephaeton 5y ago
my favorite OS .. fond memories of resurrecting a sparc64, a sparc, a hppa, an i386 next to the amd64s, and feeling right at home with all of them at once. ...Portability exercises for students based on the "Fighting the lemmings" paper by Husemann. (have you ever truly considered endianness and alignment until you've ran i386-developed code on sparc64? :D) ...sadly my work demands a different OS usage from me :'(
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  Are you sure about the HPPAs? When I had them, there was only Linux for them, also not any distro, but only Debian without too much fuss. edit: I mean besides HP-UX. I remember exactly because I'd really liked to have had the NetBSD option then. It ran on all my other systems at the time. (Between 2000 and 2004)
  - ephaeton 5y ago
    somewhat. It's been quite a while and I do remember that hppa was one of the machines in my .. pillage pile of plundering (like an sun U1, a U2, an U-what-was-it-60? three flavors of sparc, an SGI workstation and various other UNIX pizza boxes) and my memory tells me except for the SGI we had them all running at some point (might've been hp300, hp700, should've been prior to hppa renaming. Looking at the numbers, hp700 sounds more familiar). The purpose of these boxes was indeed to offer shell access to students for the fighting the lemmings exercises (a series of C quizzes with regression tests aimed at showing students the pitfalls of non-portable programming), and we did have quite the variety.. But memory lies, so no, I'm not absolutely sure.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
      No problem. Doesn't really matter. I wasn't absolutely sure either. It may have been that at the times some support has been available in the beginning, but one could only netboot it, also only in -current. Since I've been lazy then I avoided tracking that. Later on it may have been better, but since I've riced the Debian sufficiently I probably didn't bother anymore. Even more later I moved on physically and gifted all that non-X86 stuff away anyways.
IntelMiner 5y ago
NetBSD always seemed like a fun little project I saw a while back that they had it running on Sega's Dreamcast of all things. Linux has a "dreamcast_defconfig" kernel option but as far as I know, no working bootloader anymore Of course with 16 meg of memory and no local storage it's more of a toy for that but still
- Grazester 5y ago
  I believe there may be a patch for the IDE drive mod for NetBSD somewhere about the net. There is also the serial to SD card adapter but I dont know if there is a patch for that in NetBSD. Of course you can't boot from either without a custom bios(for the ide mod. No booting from SD adapter period)
simondotau 5y ago
I'm fairly sure BSD should have died by now? I definitely remember the death of BSD being reported on Slashdot a couple of decades ago. This announcement is clearly a mistake.
- nix23 5y ago
  Before you down-vote, read a bit of history. His Comment is ironically, and the death of BSD was believed to be a sure thing. It's called Irony, and it's a wildly misunderstood language concept here on HN.
  - viraptor 5y ago
    > It's called Irony It's sarcasm. And if we can't tell if something's a bad take or sarcasm, that's a good reason to downvote.
    - nicklaf 5y ago
      Conversely, this could also be one reason to read HN with showdead turned on....
  - detaro 5y ago
    I don't think there is any operating system or widely used software where there isn't a "$group called it dead ages ago" example. it tells us absolutely nothing interesting, and isn't funny.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - DanBC 5y ago
    > it's a wildly misunderstood language concept here on HN. An alternate understanding is that people are not as funny as they think they are.
  - nicklaf 5y ago
    I'll never understand why HN hates humor so much. You could say it's dumb humor, but a community that can't even tolerate dumb tongue in cheek mischief isn't much of a community at all in my opinion. https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying
hulitu 5y ago
Can NetBSD now utilize more than 1 processor core ?
- rjsw 5y ago
  It has been able to do that for many years now.
- phaemon 5y ago
  Out of curiosity I looked this up. SMP was introduced in NetBSD 5.0 which was released 12 years ago. I think you're a bit out of date. :)
  - ephaeton 5y ago
    Nah. SMP support predates NetBSD 5.0 by a decade or so. May sound like nitpicking but .. roundabout 11, 12 years ago was when the default kernel config switched to SMP on all architectures where it made sense. Before users had to enable it themselves. alpha & sparc64 SMP, I'm pretty sure, is quite older e.g. I'm wondering if it's a sarcastic comment in the style of the 'BSD is dead' meme.
    - rnd0 5y ago
      Since I haven't heard that anywhere else , I'd assume it's just FUD and not a meme (unlike "BSD is dying" https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying).
    - hulitu 5y ago
      It was not a sarcastic comment. I checked the release notes and found nothing about it. It's true that i haven't checked the development of BSDs lately. I remember just that only Dragonfly had a working SMP kernel, with FreeBSD strugling and OpenBSD just ignoring this issue. But this was around 8 years ago.
      - purerandomness 5y ago
        OpenBSD does support SMP since 2004, FreeBSD even earlier. You seem to confuse SMP with Intel's "HyperThreading", which is disabled on OpenBSD due to security concerns (SPECTRE et al.) and which makes sense to default to in an OS that takes security seriously. SMP and HyperThreading are completely different things.
jart 5y ago
Awesome news. If anyone wants to try NetBSD today there's a public access UNIX system (est. 1987) called the Super Dimensional Fortress that runs NetBSD. I'm a lifetime member: http://jart.sdf.org/ http://jart.sdf.org/ Also any programs you build with Cosmopolitan Libc will automatically work on NetBSD. As an OS, it's managed to stay really close to the roots all these years. It has good production use cases as an operating system too, since of all the modern unix systems NetBSD probably has the most accurate rusage accounting.
- anthk 5y ago
  Your universal binaries would make an instant ultraportable release of Nethack/Slashem.
frr149 5y ago
For someone used to Linux, what are the selling points of NetBSD?
- bluGill 5y ago
  TL;DR: Odds are though if you installed NetBSD, once you got past the learning curve (less than a week) it is about as different from any Linux as Debian is from Fedora - enough things to be annoying, but not enough that you notice most of the time. Big is it runs on nearly anything. If you like odd/rare computers netBSD is probably the only modern operating system choice you have. Collectors like it. As do people who run an environment of mix computers [for whatever reason] as the common OS makes it easier to remember the obscure options of whatever program they use. If you stick to the common x86-64 systems Linux is going to have better driver support and more optimizations (some of those optimizations would be a pessimization on something else - a tradeoff Linux can make but netBSD cannot), and of course Linux has the most mind share and so there are a number of programs that won't work though nothing very common. I would have put ARM in the list of ones Linux is better on because odds are you are interested in one of those - but ARM has lots of obscure variants and so there is a chance NetBSD works better there. Long ago it was said that BSD is for those who love unix, Linux for those who hate Windows. While the tone has moderated a bit over the years, there is still some truth to the idea that BSD sticks closer to the unix roots (whatever they are).
- washbear 5y ago
  Aside from the obvious BSD things (clean separation of base and third-party software, very different networking stack, etc), notable NetBSD things include a lot more security and hardening features enabled by default, a powerful and versatile default package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/ https://pkgsrc.org/), very good support for ARM (all 'mainline', etc). The NPF firewall is also quite nice.
  - throw0101a 5y ago
    > a powerful and versatile package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/ https://pkgsrc.org/) That's multi-platform as well. If you want/need the same packages on Linux, macOS, other, then you can use the same code on all of those platforms. No needs to worry about using {Homebrew, Macports} on your Mac and {Deb, RPM} on your Linux infrastructure.
iJohnDoe 5y ago
I cut my teeth on NetBSD and was the OS I learned *NIX on. I deployed many production systems using NetBSD. A great OS that is very under appreciated, very under represented, and very under respected.

NetBSD 9.2

126 points by vermaden 5y ago

unsungNovelty 5y ago

Is it just me or are we seeing more BSD based things on HN front page?

medstrom 5y ago
Topics come in waves like that here. The first BSD link leads to new people finding more links on their own, and it takes a while to die down.

AJRF 5y ago

Bit off topic but I love the NetBSD logo. It's very pleasing on the eye.

akira2501 5y ago
Likewise.. but I love that they just went with the Die Hard reference. https://www.google.com/search?q=die+hard+bsd+9.2 https://www.google.com/search?q=die+hard+bsd+9.2
- AJRF 5y ago
  Haha I didn't notice the reference, that's great!
hansor 5y ago
Before 2004(?) we had other official AMAZINGLY GOOD(in terms of gaining "fame" among fresh hackers) logo: https://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg https://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg I love NetBSD, as it supports about 40+(?) different architectures - back in the they were all listed properly on the main web page (right side) - it was amazing for bragging rights: https://web.archive.org/web/20030422140310/http://www.netbsd.org/ https://web.archive.org/web/20030422140310/http://www.netbsd... but then suddenly: - they changed the website to "modern" ascetics(and they removed the list of supported architectures from main page so no more bragging rights on landing page!] - they changed numbering systemem of new releases (why?!) - they simplified LOGO (not COOL anymore - just "professional") and suddenly NetBSD was going down [after 3.0 release IMO] in terms of popularity AND funding :( Only hope is in Chinese development who are using it for projects in mainland China.
- ephaeton 5y ago
  I, too, loved the old logo. Not being of a nationality that has been involved in the pacific war though had kept the iwo jima reference hidden to me. They didn't "suddenly" change the logo. As usual for NetBSD, everything was accompanied by painstakingly detailed discussions on the mailing lists. I always thought their communication practice to be exceptional and good enough to be a role-model for other OSS projects. The list of platforms was partially very obscure bits, and not all supported at the same quality. We / they also had the problem of GCC stopping support for some of these architectures right around the same time. Also, bragging rights ... those to whom you may have bragged about it claimed linux was ported to more, not understanding the concept of an OS (in contrast to a kernel) in the first place ... and left people wondering, "fine, but does it run on today's hardware equally well?" so it was obscuring the system more than it helped, IMO. The message, again, IMO, should always have been: "obscure or in fashion, historic or bleeding edge, we have such a clean architecture and implementation that we scale across all these dimensions for a secure, performant, integrated, well-balanced OS being as close to POSIX-compliant as it makes sense for an OS to be." The list of platforms didn't get that across well. The numbering system of the releases .. Was it 1.6 that was the last one with -current cycling about the alphabet and we had 1.6ZA as next version after 1.6Z? Or was it 1.5? I don't remember. Anyways, it was weird. Don't get me wrong. I too long for a simpler yester-time. But I don't think they've done wrong, as a community found consensus on what to do, went ahead and did that, and they're still rocking no matter the specific version number of their OS.
  - sparcpile 5y ago
    The 1.6 series was the last to use the old-style version of up to three version levels. 2.0 was the start of the version.release scheme. I've been using NetBSD for over 20 years now and I keep coming back to it when I want a coherent and minimal base operating system. I've used for daily driver workstations, file servers, and network services over the years. I loved it when an instructor at Stevens Tech built a class around using NetBSD for a UNIX programming class. I pulled down the youtube videos and website for my own copy. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24332431
- 5y ago

ephaeton 5y ago

my favorite OS .. fond memories of resurrecting a sparc64, a sparc, a hppa, an i386 next to the amd64s, and feeling right at home with all of them at once. ...Portability exercises for students based on the "Fighting the lemmings" paper by Husemann. (have you ever truly considered endianness and alignment until you've ran i386-developed code on sparc64? :D) ...sadly my work demands a different OS usage from me :'(

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
Are you sure about the HPPAs? When I had them, there was only Linux for them, also not any distro, but only Debian without too much fuss. edit: I mean besides HP-UX. I remember exactly because I'd really liked to have had the NetBSD option then. It ran on all my other systems at the time. (Between 2000 and 2004)
- ephaeton 5y ago
  somewhat. It's been quite a while and I do remember that hppa was one of the machines in my .. pillage pile of plundering (like an sun U1, a U2, an U-what-was-it-60? three flavors of sparc, an SGI workstation and various other UNIX pizza boxes) and my memory tells me except for the SGI we had them all running at some point (might've been hp300, hp700, should've been prior to hppa renaming. Looking at the numbers, hp700 sounds more familiar). The purpose of these boxes was indeed to offer shell access to students for the fighting the lemmings exercises (a series of C quizzes with regression tests aimed at showing students the pitfalls of non-portable programming), and we did have quite the variety.. But memory lies, so no, I'm not absolutely sure.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
    No problem. Doesn't really matter. I wasn't absolutely sure either. It may have been that at the times some support has been available in the beginning, but one could only netboot it, also only in -current. Since I've been lazy then I avoided tracking that. Later on it may have been better, but since I've riced the Debian sufficiently I probably didn't bother anymore. Even more later I moved on physically and gifted all that non-X86 stuff away anyways.

IntelMiner 5y ago

NetBSD always seemed like a fun little project I saw a while back that they had it running on Sega's Dreamcast of all things. Linux has a "dreamcast_defconfig" kernel option but as far as I know, no working bootloader anymore Of course with 16 meg of memory and no local storage it's more of a toy for that but still

Grazester 5y ago
I believe there may be a patch for the IDE drive mod for NetBSD somewhere about the net. There is also the serial to SD card adapter but I dont know if there is a patch for that in NetBSD. Of course you can't boot from either without a custom bios(for the ide mod. No booting from SD adapter period)

simondotau 5y ago

I'm fairly sure BSD should have died by now? I definitely remember the death of BSD being reported on Slashdot a couple of decades ago. This announcement is clearly a mistake.

nix23 5y ago
Before you down-vote, read a bit of history. His Comment is ironically, and the death of BSD was believed to be a sure thing. It's called Irony, and it's a wildly misunderstood language concept here on HN.
- viraptor 5y ago
  > It's called Irony It's sarcasm. And if we can't tell if something's a bad take or sarcasm, that's a good reason to downvote.
  - nicklaf 5y ago
    Conversely, this could also be one reason to read HN with showdead turned on....
- detaro 5y ago
  I don't think there is any operating system or widely used software where there isn't a "$group called it dead ages ago" example. it tells us absolutely nothing interesting, and isn't funny.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- DanBC 5y ago
  > it's a wildly misunderstood language concept here on HN. An alternate understanding is that people are not as funny as they think they are.
- nicklaf 5y ago
  I'll never understand why HN hates humor so much. You could say it's dumb humor, but a community that can't even tolerate dumb tongue in cheek mischief isn't much of a community at all in my opinion. https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying

hulitu 5y ago

Can NetBSD now utilize more than 1 processor core ?

rjsw 5y ago
It has been able to do that for many years now.
phaemon 5y ago
Out of curiosity I looked this up. SMP was introduced in NetBSD 5.0 which was released 12 years ago. I think you're a bit out of date. :)
- ephaeton 5y ago
  Nah. SMP support predates NetBSD 5.0 by a decade or so. May sound like nitpicking but .. roundabout 11, 12 years ago was when the default kernel config switched to SMP on all architectures where it made sense. Before users had to enable it themselves. alpha & sparc64 SMP, I'm pretty sure, is quite older e.g. I'm wondering if it's a sarcastic comment in the style of the 'BSD is dead' meme.
  - rnd0 5y ago
    Since I haven't heard that anywhere else , I'd assume it's just FUD and not a meme (unlike "BSD is dying" https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying https://everything2.com/title/BSD+is+dying).
  - hulitu 5y ago
    It was not a sarcastic comment. I checked the release notes and found nothing about it. It's true that i haven't checked the development of BSDs lately. I remember just that only Dragonfly had a working SMP kernel, with FreeBSD strugling and OpenBSD just ignoring this issue. But this was around 8 years ago.
    - purerandomness 5y ago
      OpenBSD does support SMP since 2004, FreeBSD even earlier. You seem to confuse SMP with Intel's "HyperThreading", which is disabled on OpenBSD due to security concerns (SPECTRE et al.) and which makes sense to default to in an OS that takes security seriously. SMP and HyperThreading are completely different things.

jart 5y ago

Awesome news. If anyone wants to try NetBSD today there's a public access UNIX system (est. 1987) called the Super Dimensional Fortress that runs NetBSD. I'm a lifetime member: http://jart.sdf.org/ http://jart.sdf.org/ Also any programs you build with Cosmopolitan Libc will automatically work on NetBSD. As an OS, it's managed to stay really close to the roots all these years. It has good production use cases as an operating system too, since of all the modern unix systems NetBSD probably has the most accurate rusage accounting.

anthk 5y ago
Your universal binaries would make an instant ultraportable release of Nethack/Slashem.

frr149 5y ago

For someone used to Linux, what are the selling points of NetBSD?

bluGill 5y ago
TL;DR: Odds are though if you installed NetBSD, once you got past the learning curve (less than a week) it is about as different from any Linux as Debian is from Fedora - enough things to be annoying, but not enough that you notice most of the time. Big is it runs on nearly anything. If you like odd/rare computers netBSD is probably the only modern operating system choice you have. Collectors like it. As do people who run an environment of mix computers [for whatever reason] as the common OS makes it easier to remember the obscure options of whatever program they use. If you stick to the common x86-64 systems Linux is going to have better driver support and more optimizations (some of those optimizations would be a pessimization on something else - a tradeoff Linux can make but netBSD cannot), and of course Linux has the most mind share and so there are a number of programs that won't work though nothing very common. I would have put ARM in the list of ones Linux is better on because odds are you are interested in one of those - but ARM has lots of obscure variants and so there is a chance NetBSD works better there. Long ago it was said that BSD is for those who love unix, Linux for those who hate Windows. While the tone has moderated a bit over the years, there is still some truth to the idea that BSD sticks closer to the unix roots (whatever they are).
washbear 5y ago
Aside from the obvious BSD things (clean separation of base and third-party software, very different networking stack, etc), notable NetBSD things include a lot more security and hardening features enabled by default, a powerful and versatile default package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/ https://pkgsrc.org/), very good support for ARM (all 'mainline', etc). The NPF firewall is also quite nice.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > a powerful and versatile package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/ https://pkgsrc.org/) That's multi-platform as well. If you want/need the same packages on Linux, macOS, other, then you can use the same code on all of those platforms. No needs to worry about using {Homebrew, Macports} on your Mac and {Deb, RPM} on your Linux infrastructure.

iJohnDoe 5y ago

I cut my teeth on NetBSD and was the OS I learned *NIX on. I deployed many production systems using NetBSD. A great OS that is very under appreciated, very under represented, and very under respected.