3 ms·

I've been running NetBSD beta on my laptop since january (mostly for the added performance with NVMM) and updated to RC1 yesterday. It went smoothly and the ker

by rahen 3y ago

I've been running NetBSD beta on my laptop since january (mostly for the added performance with NVMM) and updated to RC1 yesterday. It went smoothly and the kernel rebuild was swift. The added support for the Rockwell RK3328 SoC is a big deal for me as it wasn't supported yet and I had to default to OpenBSD instead, which is fairly slow.

jyrkesh 3y ago
Honestly, I'm shocked you got OpenBSD running on a laptop at all. I've tried running it both on bare metal x86 hardware and in a Hyper-V VM on two different boxes, and spent hours failing to get it to recognize my network adapter or get an IP. Gave up.... I should caveat: OpenBSD is INCREDIBLE, and we owe it the world (honestly, for OpenSSH alone, but the rest of it is an absolute gold standard too). And I know I could've gotten there. BUT, FreeBSD just worked for me out of the box on both. Haven't run NetBSD, but with the native Wireguard support in there now, I might have to throw a NetBSD gateway into my homelab. Anyone have any good recs on prosumer routers / switches that run NetBSD well?
- SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
  In fact you are wrong. OpenBSD is well known to work on laptops "out-of-the-box", but FreeBSD it was for quite a long while impossible to make properly working suspend/hibernate.
  - wahern 3y ago
    OpenBSD is known for working very well on the particular laptop models that the developers prefer and regularly use.
bitzun 3y ago
Are you using a pinebook pro? I used Manjaro for a while there because I couldn't get OpenBSD working. Eventually I switched to my thinkpad (and frankly I'm using my AMD gaming computer running popOS lately despite the trust issues running games) Any particular difficulties running either BSD for daily driver purposes?
- rahen 3y ago
  I use several machines, all running on BSD or derivatives, albeit coincidentally. My main laptop is now an M1 MacBook Air, primarily used as a terminal + mail client + web browser. My former ThinkPad runs on NetBSD, starting from version 8, then 9, then 10-BETA, and currently on 10-RC1. It's a powerful laptop serving as a server and hypervisor with qemu-NVMM for amd64 VMs. The performance slightly lags behind qemu-KVM, and networking is not as convenient, but it gets the job done. Finally, I use a NanoPi NEO3 with the Rockchip chip as a NAS. It was previously running on OpenBSD and will soon be updated to NetBSD with a cgd (block encrypted) USB drive. As for your question, it's not harder to run than, say, Slackware, as it doesn't change much with time. This is the system you choose when you're very conservative with Unix systems and expect something simple, understandable, and predictable in the long run. As for 'why', it's a matter of personal preference. NetBSD is about preserving the Unix heritage; you could still install it on a MicroVAX II, read filesystems from V7, or run SunOS 2 binaries if you wanted. It still feels much like using 4.3BSD on modern hardware. A good share of NetBSD developers purposefully use old and/or underpowered machines for both development and testing, which keeps the system clean, fast and minimal. OpenBSD is a fine choice too, but it's relatively slow and lacking in software. For instance, vmd is pretty far behind bhyve and NVMM when you want to run anything more than Alpine VMs. This may have improved recently, though, I haven't checked.
  - sillywalk 3y ago
    > OpenBSD is a fine choice too, but it's relatively slow and lacking in software. I don't know about performance, but what software is it lacking? It's got like 11k+ ports. https://openports.pl/ https://openports.pl/

by rahen 3y ago

jyrkesh 3y ago

Honestly, I'm shocked you got OpenBSD running on a laptop at all. I've tried running it both on bare metal x86 hardware and in a Hyper-V VM on two different boxes, and spent hours failing to get it to recognize my network adapter or get an IP. Gave up.... I should caveat: OpenBSD is INCREDIBLE, and we owe it the world (honestly, for OpenSSH alone, but the rest of it is an absolute gold standard too). And I know I could've gotten there. BUT, FreeBSD just worked for me out of the box on both. Haven't run NetBSD, but with the native Wireguard support in there now, I might have to throw a NetBSD gateway into my homelab. Anyone have any good recs on prosumer routers / switches that run NetBSD well?

SomeoneFromCA 3y ago
In fact you are wrong. OpenBSD is well known to work on laptops "out-of-the-box", but FreeBSD it was for quite a long while impossible to make properly working suspend/hibernate.
- wahern 3y ago
  OpenBSD is known for working very well on the particular laptop models that the developers prefer and regularly use.

bitzun 3y ago

Are you using a pinebook pro? I used Manjaro for a while there because I couldn't get OpenBSD working. Eventually I switched to my thinkpad (and frankly I'm using my AMD gaming computer running popOS lately despite the trust issues running games) Any particular difficulties running either BSD for daily driver purposes?

rahen 3y ago
I use several machines, all running on BSD or derivatives, albeit coincidentally. My main laptop is now an M1 MacBook Air, primarily used as a terminal + mail client + web browser. My former ThinkPad runs on NetBSD, starting from version 8, then 9, then 10-BETA, and currently on 10-RC1. It's a powerful laptop serving as a server and hypervisor with qemu-NVMM for amd64 VMs. The performance slightly lags behind qemu-KVM, and networking is not as convenient, but it gets the job done. Finally, I use a NanoPi NEO3 with the Rockchip chip as a NAS. It was previously running on OpenBSD and will soon be updated to NetBSD with a cgd (block encrypted) USB drive. As for your question, it's not harder to run than, say, Slackware, as it doesn't change much with time. This is the system you choose when you're very conservative with Unix systems and expect something simple, understandable, and predictable in the long run. As for 'why', it's a matter of personal preference. NetBSD is about preserving the Unix heritage; you could still install it on a MicroVAX II, read filesystems from V7, or run SunOS 2 binaries if you wanted. It still feels much like using 4.3BSD on modern hardware. A good share of NetBSD developers purposefully use old and/or underpowered machines for both development and testing, which keeps the system clean, fast and minimal. OpenBSD is a fine choice too, but it's relatively slow and lacking in software. For instance, vmd is pretty far behind bhyve and NVMM when you want to run anything more than Alpine VMs. This may have improved recently, though, I haven't checked.
- sillywalk 3y ago
  > OpenBSD is a fine choice too, but it's relatively slow and lacking in software. I don't know about performance, but what software is it lacking? It's got like 11k+ ports. https://openports.pl/ https://openports.pl/