6 ms·

NetBSD 10: Proper old-school Unix, not like those lazy, decadent Linux types

106 points by lproven 3y ago

bmacho 3y ago
> We at NetBSD of course do not believe the OpenBSD tale about their security focus and consider NetBSD at least as secure Why is this so obvious (the first half)?
- Gualdrapo 3y ago
  It's funny, Theo de Raadt claims that Linux folks "do what they do because they hate Microsoft" whereas they do what they do "because we love UNIX", but there are countless examples of *BSD folks dissing at Linux (like in the article) because the "superiority" of *BSDs. Even Haiku got into that bus for some reason. Not a smart way to get more users or to prove maturity, and even worse that they chose to diss their own *BSD brothers. But that's not my issue.
  - throwaway984393 3y ago
    I always thought it was tongue in cheek, like the Goth kid making fun of the popular kid
  - thesuitonym 3y ago
    Couple things going on here. First, BSD folks don't diss Linux, they just state the ways they believe their BSD is better. Linux folks get their identities really wrapped up in the OS they use for some reason, so that might result in hurt feelings, but most BSD users are also Linux users. Second, most BSDs (Esepecially OpenBSD) are not really interested in "getting more users." Theo is probably the biggest example of this, he would still work on OpenBSD if he was the only person using it, because he is making the OS he wants to exist.[*] Unlike Linux, Windows, and MacOS, BSDs aren't made to take over the world, they're made to be good operating systems. * Edit to add: That's not to say he's not a self-righteous asshole, but that's a different discussion.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
  - teleforce 3y ago
    I have been following along in the early days of Linux vs BSD. Believe it or not, the main reason people especially developers flocking to Linux at the time despite the superiority claim of other BSDs of their self-evident stability and security was mainly the licensing of GPL for Linux kernel. It was a stroke of genius from Linus by adopting the GPL but he probably hardly admitting the fact. No decent open source programmer (open source terminology was defined in the midst of this) at the time were willing to compromise people ripping their codes and put them inside other commercial OS, and at the time the usual suspect was Microsoft Windows of course. This very thing happened right infront of their eyes and under their noses when Microsoft literally took the entire TCP/IP stack from FreeBSD, but as a compensation they probably hired some of the FreeBSD folks after that and this latter fact is only speculation. It is really philosophical rather than technical superiority but in technology the superior product hardly win the contest, remember Betamax and VHS?
    - lproven 3y ago
      > It was a stroke of genius from Linus by adopting the GPL I agree. So does Linus: https://www.cio.com/article/238985/linus-torvalds-says-gpl-was-defining-factor-in-linuxs-success.html https://www.cio.com/article/238985/linus-torvalds-says-gpl-w... Also, important note: the GPL was not the original license he chose. It changed with v0.99. Before that it was his own licence. https://web.archive.org/web/20110721105526/https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12 https://web.archive.org/web/20110721105526/https://www.kerne...
    - Gud 3y ago
      I think more importantly is the lawsuit by AT&T against University of California.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
jspann 3y ago
> NetBSD sits in the middle. It is a relatively small, clean, and simple OS. The "build.sh" system for compilation is so easy to use for compiling your own toyOS that I initially felt like I had done something wrong. Linux is a bigger, better funded, wider documented project but the overall ease of specifying output type for a boot image and what platform I was developing for was the second deciding factor for me. The first was being able to compile it (with no weird extra steps) on my Mac (pre Apple Silicon). In undergrad it became my hackable OS of choice if I wanted to compile something for my old Mac, a server for my bike, or some incredibly niche computer I found by accident. When I had questions, I asked the IRC group. For me, it was a great introduction by practice of the different parts of an OS.
- wannacboatmovie 3y ago
  > some incredibly niche computer I found by accident I used to think this, but leave it to me to disprove... Had an Intel Atom board that would only boot Linux and... OpenBSD. NetBSD (and a number of other OSes) would hang when attempting to load the kernel and refuse to boot - likely due to some firmware bug.
  - kees99 3y ago
    > Intel Atom (...) NetBSD (and a number of other OSes) would (...) refuse to boot Was it one of those cheap tablets/netbooks that shipped with fully-64-bit-capable CPU (Atom Z3735F) but with dreaded 32-bit-only UEFI firmware? GRUB can boot NetBSD there, although it's a bit of a hassle to set up.
    - wannacboatmovie 3y ago
      Negative, it was an embedded board. GRUB was not the issue; rather the kernel would hang after partially booting. Affected Illumos as well so it's likely a firmware bug.
rahen 3y ago
> NetBSD is more of a traditional Unix-style experience than modern Linux. That's a bit of an understatement. NetBSD is primarily about preserving the original Unix spirit with broad compatibility across both hardware and software. This is the antithesis of, say, Fedora. NetBSD spans a vast amount of history, supporting everything from VAX and early Sun workstations to aarch64 and amd64, and from the V7 filesystem (1979) to ZFS. It will run both early SunOS binaries and bleeding edge software. That being said, what I appreciate most about NetBSD is the dogfooding. Many core developers use vintage hardware or ARM boards, and routinely try the releases on antiquated hardware. Since software behaves like a gas, this helps keep bloat to a minimum. So there you have it: a deliberately old-school Unix that will run modern software yet still work like in the 80s / early 90s on basically anything with a CPU and MMU.
- smackeyacky 3y ago
  No, trying software on antiquated hardware just keeps you in the dark ages. For those of us that were there when 385BSD and NETBSD were waging their stupid holy war against commercial nixes the purity tests about what Unix really was are just pointless. Unix was always an entirely commercial enterprise. Linux wasn’t.
  - rahen 3y ago
    I strongly favored Linux in the nineties because the elitism of the BSD world was infuriating back then. There were no device drivers for IDE CD-ROM drives because "real men" were supposed to use SCSI. There were no binary packages, yet ports were constantly broken. Sound support was non-existent by default. Not to mention the early BSDs were extremely buggy, let alone the train wreck that was 386BSD. Linux 0.9 was already more stable, performant, and usable. A true hacker paradize. Then Linux started transitioning from a patchwork of loosely coupled replaceable components to integrated stacks in the mid-2000s, becoming ironically more and more of a corporate commodity rather than a playground for software freedom. You would need to define "the dark ages", as I understand casual users may prefer this trend, but for me, NetBSD is where the spirit remains. This is an entirely dependable, simple, hackable, grokable system and that's the way I want it to stay.
mmsc 3y ago
I’m a fan but this is such a turnoff: That worked too, albeit not quite as we expected. We got a nightly build, rather than the latest release 124, and it pulled in some unexpected dependencies such as Python 3 and Wayland – although NetBSD doesn't support Wayland.
- pasc1878 3y ago
  But that is not NetBSDs fault but the configure script not doing the correct things. It would pull in the same things on Linux. Which is the error as they should be different.
- washbear 3y ago
  The article is wrong, it has branding disabled (so it identifies as Nightly), but it's stable Firefox. And the linked article indicates that one compositor can be used.
FujiApple 3y ago
What is the state of the art for running NetBSD (and other *BSD) in CI such as GitHub actions? Edit: to add a bit more detail, I maintain a cross platform tool [1] on GitHub and require a way to build and test it in CI for several platform not natively supported by GitHub. Currently I use cargo-cross [2] to build it from a Linux OS but this doesn’t work for running the tests. One option I’m aware of is running a qemu VM on Linux, which is the approach taken by postgres [3]. Another option is using an external CI provider such as Cirrus who claim to have native support [4] for various *BSD. [1] https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy [2] https://github.com/cross-rs/cross https://github.com/cross-rs/cross [3] https://github.com/anarazel/pg-vm-images https://github.com/anarazel/pg-vm-images [4] https://cirrus-ci.org/guide/FreeBSD/ https://cirrus-ci.org/guide/FreeBSD/
- jaypatelani 3y ago
  https://github.com/vmactions/netbsd-vm https://github.com/vmactions/netbsd-vm https://smolbsd.org/ https://smolbsd.org/
RetroTechie 3y ago
It is (slightly) disappointing RISC-V didn't make it as an officially supported platform in this release. Hopefully we won't have to wait for next major release before that support gets integrated. It used to be that NetBSD was among the 1st (if not the 1st) to hop onto a new platform. Along with smaller OSes like some RTOS or Forth-based systems. But that hasn't been true for a long time - nowadays Linux usually gets there first. That said: it's very impressive what NetBSD manages to do & support, given its relatively small user- and developer community. Kudoz to everyone involved!
- nortonham 3y ago
  https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/riscv/#index4h2 https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/riscv/#index4h2
a-french-anon 3y ago
Anyone knows if NetBSD plans on syncing their ZFS with OpenZFS at some point? Didn't manage to find info on this.
- nortonham 3y ago
  probably best asked on a mailing list. But NetBSD is really community/volunteer driven, so someone with an itch to scratch will have to take it on
jmclnx 3y ago
Not to mention, the NetBSD people are quite friendly. If you are a student (or anyone) looking for a project to get involved with, you should give NetBSD a try.
sourcepluck 3y ago
I'm loving the BSD announcements these days. Getting more and more tempted to put maybe NetBSD on an older machine some evening and have a play around.
vhodges 3y ago
I have a fondness as NetBSD was the first Unix I ever installed (circa fall of '94)... for about 4 hours or so, then I had to restore my Amiga4000 back to AmigaOS for work on Monday :). I set up a NetBSD VM (on my Macbook) that I had intended to use but there was just enough friction/lack of pkgsrc knowledge that I never made the leap.
- johnklos 3y ago
  My first experience with free Unix were with Red Hat and NetBSD on Amiga hardware. I'm still running NetBSD on the two Amigas I started with in the mid '90s :)
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
nortonham 3y ago
I will say I like this more than your review of netbsd 9 ;)
- lproven 3y ago
  :-D I have no idea if some of the issues I reported with 9.3 led to those issues being fixed in 10, but I really did appreciate things like my cursor keys working in the shell, right off the boot media. ;-)
  - nortonham 3y ago
    It's proving to be a good release so far. Hopefully they get more support in the form of manpower and cash. Looking forward to NetBSD and the increasing popularity of ARM in the future.
nortonham 3y ago
NetBSD is great because: can support lots of hardware; minimal but featureful; secure; pkgsrc; friendly community; It's like a good middle ground between Free and OpenBSD. Anyone into "minimal" linux distros might get a kick out of it. Anyone interested should check out https://www.unitedbsd.com/ https://www.unitedbsd.com/ It's a bsd forum with a good number of netbsd users and a couple of developers as well.

106 points by lproven 3y ago

> We at NetBSD of course do not believe the OpenBSD tale about their security focus and consider NetBSD at least as secure Why is this so obvious (the first half)?

Gualdrapo 3y ago
It's funny, Theo de Raadt claims that Linux folks "do what they do because they hate Microsoft" whereas they do what they do "because we love UNIX", but there are countless examples of *BSD folks dissing at Linux (like in the article) because the "superiority" of *BSDs. Even Haiku got into that bus for some reason. Not a smart way to get more users or to prove maturity, and even worse that they chose to diss their own *BSD brothers. But that's not my issue.
- throwaway984393 3y ago
  I always thought it was tongue in cheek, like the Goth kid making fun of the popular kid
- thesuitonym 3y ago
  Couple things going on here. First, BSD folks don't diss Linux, they just state the ways they believe their BSD is better. Linux folks get their identities really wrapped up in the OS they use for some reason, so that might result in hurt feelings, but most BSD users are also Linux users. Second, most BSDs (Esepecially OpenBSD) are not really interested in "getting more users." Theo is probably the biggest example of this, he would still work on OpenBSD if he was the only person using it, because he is making the OS he wants to exist.[*] Unlike Linux, Windows, and MacOS, BSDs aren't made to take over the world, they're made to be good operating systems. * Edit to add: That's not to say he's not a self-righteous asshole, but that's a different discussion.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
- teleforce 3y ago
  I have been following along in the early days of Linux vs BSD. Believe it or not, the main reason people especially developers flocking to Linux at the time despite the superiority claim of other BSDs of their self-evident stability and security was mainly the licensing of GPL for Linux kernel. It was a stroke of genius from Linus by adopting the GPL but he probably hardly admitting the fact. No decent open source programmer (open source terminology was defined in the midst of this) at the time were willing to compromise people ripping their codes and put them inside other commercial OS, and at the time the usual suspect was Microsoft Windows of course. This very thing happened right infront of their eyes and under their noses when Microsoft literally took the entire TCP/IP stack from FreeBSD, but as a compensation they probably hired some of the FreeBSD folks after that and this latter fact is only speculation. It is really philosophical rather than technical superiority but in technology the superior product hardly win the contest, remember Betamax and VHS?
  - lproven 3y ago
    > It was a stroke of genius from Linus by adopting the GPL I agree. So does Linus: https://www.cio.com/article/238985/linus-torvalds-says-gpl-was-defining-factor-in-linuxs-success.html https://www.cio.com/article/238985/linus-torvalds-says-gpl-w... Also, important note: the GPL was not the original license he chose. It changed with v0.99. Before that it was his own licence. https://web.archive.org/web/20110721105526/https://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/Historic/old-versions/RELNOTES-0.12 https://web.archive.org/web/20110721105526/https://www.kerne...
  - Gud 3y ago
    I think more importantly is the lawsuit by AT&T against University of California.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

jspann 3y ago

> NetBSD sits in the middle. It is a relatively small, clean, and simple OS. The "build.sh" system for compilation is so easy to use for compiling your own toyOS that I initially felt like I had done something wrong. Linux is a bigger, better funded, wider documented project but the overall ease of specifying output type for a boot image and what platform I was developing for was the second deciding factor for me. The first was being able to compile it (with no weird extra steps) on my Mac (pre Apple Silicon). In undergrad it became my hackable OS of choice if I wanted to compile something for my old Mac, a server for my bike, or some incredibly niche computer I found by accident. When I had questions, I asked the IRC group. For me, it was a great introduction by practice of the different parts of an OS.

wannacboatmovie 3y ago
> some incredibly niche computer I found by accident I used to think this, but leave it to me to disprove... Had an Intel Atom board that would only boot Linux and... OpenBSD. NetBSD (and a number of other OSes) would hang when attempting to load the kernel and refuse to boot - likely due to some firmware bug.
- kees99 3y ago
  > Intel Atom (...) NetBSD (and a number of other OSes) would (...) refuse to boot Was it one of those cheap tablets/netbooks that shipped with fully-64-bit-capable CPU (Atom Z3735F) but with dreaded 32-bit-only UEFI firmware? GRUB can boot NetBSD there, although it's a bit of a hassle to set up.
  - wannacboatmovie 3y ago
    Negative, it was an embedded board. GRUB was not the issue; rather the kernel would hang after partially booting. Affected Illumos as well so it's likely a firmware bug.

rahen 3y ago

> NetBSD is more of a traditional Unix-style experience than modern Linux. That's a bit of an understatement. NetBSD is primarily about preserving the original Unix spirit with broad compatibility across both hardware and software. This is the antithesis of, say, Fedora. NetBSD spans a vast amount of history, supporting everything from VAX and early Sun workstations to aarch64 and amd64, and from the V7 filesystem (1979) to ZFS. It will run both early SunOS binaries and bleeding edge software. That being said, what I appreciate most about NetBSD is the dogfooding. Many core developers use vintage hardware or ARM boards, and routinely try the releases on antiquated hardware. Since software behaves like a gas, this helps keep bloat to a minimum. So there you have it: a deliberately old-school Unix that will run modern software yet still work like in the 80s / early 90s on basically anything with a CPU and MMU.

smackeyacky 3y ago
No, trying software on antiquated hardware just keeps you in the dark ages. For those of us that were there when 385BSD and NETBSD were waging their stupid holy war against commercial nixes the purity tests about what Unix really was are just pointless. Unix was always an entirely commercial enterprise. Linux wasn’t.
- rahen 3y ago
  I strongly favored Linux in the nineties because the elitism of the BSD world was infuriating back then. There were no device drivers for IDE CD-ROM drives because "real men" were supposed to use SCSI. There were no binary packages, yet ports were constantly broken. Sound support was non-existent by default. Not to mention the early BSDs were extremely buggy, let alone the train wreck that was 386BSD. Linux 0.9 was already more stable, performant, and usable. A true hacker paradize. Then Linux started transitioning from a patchwork of loosely coupled replaceable components to integrated stacks in the mid-2000s, becoming ironically more and more of a corporate commodity rather than a playground for software freedom. You would need to define "the dark ages", as I understand casual users may prefer this trend, but for me, NetBSD is where the spirit remains. This is an entirely dependable, simple, hackable, grokable system and that's the way I want it to stay.

mmsc 3y ago

I’m a fan but this is such a turnoff: That worked too, albeit not quite as we expected. We got a nightly build, rather than the latest release 124, and it pulled in some unexpected dependencies such as Python 3 and Wayland – although NetBSD doesn't support Wayland.

pasc1878 3y ago
But that is not NetBSDs fault but the configure script not doing the correct things. It would pull in the same things on Linux. Which is the error as they should be different.
washbear 3y ago
The article is wrong, it has branding disabled (so it identifies as Nightly), but it's stable Firefox. And the linked article indicates that one compositor can be used.

FujiApple 3y ago

What is the state of the art for running NetBSD (and other *BSD) in CI such as GitHub actions? Edit: to add a bit more detail, I maintain a cross platform tool [1] on GitHub and require a way to build and test it in CI for several platform not natively supported by GitHub. Currently I use cargo-cross [2] to build it from a Linux OS but this doesn’t work for running the tests. One option I’m aware of is running a qemu VM on Linux, which is the approach taken by postgres [3]. Another option is using an external CI provider such as Cirrus who claim to have native support [4] for various *BSD. [1] https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy https://github.com/fujiapple852/trippy [2] https://github.com/cross-rs/cross https://github.com/cross-rs/cross [3] https://github.com/anarazel/pg-vm-images https://github.com/anarazel/pg-vm-images [4] https://cirrus-ci.org/guide/FreeBSD/ https://cirrus-ci.org/guide/FreeBSD/

jaypatelani 3y ago
https://github.com/vmactions/netbsd-vm https://github.com/vmactions/netbsd-vm https://smolbsd.org/ https://smolbsd.org/

RetroTechie 3y ago

It is (slightly) disappointing RISC-V didn't make it as an officially supported platform in this release. Hopefully we won't have to wait for next major release before that support gets integrated. It used to be that NetBSD was among the 1st (if not the 1st) to hop onto a new platform. Along with smaller OSes like some RTOS or Forth-based systems. But that hasn't been true for a long time - nowadays Linux usually gets there first. That said: it's very impressive what NetBSD manages to do & support, given its relatively small user- and developer community. Kudoz to everyone involved!

nortonham 3y ago
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/riscv/#index4h2 https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/riscv/#index4h2

a-french-anon 3y ago

Anyone knows if NetBSD plans on syncing their ZFS with OpenZFS at some point? Didn't manage to find info on this.

nortonham 3y ago
probably best asked on a mailing list. But NetBSD is really community/volunteer driven, so someone with an itch to scratch will have to take it on

jmclnx 3y ago

Not to mention, the NetBSD people are quite friendly. If you are a student (or anyone) looking for a project to get involved with, you should give NetBSD a try.

sourcepluck 3y ago

I'm loving the BSD announcements these days. Getting more and more tempted to put maybe NetBSD on an older machine some evening and have a play around.

vhodges 3y ago

I have a fondness as NetBSD was the first Unix I ever installed (circa fall of '94)... for about 4 hours or so, then I had to restore my Amiga4000 back to AmigaOS for work on Monday :). I set up a NetBSD VM (on my Macbook) that I had intended to use but there was just enough friction/lack of pkgsrc knowledge that I never made the leap.

johnklos 3y ago
My first experience with free Unix were with Red Hat and NetBSD on Amiga hardware. I'm still running NetBSD on the two Amigas I started with in the mid '90s :)

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

nortonham 3y ago

I will say I like this more than your review of netbsd 9 ;)

lproven 3y ago
:-D I have no idea if some of the issues I reported with 9.3 led to those issues being fixed in 10, but I really did appreciate things like my cursor keys working in the shell, right off the boot media. ;-)
- nortonham 3y ago
  It's proving to be a good release so far. Hopefully they get more support in the form of manpower and cash. Looking forward to NetBSD and the increasing popularity of ARM in the future.

nortonham 3y ago

NetBSD is great because: can support lots of hardware; minimal but featureful; secure; pkgsrc; friendly community; It's like a good middle ground between Free and OpenBSD. Anyone into "minimal" linux distros might get a kick out of it. Anyone interested should check out https://www.unitedbsd.com/ https://www.unitedbsd.com/ It's a bsd forum with a good number of netbsd users and a couple of developers as well.