NetBSD 9.2

https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/netbsd_9_2_released

by vermaden • 5 years ago

126 60 5 years ago

blog.netbsd.org

AJRF2• 5 years ago

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

akira2501• 5 years 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

AJRF2• 5 years ago

Haha I didn't notice the reference, that's great!

hansor• 5 years 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

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...

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.

ephaeton4• 5 years 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.

bluedino• 5 years ago

I liked Beastie as the FreeBSD logo as well, he's still on the page but the logo is now some sort of red bulbous thing, that still somehow resembles the mascot.

ephaeton4• 5 years 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 :'(

LargoLasskhyfv3• 5 years 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)

ephaeton4• 5 years 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.

IntelMiner• 5 years 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• 5 years 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)

simondotau2• 5 years 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• 5 years 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• 5 years 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.

detaro• 5 years 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.

DanBC• 5 years 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.

nicklaf3• 5 years 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

Mordisquitos• 5 years ago

I seem to remember that Netcraft confirmed it.

jart2• 5 years ago

What is dead may never die, but rises again harder and stronger.

mrweasel• 5 years ago

The calculations back then placed OpenBSD as being less used than NetBSD. While neither of those two BSD seem to have die, or perhaps just wasn't informed of their demise, OpenBSD looks to have overtaken NetBSD in usage (and news coverage).

medstrom3• 5 years ago

Software doesn't die until all developers abandon it.

znpy4• 5 years ago

Meh.

Sometimes it takes very long for things to die definitively.

"The BSDs are dieing" is definitely a (false) meme but there's some truth to that.

On a lot of things the BSD are either cut out or lagging behind by a lot.

Example for both things:

Being cut out: containers and kubernetes. Heck, you can even have MS-Windows-based kubernetes workers, whereas just yesterday some random guy released an experimental oci-compliant, jail-based container runtime (IIRC). And that's for FreeBSD, does not even apply to Net/Open/Dragonfly/whatever.

Lagging behind: wayland. Mostly working on GNU/Linux, what's the status on the various BSDs? Not pretty.

So to wrap up: it kinda depends on your point of view.

If your use case falls within what's supported and what the developers develop for, then the BSDs are alive and doing well.

Otherwise, the BSDs appear to be dieing very slowly.

hulitu2• 5 years ago

Can NetBSD now utilize more than 1 processor core ?

rjsw• 5 years ago

It has been able to do that for many years now.

phaemon• 5 years 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. :)

ephaeton4• 5 years 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.

unsungNovelty• 5 years ago

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

medstrom3• 5 years 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.

jart2• 5 years 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/ 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.

anthk3• 5 years ago

Your universal binaries would make an instant ultraportable release of Nethack/Slashem.

frr149• 5 years ago

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

bluGill• 5 years 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• 5 years 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/), very good support for ARM (all 'mainline', etc). The NPF firewall is also quite nice.

throw0101a• 5 years ago

a powerful and versatile package manager (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.

jmclnx2• 5 years ago

One neat thing is the rump kernel.

I had a very old DOS formatted diskette and when I tried to mount it on Linux, FreeBSD and got a panic.

NetBSD just came out with rump and I did some reading and gave it a try. I was able to mount after a couple of attempts and copy about 90 % of the Text File (a large file). No panics except under rump, but main system was happily moving along.

anthk3• 5 years ago

How does that work? I would like to see an example.

LargoLasskhyfv3• 5 years ago

Lean and mean!

iJohnDoe• 5 years 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

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