The current state of NetBSD

[DaBSD]

Originally Posted by rocket357

Good to see this thread isn't as dead as NetBSD is rumored to be. =)

Shame it's not the other way around

[bsd-keith]

Well now - if you don't like it, don't use it.

If you think it's dead, don't use it.

No point in criticising a 'dead' project.

[kamil]

NetBSD is alive and kicking.

Cutting edge toolchain, new ports (riscv, oprk1k), new in development lm32. Resurrected playstation2.
We had initial toolchain and platform stubs for aarch64 before FreeBSD. We had Raspberry Pi 2 support before FreeBSD.. etc.
The system base is well covered and verified with automated tests.
For NetBSD-7.0 the bugs in developed DRMKMS stuff are blockers.

pkgsrc is quartely on time and 2014 was one of the most active years. OpenSolaris folks use pkgsrc and lately covered the Q4 branches with Long Term support.

We have new developers, new candidates for developers, new users.

But the OS still needs you, more hands and computers to test, develop, give feedback.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by kamil

The system base is well covered and verified with automated tests.

You people really have to be little bit more aggressive promoting your work. I actually read about your great automatized and regression tests on tech@openbsd even though I am lurking one many of your mailing list.
OpenBSD developers wants to port that stuff from you guys.

Originally Posted by kamil

For NetBSD-7.0 the bugs in developed DRMKMS stuff are blockers.

Any change that you give us a rough release date of 7.0 branch? Could you also give a brief summary/highlights of major changes? Hunting them on netbsd web site and commit logs is not easy.

[kamil]

Originally Posted by Oko

You people really have to be little bit more aggressive promoting your work. I actually read about your great automatized and regression tests on tech@openbsd even though I am lurking one many of your mailing list.
OpenBSD developers wants to port that stuff from you guys.

I'm just a user not a representative.

Originally Posted by Oko

Any change that you give us a rough release date of 7.0 branch? Could you also give a brief summary/highlights of major changes? Hunting them on netbsd web site and commit logs is not easy.

Changes: http://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-7.0.html

There is no date, it will be released when it will be ready and the following list will be emptied: http://releng.netbsd.org/pr-list.html


Well I can see problems too, like keeping 250,000 USD reserves, not well invested next year it can be worth 100,000 USD or less. Much better to invest in 2 full-time devs and push DRMKMS forward as much as possible, because broken X acceleration can likely marginalize the system share on market.

NetBSD shares the same issues with all BSD, Unix systems and some legacy Linux distros, shrinking user-base, aging devs and admins.

To address the problems (not just applicable to NetBSD) I see the following things to be done:

• Improve fundraising. 1. State goals: the end date, the amount to collect, for what to use the money. 2. Fragment the fundraising to: TNF goals, new particular ports (like ARMv8 or Power8), X Window, pkgsrc, etc.
• Improve the contribute platform. 1. I like CVS and I think it's superior to git for large projects, however new users start from git. The solutions are as follows: full migration or an official mirror in git (do the same way as FreeBSD). 2. Introduce phabric(ator)-like for new code. People submit code to mailing lists and it happens to be forgotten.... quite demotivating. It's this way in other BSDs too, lately FreeBSD merged pmap for armv6 pending for years.. already obsoleted as the new one has superior features (like Transparent Huge Pages)...
• Improve promotion, find ways to get younger generation to join the team. People in their 15-30 usually have more time to contribute. Yeah static webpage with legacy content isn't promising - even you the BSD enthusiasts miss what's going on there. I used to be a dev member of a popular Linux distro, there was formalized mentoring procedure for candidates, mentors looking for apprentices, apprentices looking for mentors, up-to-date HOW-TOs, guidelines, even YouTube live streaming with tutors and it worked. Tutorials for BSD systems are often from year 2000 or so, never updated.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by kamil

I'm just a user not a representative.



Changes: http://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-7.0.html

That webpage is exactly what I refer when I said that is very difficult to track changes. Just pulling CVS commits and posting them in sorted order is not very useful for people like me who want to see 5-10 pig ticket items. For example ZFS is finished (it is not and it is never going to happen), or softraid 6 works (same as ZFS) or latest Xen is ported (which is actually true). Why do I want to use NetBSD Dom0 over Linux Dom0 or incoming FreeBSD Dom0. Current state of NPF. You work on ARMv7 multiprocessor support and things like that.

BTW Raspberry Pi is a joke! If you guys post that as a highlights I know that you are really in trouble.

[kamil]

Originally Posted by Oko

That webpage is exactly what I refer when I said that is very difficult to track changes. Just pulling CVS commits and posting them in sorted order is not very useful for people like me who want to see 5-10 pig ticket items. For example ZFS is finished (it is not and it is never going to happen), or softraid 6 works (same as ZFS) or latest Xen is ported (which is actually true). Why do I want to use NetBSD Dom0 over Linux Dom0 or incoming FreeBSD Dom0. Current state of NPF. You work on ARMv7 multiprocessor support and things like that.

If you want to see the release news in a different way and claim that the changes site is awful, feel free to do a better one.

People have different set of interests, I'm personally not interested in softraid 6, zfs or npf. I'm satisfied with Lua in kernel, dynamic modules, Linux compat, X, DRMKMS, USB, NIC, cross-compilability, reusability and more.
Talking this way we won't have the same language.

Originally Posted by Oko

BTW Raspberry Pi is a joke! If you guys post that as a highlights I know that you are really in trouble.

Why trouble? Actually a lot of new people come just to run NetBSD on their RPi or Allwinner boards. I assume that you are not interested in low-cost embedded. A lot of people is.

[fn8t]

Originally Posted by Oko

BTW Raspberry Pi is a joke! If you guys post that as a highlights I know that you are really in trouble.

I tend to side with those that dislike the Rpi, I wouldn't even use it as a wifi router. There are lots of projects using it for security surveillance systems and as an advanced controller. I don't see any real reason that OpenBSD should support the Rpi. There are some clearly conflicting philosophies between the two.

Considering that NetBSD somewhat supports the playstation 2, the Rpi probably deserves some support mention. There are a large amount of people playing around with the Rpi and NetBSD exposure from experimentation on their boards may draw some attention.

The Rpi has some real drawbacks against other SoCs. But, it is real cheap. In varying countries with different financial structures, a 25 to 35 dollar computer might mean the difference between having one and not. These folks aren't going to be serving up data centers, but it does provide a chance to create a local mesh network with a smaller investment. Someone like that might not care about binary blobs, even if they should.

I should add that the Odriod-c1 is comparative in cost and spec to the Rpi. Its only draw back it having no composite video or analog audio outputs (it seems). For most this wouldn't even matter, but if you don't have an hdmi a/v output device you might be out of luck. Again, this affects those with lower incomes.

[rocket357]

Originally Posted by fn8t

Someone like that might not care about binary blobs, even if they should.

Agreed.

Originally Posted by fn8t

I should add that the Odriod-c1 is comparative in cost and spec to the Rpi.

That is a seriously cool board. I haven't found a list of Bitrig supported SoCs yet, (looks like Patrick is working on rpi2 support?), but I'd be interested to see if that SoC is supported by OpenBSD in the future.

[kamil]

Odroid-C1? Of course it runs NetBSD!

http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/net...dkernel_odroid

[Oko]

Originally Posted by kamil

If you want to see the release news in a different way and claim that the changes site is awful, feel free to do a better one.

But I don't use NetBSD. Why would I do that? I am just pointing out that if I had quickly to make a sale pitch to my management why we need to use NetBSD 7.0 in our shop I would have very hard time point out 5-10 cool things even that you guys actually have them. Seriously, running BSDs is in part my livelihood and even I am having very hard time navigating what you guys bring to table comparing to other BSDs.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by kamil

Odroid-C1? Of course it runs NetBSD!

http://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/net...dkernel_odroid

That is very cool and the board is really nice. Why aren't you guys bragging about that? Do you have too many users as it is? BTW I love embedded hardware. I just have very low opinion of Raspberry Pi in part due to crap you developer got from Raspberry PI developers when he dared to port non-Linux OS to that firmware bloat-ware.

[rocket357]

Originally Posted by kamil

Odroid-C1? Of course it runs NetBSD!

I appreciate the banter, and it's nice that NetBSD runs on everything under the sun, but I have yet to run across a situation where I had no choice but to run NetBSD. I suppose I don't have varied enough hardware to warrant running NetBSD enough to overcome the lack of security features found in OpenBSD.

But that board does look nice =)

[kamil]

Everything depends on use-case, for servers we have the longest support, including binary backward compatibility to BSD4.4 or so, security and bugfix updates, decent server software in pkgsrc -- see what is doing the Solaris team with pkgsrc, they provide commercial support for it with LTS.

NetBSD shares networking capabilities of other BSD systems (well there are always narrow cases).

Personally I wouldn't install a system on a server with less than 5 years of support. Yearly upgrades are no go. People still have NetBSD-4 and -5 on their servers. The 5.x release is still supported. For virtualization NetBSD/Dom0 works and the wiki was lately updated.

I see no problem with NetBSD on a decent server.

[rocket357]

You see no problem running a 5 year old OS that lacks basic security hardening?

You are correct, everything depends on use-case =)

[kamil]

Originally Posted by rocket357

You see no problem running a 5 year old OS that lacks basic security hardening?

You are correct, everything depends on use-case =)

There are security updates to 5-years old systems.
Please see an example advisory (the latest one noted):

http://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/sec...15-003.txt.asc

Please don't change this topic to 'my system is better than yours' or 'your system is wrecked', for me and many users this is just a great piece of code reusable and retargettable it fits our needs. There are serious problems to focus on, like driver-base deficiencies or the current state of DRMKMS - this is for me top priority.

My first code for NetBSD was contributed when I needed to use a new piece of software on CentOS-6... pkgsrc came with 'it just works' solution. Today that particular package is used on many platforms including NetBSD.

PS. Do you know that some Linux vendors sale support for 20 years? Or VAX/VMS solutions are still supported? Community and volunteer driven long term support in NetBSD is good piece of work.

PPS. If I would seriously care about security, I would pick-up the sel4 kernel and laugh at every other solution. Of course NetBSD code could be added to it the same way how it was added to Minix. Today Minix runs with NetBSD drivers and code-base.

[rocket357]

Originally Posted by rocket357

I'd be interested to see if that SoC is supported by OpenBSD in the future.

Originally Posted by kamil

Odroid-C1? Of course it runs NetBSD!

Originally Posted by kamil

Please don't change this topic to 'my system is better than yours'

You first.

As for sel4, of course you can mathematically prove a kernel where everything is in user-space. It even admits so much in the supported devices section of the FAQ:

https://sel4.systems/FAQ/#devices

"seL4, like any real microkernel, runs all device drivers in user mode, device support is therefore not the kernel's problem.

<snip>

Other than that, device support is the user's problem."

[kamil]

Well, to sum it up and not to derail the discussion, we are alive.

Best regards and thank you for your care.

[Oko]

Originally Posted by kamil

PPS. If I would seriously care about security, I would pick-up the sel4 kernel and laugh at every other solution.

I was taking your posts seriously until you said that nonsense. BTW I have some rudimentary exposure to RAND corporation research on secure computer hardware and OS. Neither you nor me (thanks God) have access to such kind things.

And finally more bad news on March 4th for still alive NetBSD

Now, the 2015 mentoring organizations have been announced, and I am in a sad position to tell that NetBSD is not among the choosen mentoring organizations this year, again. :-(

http://netbsd.fi/

[gpatrick]

But I don't use NetBSD.

Then why are you even making comments that seem to be knocking NetBSD?