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NetBSD Internals

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107 pointsjayp141824 comments

NetBSD is such a joy to work with, I’ve stuck with it for nigh 18 years (NetBSD 1.6). I’ve used FreeBSD and Linux fairly extensively (esp Linux at $work, of course), and dabbled with DragonFly and Open BSDs, but the fit/finish of NetBSD keeps me coming back.

The linked document is fairly old. There seems to be a lot of churn in the tree lately (last 6(?) months; seems to have slowed last few weeks), especially by ad@ (Andrew Doran). Browse the mailing list[0] to see what’s going on in -current. It’s extensive enough (read: occasionally unstable) that I’ve moved from running -current as my daily-driver (which was possible for an amazingly long time) to tracking 9-release.

If anybody is interested in a well put together *nix, esp a BSD, NetBSD[1] deserves attention.

[0] https://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/

[1] https://NetBSD.org/

I’ve been running OpenBSD as my daily driver for the past few months and I like it.

Turning my laptop into a little fortress appealed to the same part of me that loved the Tesla Cybertruck for being built like a tank.

How does NetBSD compare with OpenBSD? What would be the strongest reason for me to switch over?

If you like Open, I wouldn’t switch; Keep enjoying it.

Seems to me Net and Open are remarkably similar- relatively simple implementations with an eye to traditional Unix and standards. OpenBSD is more conservative, in the name of security, at the cost of “neat things”. Seems to me they eschewed MP kernels for ages on that basis, and won’t ever have (eg) PAM for authentication. Make of it what you will. In the meantime, enjoy OpenBSD!

> Seems to me Net and Open are remarkably similar- relatively simple implementations with an eye to traditional Unix and standards.

Well OpenBSD was originally forked from NetBSD and iirc, NetBSD was the first of the "modern" BSD's forked from 386BSD.

You’re right on both counts. But to throw a wrinkle in this, DragonFlyBSD was forked from FreeBSD 4 more recently than Open from Net, and is quite a remarkably different beast; it doesn’t necessarily follow they need to be remarkably similar.

Well. NetBSD supports bluetooth. (!)

But in general, the reasons to run one or the other don't overlap all that much. People already happy running OpenBSD are unlikely to want to switch.

NetBSD was my favorite OS to run on a Raspberry Pi. Raspbian (at least back in the RPi 2 days) felt like a stripped down Debian squeezed into something that can run on the Pi, while NetBSD seemed to feel right at home.

Not very scientific of a response, but meh, give it a try if you've got a Pi lying around!

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.

"no hype required"

Don't get me wrong, but I can't see why anyone should use something except mainstream OS like Linux? Taking into account that fact what OS is no interest for people itself, it's just a platform for applications.

Network performance and efficiency are pretty high on that list. This might even still be true today.

I'm not sure *BSD has top network performance today: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=windows-...

Eh, I'd be more interested in seeing how well each could be optimized for a specific workload.

For instance, take a peak of what Netflix has accomplished (200Gbps of TLS from single server). I'd wager that Windows Server could not be optimized to the same degree.

https://2019.eurobsdcon.org/slides/NUMA%20Optimizations%20in...

More secure, more stable, better documentation, easier upgrades, less complexity, less aggravation.

OpenBSD makes me happy, bought a Thinkpad for the occasion and it runs great.

>but I can't see why anyone should use something except mainstream OS like Linux?

Everyone said the same in the 90's...but about Windows.

>Taking into account that fact what OS is no interest for people itself

True but for the dev's and admin's its pretty much the most important thing to have a good base.

I think most dev's don't care about OS or will stick with Linux as it's most widely supported choice. Speaking of sysadmins, I don't see much job openings for such role, it's more like everyone is DevOps now, running some sort of Linux containers.

>dev's don't care about OS

Maybe ask Netflix or Whatsapp (before FB) why the chose FreeBSD?

>sysadmins, I don't see much job openings

That is the HR 'coolness' Factor, often they don't even know what a DevOp is but i find alone in Switzerland 304 alone on one platform:

https://www.jobs.ch/de/stellenangebote/informatik-telekommun...

And 668 devop's:

https://www.jobs.ch/de/stellenangebote/?term=devop

But if you read the description of the jobs its mostly pure System-administration with a grain of Jenkins and Orchestration...as if that's not pure Administration.

The way I see it, people should

A) Use the simplest possible solution, from a technical perspective. Right now for me, that's Pop!_OS, but I fully intend to move to BSD/Void/Alpine on my next machine.

B) Use what works with the right amount of effort. For many people, this is Linux/Windows/Mac, why not a different BSD as well?

Also, how is Linux any more mainstream then BSD? cough Darwin cough

Ok maybe I am narrow-minded but Alpine has so many hidden gotchas such as not using muslc instead of glibc. This specifically causes most stuff not to compile from source properly. Depending on how you use your daily machine you might end up redoing everything inside Alpine and would be better served with something like Fedora or Debian.

My next machine is going to mostly be

A) Programming my own stuff, in which case I see that as a benefit, because it forces me to write portable code.

B) Managing servers, in which case it won't matter.

I do have some experience with it on a side laptop, and I quite enjoyed it.

That being said, the warning you brought up could certainly screw up many workflows, so thank you for the heads up.

Specifically where I run into it a lot is installing python modules that expect glibc to build something from source. The workaround is to either install the python module from the alpine package manager (apk) or to add in glibc to alpine.

90% of what programming I do is in C/Rust/sh, so I shouldn't run into that. Thanks for the heads up though, I'll keep it in mind when I do use python, which makes up a good chunk of that last 10%.

I have tried using various BSD OS’s but they always seemed to require a lot more work if you wanted a desktop GUI.

Am I correct in thinking that BSD is meant to be used “headless” for security reasons?

30 minutes is not much for freebsd, otherwise use something like http://ghostbsd.org/ or https://nomadbsd.org/ but you learn much more with net- open- freebsd

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