NetBSD 10: Thirty Years, Still Going Strong | Hacker News Reader

NetBSD 10: Thirty Years, Still Going Strong

bentsukun.ch

76 pointsjaypatelani23 comments

With NetBSD, I've discovered an OS that gives me joy in a way that's hard to describe: NetBSD is neat, works everywhere, and its users are friendly.

It's not as well known as FreeBSD (or Linux) but yet you've got everything in a smaller community that's well organized and big enough that you can, share, and learn with them. I like that pace :)

I hope I will be able to offer minimal contributions to the kernel: for now, my project is adding an init_flag to pass the kernel to be loaded,and the init run too, like --init-args do similar on FreeBSD or Linux,

My other project is about boot time metrics: https://old.reddit.com/r/NetBSD/comments/1agmfja/collecting_... My other small project is for metering boot: I'ts just small sqlite database that'll automatically extract tslog boot info to better track regressions, improvements etc: with a kernel that now boots in 60 ms or less, you want very accurate numbers!

I get the feeling I should really take the plunge and start using one of the BSDs, at least as a web server or something. I rarely see them mentioned in job postings compared to Linux, but everything I hear about them as servers sounds so much less painful.

Turn as to whether Free vs Open vs Net makes the most sense. My very uncertain guess is Free is the easiest to get used to, and that you can't really go too wrong with any of them without a specialized use case.

> everything I hear about them as servers sounds so much less painful.

It's a different kind of pain.

The entire "distribution" is cohesive and clean in a way that no Linux distribution manages. A lot of duplication of effort and ugliness is avoided.

But everyone develops for Linux, and you run into places where things don't work. And performance doesn't come close to Linux on the top end or even high middle end.

> And performance doesn't come close to Linux on the top end or even high middle end.

There are presentation about how Netflix uses BSD for video delivery for its performance, so it can't be that bad.

Unless Netflix compares the performance with Linux and publishes the results, it's hard to know if it's a great idea or just based on the whims of the most senior sysadmins.

IIRC the main reason to use FreeBSD instead of Linux was BSD being a lot simpler and have a lot more room to optimize their specific use case.

BSD is really do for companies that want to keep their code closed, but not start from scratch. I see this as a large reason why Netflix uses them and Sony uses BSD on playstations.

> And performance doesn't come close to Linux on the top end or even high middle end.

The Playstation System software (Orbis OS) is a fork of FreeBSD:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_4_system_software

I'd guess performance was pretty high on Sony's list of priorities.

Your guess is mostly wrong.

The playstation runs freebsd rather than linux licensing reasons, not for speed.

Sure, Sony chooses a crap preforming OS just because it can't license the most popular. That makes sense.

It’s a gaming console. A lot of performance issues which could occur with e.g. a server OS aren’t going to happen.

And the bits that are most performance critical (primarily graphics) are very custom and likely have little in common with vanilla FreeBSD

So how well it performs for Sony says very little about how well it will perform for you - since your use cases have a high chance of being very different from theirs

Yeah, I can see that. Fair enough. Thanks.

> That makes sense.

you'd be surprised how many nice things we don't get because of licensing.

dumb example: magsafe. it'd be nice and cheap to have it on all laptops, but laptop manufacturers can't license it (because apple won't sell licenses) so they have to go with other routes.

But we got BSD, Linux and GNU because of Licensing ;)

> > And performance doesn't come close to Linux on the top end or even high middle end.

> I'd guess performance was pretty high on Sony's list of priorities.

Do you consider the Playstation 4 hardware "top end"? I'm mostly thinking about SMP and IO performance.

See the geometric mean results here: https://www.phoronix.com/review/3990x-freebsd-bsd/5

"At 16 cores, RHEL8-based CentOS was about 17% faster than FreeBSD 12.1 while at 128 threads the lead expanded to 28% based upon the geometric mean or 21% when comparing the GCC9 results on FreeBSD 12.1."

It's my understanding that FreeBSD 13 has narrowed the gap a little bit. I was a total NetBSD fanboy at the beginning of my career, but was eventually forced to move away when Linux's momentum inexorably made running NetBSD (and FreeBSD) harder.

>And performance doesn't come close to Linux on the top end or even high middle end.

It's a mixed bag, a not so good benchmark:

https://senioradmin.de/BenchmarkBSDLinux.html

And a little better one (with FreeBSD13 but 14 is already out and it's much faster[1]):

https://www.phoronix.com/review/bsd-linux-eo2021

[1]https://www.phoronix.com/review/freebsd-14-epyc

I went full in on FreeBSD, it just has the most features and biggest community. I have pf (the firewall), zfs or ufs(the real one :) ), HAST, two supported versions FB13/14, packages or ports (both available as head or quarterly), MAC, Jail's, Bhyve, Security Event Auditing, Secure-levels, Capsicum, File-flags etc etc. [1]

And one really important point for me, one can work ~instantly on the project:

-Read https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/porters-handbook/

-Open an account at https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/

-Send in patches and have fun.

-Search for outdated ports https://portscout.freebsd.org/

-Send in another patch.

[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/security/

[dupe]

An earlier link to the event talk page https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39220474

Thanks

There was some work on wine in NetBSD earlier, has that panned out? as in is that usable yet?

https://wiki.netbsd.org/projects/project/wine_amd64/

> Completed in 2019

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/emulators/w...

Looks like it is usable.

This is the first time I've seen the NetBSD announcement. "Escape from the political wars" is an interesting bit because it sounded like 386BSD completely devolved into a flamewar, and this confirms that it was more political than technological.

Linus T wrote a book called "Just For Fun", and idk but maybe fun-factor maybe won out.

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