NetBSD turns 20 | Hacker News Reader

NetBSD turns 20

netbsd.org

101 pointsdallagi8 comments

Hopefully this isn't considered too much of a hijack, but while NetBSD on topic I'd really like to recommend taking a look at their support for "rump kernels". Basically, you can compile and use large swathes on NetBSD as a library even on non-NetBSD systems. You can use this to, for instance use the NetBSD filesystem implementations to read an unmounted disk image. Or run Firefox using the NetBSD TCP/IP stack.

http://www.netbsd.org/docs/rump/sptut.html https://github.com/anttikantee/buildrump.sh

Wow. That's a totally awesome feature I was not aware of. There are tons of use-cases for being able to do things like run a real TCP/IP stack in userspace.

Tools such a http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slirp had to hack the BSD networking stack considerably to run as a userspace process, and is used to power networking in emulators, mobile phone tethering, etc.

> "rump kernels"

> compile and use large swathes

Can someone elaborate in plain speak?

Happy birthday, NetBSD! My tool of choice for my first ten years of Unix. While Linux was scrambling from kernel update to kernel update, NetBSD felt pro on whatever scrounged hunk o' silicon I had powered up at the time. Congratulations on two decades of excellence. Here's looking at a few more!

Great OS and Great Team. If you need an OS that will not need to be upgraded frequently and secure this is the one.

Definitely. I had a dialup SLIP server running on NetBSD on an old Compaq desktop for nearly 10 years and it didn't get a single update. It died when the case filled up with dust to the point the CPU fan stopped going round and it blew up.

How would it compare to OpenBSD of FreeBSD? Both beat Linuxes at "stability" and security, but there seems to be easier to find docs about them and software guaranteed to work on them. Why would I learn/use it besides for the fun of hacking on it and the support for exotic architectures?

"NetBSD turns 20, still lives with parents."

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