from Hacker News

NetBSD 8.0 released

by algorithm314 on 7/21/18, 2:56 PM with 111 comments

  • by aaronmdjones on 7/22/18, 2:48 AM

    Am I the only one feeling a little bit disappointed with some of the software versions listed there?

    I don't use NetBSD, so perhaps I'm not in "the loop", and please forgive me if so, but;

    - GCC 5.5 is only one major version higher than the oldest supported version; 6 or 7 would have been a better choice while you're banging out a whole new operating system release, 6 is still fully supported, 8 was released early this year. I understand newer compilers can sometimes introduce regressions in the build process for something as large as an entire operating system, but surely they could have tested it and gotten those bugs fixed if any?

    - Similarly for Clang/LLVM 3.8.1 (Really? The oldest version of Clang that you can get on a modern Linux distro? Really?).

    - OpenSSL 1.0.2 is only supported for another 17 months, 1.0.2k (the version they're shipping) is 3 versions older than the current 1.0.2o, and 1.0.2p is going to be released any day now. There are at least 4 CVEs patched between 1.0.2k and 1.0.2o; I hope they're applying those patches on top of 1.0.2k manually.

  • by avar on 7/21/18, 4:14 PM

        > USB stack rework, USB3 support added.
    
    I didn't realize NetBSD was that far behind on some basic features like USB support.

    "The Linux kernel mainline contains support for USB 3.0 since version 2.6.31, which was released in September 2009"[1]. "FreeBSD supports USB 3.0 since version 8.2, which was released in February 2011.".

    So they're getting USB 3.0 almost 10 years after it was released for Linux.

    1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_3.0

  • by zippie on 7/21/18, 4:17 PM

    This release of NetBSD disables eagerfpu on vulnerable FPU’s.

    Often overlooked while discussing performance impact of context switching; context switching also applies to the FPU. There are two modes in which the OS performs FPU context switching: lazy and eager.

    “lazy” FPU context switching leaves the previous context on the FPU until a different context gives it a set of instructions. This saves an unload on the FPU, since not all time splices require the FPU, you may see some performance gains under some application workloads.

    “Eager” FPU context switching unloads FPU context whenever a time splice is finished. On a new time splice, the FPU context is reloaded. While this constant reloading of context sounds more expensive, it is optimized in hardware and almost never noticeable on modern architectures.

    By default eager FPU is enabled in Linux. You can test its’ impact by passing the eagerfpu=on or eagerfpu=off boot flags (Linux).

    Kudos to the NetBSD team for enabling/disabling eager FPU based on FPU model instead. This approach makes more sense to me.

  • by kev009 on 7/21/18, 6:39 PM

    NetBSD was my first BSD and OS development experience in my teens. I'm fairly entrenched in the FreeBSD camp for commercial reasons now after a very long run as a Linux user, but there is some nice security stuff in here and happy to see NetBSD chugging along! Congrats!
  • by occamrazor on 7/21/18, 6:17 PM

    What are the distinguishing features of NetBSD in comparison to OpenBSD and FreeBSD?

    From the respective home pages, FreeBSD targets high performance, OpenBSD security, but it is not so clear to me what is the focus of NetBSD.

  • by somethingsimple on 7/21/18, 4:34 PM

    Does anyone here on HN have experience running NetBSD as their desktop OS?
  • by krylon on 7/21/18, 5:44 PM

    Wasn't NetBSD 8 supposed to have zfs? Last time I read something about it, it sounded like it was practically finished. But the release notes do not mention it at all.
  • by dfox on 7/21/18, 8:17 PM

    PaX support on pmax? There is only one reaction I have for that: why? (With "because we can" probably being the reason)

    [Edit: landisk platform are various NAS boxes, so nothing of comparable obsolescence as pmax]

  • by 8bitsrule on 7/22/18, 2:29 AM

    A podcast I recently heard - hosted by long-experienced Linux hands - reported that installing BSD was a nightmare. Some discussion of which distros avoid that nightmare might be helpful.
  • by vasili111 on 7/21/18, 5:56 PM

    Have you used NetBSD and if yes:

    1. Why did you choose it?

    2. What are your impressions?

  • by Crontab on 7/21/18, 9:17 PM

    Yay! I love the smell of fresh Netbsd in the morning. Seriously though, awesome news.
  • by collinmanderson on 7/23/18, 7:28 PM

    Does anyone know what version of Python is installed by default?
  • by qop on 7/21/18, 10:20 PM

    I remember hearing netbsd had support for using Lua to write network drivers and then never heard anything else.

    Is that still a thing? I've had netbsd on my weekend to-do list for years but just have never found enough time or motivation.

    What's so great about netbsd?