|
NetBSD General Other questions regarding NetBSD which do not fit in any of the categories below. |
|
Thread Tools | Display Modes |
|
||||
The current state of NetBSD
Has somebody read NetBSD Foundation 2013 Financial Report. I knew that NetBSD was in trouble for a long time but I didn't realize how bad trouble was until I read the report. They spent less than $30 000 last year and raised only $25 000. I am also having hard time finding anything about impending 7.0 release (please no links to http://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-7.0.html) upgrade from one version of GCC to anther or upgrading OpenSSL are not significant new features. What is the status of Xen Dom0? It seems that that thing is rotting and it is in the same shape from almost 10 years ago.
Last edited by Oko; 30th March 2015 at 04:50 AM. |
|
|||
They've been running with about $250,000 cash on hand for a few years. About what they spend is what they receive in donations, 2013 wasn't any different than 2012 or 2011. I'd assume 2014 will be the same.
|
|
|||
Things were even rotting if they had more money. So many projects at a time, so many half-baked developments. Sigh.
But all we can do for now is to try keeping them up. |
|
|||
Quote:
I think a lot of work is currently going into stabilising the KMS support for netbsd-7 (native resolutions and reasonable performance on current Intel and ATI display hardware), and a chunk more of arm platform support (allwinner mainly), plus cutting more ports across to gcc-4.8 (which is apparently not as simple as you might hope given port specific hardware or boot code which makes assumptions about how code will be compiled which are no longer valid in recent gcc). I have a NetBSD/Xen DOM0 running nine assorted test VMs (mainly CentOS) on an old i5 server. I upgrade xen when there is a security notice, and otherwise pretty much forget its there. |
|
|||
I hope it doesn't disappear. I feel it's always a shame when this happens, even when I don't even use the software.
__________________
May the source be with you! |
|
||||
Now lets put above facts in prospective knowing that project spends less than $30 000 a year in operational costs (that used to be my NFS Summer support). If that doesn't look like the ship is sinking I don't know what. Maybe project leaders like Martin Husemann who claims that OpenBSD is not "really UNIX and BSD" see what we other mortals don't see. Last edited by Oko; 10th December 2014 at 01:45 AM. |
|
|||
NetBSD received donations of $150,000 in 2009 and more in 2010 that left them with a final balance which is about what it is today. They spend about what their donations are.
If you think their ship is sinking, then I'd assume you'd feel the same way about OpenBSD which was in worse shape because they had no money to pay their light bill. Seems OpenBSD likely receives less money than NetBSD. |
|
||||
http://arstechnica.com/information-t...coin-donation/
$100k in 2014 seems a bit more alive than $150k in 2009 (but I'll give you that we're discussing two projects that both seem dead compared to, say, Linux). I'd argue that OpenBSD code gets used more heavily in other projects than NetBSD code, though (OpenSSH alone makes that statement possible), though that doesn't mean shit when it comes to corporate sponsorship.
__________________
Linux/Network-Security Engineer by Profession. OpenBSD user by choice. |
|
||||
I really like both Net and Open. I have different use scenarios for each.
I can't say anything negative about Open or the authority in its development process, other than attributes that are practical but yet still hindering. Practical negatives are viewed as positive (in my eye). This might be my stance on Theo's so called overbearing control and or general intolerance, if I actually knew personally that he was overbearing or unduly intolerant. If it accomplishes the goal, then it can't be that bad. While I like Net, I can't say anything more certain about its development process. Different members of the Net group have admitted that the treatment Theo and others have received was an investment in bad karma. I have read a ton of "historical" email archives, and still feel there is some background information missing. What isn't missing is the improper treatment of persons due to some mentioned disagreements that are not likely the sum of the igniting issues. One area about Net that leaves me questioning, is the member agreement contract. There is a clause about "private information" that seems excessive, but could be completely proper. Guess I don't know enough about anything to make any stone engraved judgments. None of this actually addresses the concept of decaying operating systems. To some, Plan 9 is good and dead. To others DOS is dead and rotten. If you still use and develop on them, they are plenty alive enough for you. Dead or decaying might just mean not used by the majority or a slower level of maintenance toward satisfying modern expectations. If that is the case, I haven't been using a living operating system in a long time. Yet another concept of dead is, "Its dead to me". This is the case with my regard to Windows and Linux, regardless of their root strength globally. This thread could go some interesting directions. |
|
||||
Quote:
Quote:
Now politics aside OpenBSD is associated with the following significant coding projects: OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, OpenSMTPD, OpenIKED, mandoc, LibreSSL. LibreSSL alone would be enough to make a big splash. Now tell me one, just one significant NetBSD project in the last five years which was absorbed by other BSDs or OSs. Now I am fully aware of WAPBL and excited that it is part of Bitrig and possibly in the future of OpenBSD. However WAPBL is Wasabi Systems' file system and it has been released to public after Wasabi went out of business in spring of 2009 (that is more than 5 years ago). NPF is vaporware. What else? Porting ZFS and HAMMER went nowhere. Famed portability is reduced to cross compiling everything on amd64. Compare the state of Sparc64 in OpenBSD and NetBSD or something similar. pkgsrc doesn't work as advertised on anything but NetBSD and more testing and less talk would help (DragonFly people bailed out of pkgsrc, Minix seems to stick with it for now). Xen is cool but is it maintained? How does it compare to Jails+Behyve? NetBSD documentation feels like from the previous century. There is nothing new added there in the long, long time. New books are written about OpenBSD. None so far has ever been written about NetBSD. Nobody here hates NetBSD. I am personally worried about once mighty NetBSD (it was more popular than FreeBSD in mid 90s). NetBSD is very important for the BSD and UNIX ecosystems. Something has to happen to shake that community because otherwise will just further sink into obscurity. They have to come up with something cool to work on and more importantly they have to finish it, test it, and brag about it. Last edited by Oko; 10th December 2014 at 07:28 PM. |
|
|||
Quote:
As near as I can tell, NetBSD is about running on mutliple architectures. In my opinion, they should prioritize the architectures they wish to support, cut the cruft. and focus on making sure those system run well. Last edited by shep; 10th December 2014 at 09:13 PM. Reason: spelling |
|
|||
I'll admit NetBSD needs an identity, much the same as OpenIndiana. To me, both projects are foundering without adequate direction (OI's project leader resigned so that's a given).
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
|
|
||||
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
|
|
|||
So I'm going to do something I never do and post to a non-OpenBSD section of the forums. Not that I think NetBSD needs help defending themselves; they're adults and can speak for themselves. But there is one recurring sentiment made in this thread that needs to be challenged and/or halted because it's senseless. I'm going to paint you all with a broad brush. I don't particularly apologize for this.
Complaint: NetBSD should drop smaller platforms/"cruft". Why? What sense does this make? Should OpenBSD drop their smaller platforms, like OpenBSD/loongson? Think really hard before you answer that question. If OpenBSD took your suggestions then I would not have had the opportunity to join the team. I got my account because I wanted to work on that platform so I did and got rewarded for that work. The OpenBSD/luna88k is essentially a labor of love from a single person. Why take that away? There's some bizarre folk logic that says "if you take away what I think are the distractions then developers will work on the things I think are important." No. That's 100% wrong. Taking the Loongson platform away doesn't translate to me working on something else. It translates to me, and I am going to stress this, NOT WORKING ON ANYTHING. The things are are important to the developers (i.e. not you, i.e. the only people that actually matter in this discussion) would not be there. And they would have nothing to work on. So I went and read the NetBSD CVS logs, clearly something none of you bothered to do, and there's real activity going on in the Amiga port. Go look for yourself: NetBSD/amiga. If people want to work on it, great! You don't get to control what other people voluntarily work on. Remember: the equation isn't "they work on amiga or they work on something else" it's "they work on amiga or they don't work." And yes having those "dead archs" really matters. Because sometimes you find bugs you don't find elsewhere. And sometimes those bugs are bugs that affect all platforms. Yes, NetBSD would do better at finding those bugs if they did more native building but that's their decision to make. And if someone else wants to work on ZFS or anything else and the project is willing to let them work on it in-tree then it's a sad day for you. If you don't like the direction NetBSD is headed, do something about it. Yeah, that's difficult. And it takes a lot of hard work and/or money (but sometimes not as much money). The conference I helped organize and run this past year, NYCBSDCon 2014, was able to raise enough money to donate over $1100 to each of the four main *BSD projects. See our logo on the NetBSD donations page for 2014. Or maybe donating your time and code? Maybe you're not a kernel hacker, but maybe how about one of you take it upon yourself to clean up pkgsrc on some platform you think is less than ideally supported. A friend of mine has been doing this with pkgsrc on PowerPC Mac OS X. Seriously, go and do any of those things. Donate money or go donate your time and skills. Then come back and repeat any of that to me again. I dare you. You won't be able to because you'll finally have an appreciation for all those things you don't know and never think about. I'm done. Don't make me come back to this thread. |
|
|||
I don't agree with dropping architectures, but remove what is half-baked like ZFS or fund it so it works. I'm looking forward to the NetBSD 7.0 release.
FWIW NetBSD is my preference between FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. |
|
||||
I think ZFS on NetBSD is dead, nobody really wanted it. If there are no efforts to take ZFS to the main file system, there is no chance to update this outdated non functional port. You can look on the wiki site, not so much progress for years.
I also see any progress to Lua interfaces. My hope was i can use this for skripting i.e. to replace some shell scripts or make it easier to get control of my accellerator sensor for the hard disk. Then i don't see much benchmarks how good or bad NetBSD is. When npf is better scaling why is no actual slides/tests to demonstrate this? Maybe it is worth to work with phoronix to get more statistics and attention to NetBSD. Also there is also a very bad information politic. When i want to know whats going on in NetBSD have to visit cvs logs, news aggreator(not so much NetBSD inside) sites and the changes in the next version(netbsd.org/changes). I saw a video from AsiaBSD that Net-/OpenBSD has now valgrind. Thanks to japanese NetBSD developer, but is it to much work to send a short message to news/bsd sites like bsdnow? I also see working on networking layers, maybe useful for better smp performance. All and all many NetBSD relevant information are hard to find. When i want to see which wireless adapter are supported, i have to visited wikipedia. For many changes there i responsible. Also a info of the state of X, which driver are currently supported when come newer X release would be nice. On the OpenBSD plus site i can follow the progress of the project, NetBSD doesnt have an equivalent. Also a specific NetBSD site like OpenBSD undeadly would be nice to keep in touch users and developers. Our community blog is full of dragonfly digest entries and questions from forums with no answers, not very useful from a NetBSD user perspective. Last i hope we can see progress in 802.11n, uefi. NetBSD isn't in that bad state, it is under heavy active development in different regions, but a little more information what going on would show that the project is there and donation aren't waste. |
|
|||||
I feel compel to respond to this well intended post which I believe contain some logical fallacies. None the less I think that the post is very valuable in the sense that it might help us understand how some of the inner circle NetBSD people think.
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Quote:
Last edited by Oko; 6th April 2018 at 02:12 AM. |
|
|||
Quote:
http://www.NetBSD.org/changes/rss-netbsd.xml NetBSD Code Changes: http://www.NetBSD.org/changes/rss-netbsd-internals.xml NetBSD Fresh Packages: http://www.NetBSD.org/changes/rss-netbsd-pkgs.xml NetBSD Security Advisories: http://www.NetBSD.org/support/securi...advisories.xml Quote:
http://blog.netbsd.org http://wiki.netbsd.org http://mail-index.netbsd.org/ http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/bx/blosxom.cgi/index.front http://pkgsrc.org/ http://pkgsrc.se/ http://pkgsrc-wip.sourceforge.net/ http://netbsdfr.org/ http://www.netbsd.se/ |
|
|
Similar Threads | ||||
Thread | Thread Starter | Forum | Replies | Last Post |
NetBSD New kernel modules in NetBSD-CURRENT (instead LKM) | vermaden | News | 1 | 17th May 2015 11:06 PM |
FreeBSD The state of 802.11n on FreeBSD | joekiser | News | 0 | 27th December 2011 08:15 PM |
current state of virtualization? | MBybee | OpenBSD Packages and Ports | 4 | 14th April 2011 07:27 PM |
State of Native Java in NetBSD? | shep | NetBSD Package System (pkgsrc) | 1 | 2nd June 2009 08:13 AM |
NetBSD -current changelog | JMJ_coder | NetBSD General | 2 | 14th June 2008 06:23 PM |