Widely ported, sure. [LWN.net]

Widely ported, sure.

Posted Dec 31, 2005 8:57 UTC (Sat) by danieldk (subscriber, #27876)
In reply to: Widely ported, sure. by ncm
Parent article: NetBSD 3.0

That is a ongoing discussion. But portability in the sense NetBSD uses does not mean that there is a maintained or undermaintained patchset somewhere that adds support for some platform. It means that on all supported platforms userland is almost identical, and that the system can be built for any platform on any platform with just one command.

We are trying to get rid of the 'oh, use NetBSD when you have an old obscure platform' mantra. NetBSD is very portable, but has many other merits. To name a few:

The cryptographic disk driver, a pseudo-device driver that can encrypt blocks on the way to a disk or filesystem.
Veriexec, a kernel subsystem that permits execution of binaries based on the correctness of the hash of the binary.
systrace, a program that can enforce system call policies for applications.
Good Xen support, with ready-to run domain0 and domainU sysinst images.
Binary emulations for many operating systems. Most notably Linux binary support on i386, which can be used to run Sun JDK, Opera, Acrobat Reader, Mathematica, and Matlab, to name a few.
Enforcement of non-exec bits for the stack and heap on many platforms. This is used by default since NetBSD 2.0.
The excellent pkgsrc package system, that is also ported to other operating systems.

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Widely ported, sure.

Posted Dec 31, 2005 9:31 UTC (Sat) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]

I recall, too, a topologically-sorted init process, in place of the baroque sysvinit scheme (with numbered symlinks in /etc/rc?.d) used in most Linux distros.

It seems worth mentioning that there's a Debian port with the NetBSD kernel underpinning a GNU userland, called Debian GNU/kNetBSD. This is no aberration; Debian has been intended to be kernel-agnostic from the beginning, originally to leave room for the Hurd. You can choose between exim and postfix to move your mail, between evolution and mutt to read it, between firefox and galeon to surf, and between Linux and the NetBSD kernel to operate the hardware.

Widely ported, sure.

Posted Dec 31, 2005 9:52 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Actually, topology-sorted init has been in SuSE since around 8.0, I believe. It is supposed to be part of the LSB since 1.3 but has remained widely unimplemented on other distroes (except, maybe, Gentoo).

Widely ported, sure.

Posted Dec 31, 2005 11:53 UTC (Sat) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Gentoo does have topology-sorted init. I like it. But this kinda shows what's wrong with "*BSD vs Linux" comparision. Once you are comparing "*BSD kernel" and "Linux kernel" - comparision is more-or-less fair. But when you are trying to compare "*BSD" and "GNU/Linux" (and use just "Linux" to confuse everyone) - it becomes complicated. For every obscure feature found in *BSD you can find equally obscure GNU/Linux distribution where feature was "implemented for ages"! Not exactly fair comparision...

Widely ported, sure.

Posted Jan 1, 2006 21:11 UTC (Sun) by samb (subscriber, #32949) [Link]

Was Debian GNU/kNetBSD ever functional? It was basically a one-man show, and I believe it's defunct now.