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Apple Businesses

NetBSD released for iMacs and G3s 105

Posted by Hemos from the comin-at-ya dept.
ChristianC writes "The latest release of NetBSD, 1.4, now supports iMacs and G3s. This is particulary interesting, as OS X is based on various BSD distributions, so NetBSD and OS X will be very similar under the hood. "
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NetBSD released for iMacs and G3s More

NetBSD released for iMacs and G3s

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  • UVM (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yes, in 1.4 is the new UVM. (After a year or so in the experimental "NetBSD current" branch.)

    From my experience (old)VM to UVM is like night to day: page faults on our server went down to less than 1/4 after we have upgraded to 1.4.
    System even "feels" faster (especially on old "handicaped" hardware like my old RISC PC).

    Since UVM is better than the Mache derived VM FreeBSD and OpenBSD still have, wich is better than the simple VM Linux has, this brings NetBSD in front. (Well, at least in terms of memory management :-).

    NetBSD was first with working USB, NetBSD has the most modern VM in the OSS world and NetBSD even supports my ALi chipset better than Linux! :-)
    (The story: My Linux using (and advocating) brother has the AT version of my board and he said, Linux 2.2.I-dont-know-anymore doesn't support IDE-UDMA with this board.)

    This should show people that all the FUD about missing support and lagging behind FreeBSD and no new features, NetBSD is dieing, etc is nonsense.

  • HA! Yeah, like that will be the day. (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah sure, once someone like me who WANTS
    to use linux has an easy time configuring
    and setting it up and getting everything to
    work, maybe. But that day will probably never
    happen.

    Grab a notebook, go outside. Randomly say you
    are doing a survey and ask the first 20 people
    you see passing by if they know what The windows
    OS is, Ask 20 others if they know what an imac is,
    then ask 20 other random people if they know
    what linux is. Compare, and understand.

    Linux is still a bear to install. I just got
    Suse Linux 6.1 which made it a lot easier, but
    its still hard. I was messing around thinking
    I'd have to download and purchase OSS when
    I suddenly came upon a section in the SuSe manual
    which was almost in a language that was easily
    understood. I tried it a couple different ways
    and finally found that with one line I could
    get my SB PCI 128 (ensoniq or someting chipset)
    to work fine in linux.

    Of course the next thing I discovered is for
    some reason my memorex cdrom recordable/rewriteable 1622 won't play audio
    cds in linux. It does under windows easily
    but after scouring the net this seems to be a
    problem with it, I don't know why. But mp3's are
    fun.

    The point is that I just screw around with Linux, I don't program - I don't know how not
    even in the simplest language. I'm just a user.
    And I have trouble in linux sometimes, but to
    my friends and family, I'm a computer god.
    I could walk into their house, install windows
    95, set up their modem and sound card and every
    thing, and they'd lick my boots and worship me.
    But I'd have trouble doing even those simple
    things under Linux. It might even be impossible
    depending on the hardware they had.

    It takes a whole lot of people to make the
    mac OS and Windows OS so even a moron can use
    them. Those people make a lot of money, the
    OS costs money. It takes a whole lot of geeky
    people to make linux, those people make it
    so they (the geeky people) can use it. AND THAT
    is why it fails. (Of course it never fails since
    it is free. I mean, if everyone suddenly did
    use linux who'd win? no one owns it!)

    In order to use windows or mac at work, you need
    maybe a couple people who know just a little bit
    more, to keep it running. In order to use linux
    at work you need at least one guy making
    $80,000 a year( or more). That guy can smugly laugh at the people working there how they need
    him to set things up for them, but they also
    laugh at him how he is a huge geek with no life.









  • Absurd Prices? (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    $89.95 is an absurd price for a product that costs millions to develop?

    Amazing.

  • Re:Demo'd at USENIX last week (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    If dropped from higher altitude nothing can withstand the might of a VAX.

    I found this goody:
    http://world.std.com/~bdc/projects/vaxen/vaxgeek top10.html

    "It doesn't matter to you if someone else's computer is faster because you know your system could smash theirs flat if it fell over on it."
  • It was also used in the Hewlett Packard OmniGo a few years back.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Well, I'm not sure, but NetBSD/x86 would imply support for all x86 chips, including 8086 and 80286 (yes, there was an 80186, but I don't think it was ever used as a PC CPU).

    --
    Get your fresh, hot kernels right here [kernel.org]!
  • >Apple is doomed now with their MacOS.

    Ummm, try publishing a commercial-quality magazine on something other than the Mac. I've been doing a lot of research on color management, and the Mac OS is still *light years* ahead of even Windows... I don't know when you'll see something like ColorSync for Linux, but until we do, we'll be using our Macs for professional color scanning and color correction, graphics, and publishing.

  • Isn't supporting imacs and G3s a little redundant?

    =)
  • at least in theory. They're relatively easy to program and understand, and in an emergency the hand-editability becomes a great asset.

    But programmers forget one problem: the average person. The average person is not a programmer. They get no masochistic joy from hunting through cryptically-named directories to find the file, change it, and then restart the program, especially a big one like X.

    This wouldn't be a problem is most programmers provided other means of configuring the program. But in the *nix crowds, they don't tend to do that (it's getting more popular but is still relatively rare). That's why things like iceconf, e-conf, and wmakerconf are getting so popular; I don't want to have to hunt down, for example, each of the config files WindowMaker uses (~/GNUstep/Defaults/WindowMaker, ~/GNUstep/Defaults/WMWindowAttributes, ~GNUstep/Library/WindowMaker/Menu, and so forth), learn the different syntaxes on each file, and hand-edit them. And the hell of it is, I do know what I'm doing with those files; I've done it before.

    (By the way, WM fans, please don't flame me for this one; I use WindowMaker every day; I'm just using its multiplicity of config files as an example).

    Having multiple config files is a Good Thing; certainly better than having them in a Registry. But it needs to be done right; put them all in a consistent, well-defined place, like the Preferences folder in MacOS, so you at least know where to look for them (if you have lots of them; make a subdirectory of this place and put them in there to keep it organized; but at least get them in one good spot). And to all the coders out there, add a somewhat more convenient way of configuring programs to supplement the config files; your users will thank you for it.
  • Or they just don't want to support the couple of engineers needed to get any of the specs they could possibly need from the LinuxPPC, NetBSD, or Darwin source code and keep it legal to make their software proprietary (still a possibility, but it involves cleanroom techniques, which means sacrificing several engineers since they have to document the specs but then cannot code).
  • Yes and no. iMac implies USB support. There are plenty of G3 based macs out there with no USB support (unless you have a USB PCI card).
  • It's for "G2" Macs, i.e., those running 603 or 604 PPC chips. The full list is on the main page or in FAQ [netbsd.org].

    This is a bit of annoyance, since so many people seem to think the iMac was such a grand leap forward, that it's entirely unlike other Macintoshes. For a while, the page for Yahoo! Pager [yahoo.com] referred to "iMac OS 8.5," and the morons at Bell Atlantic tried to tell some poor saps that iMacs were of fundamentally different hardware. [macintouch.com]

    So the better headline would have been "higher-end Macs" rather than "iMacs and G3s."

  • It's not about the processor, it's whether they have PCI or not. NuBus isn't supported.

    Mea culpa,

    J.

  • ...was used in the Tandy 2000 computer in the mid-80s.
  • The NetBSD project demo'd NetBSD on the iMac last week at USENIX. They had a booth over in the vendors area where they were showing this spiffy iMac along with an old VaxStation or somesuch -- this iMac probably outperformed that VAX 20:1... hehe.

    Nice guys too.

  • Portability (Score:3)

    by maynard ( 3337 ) on Saturday June 19, 1999 @05:07AM (#1842976) Journal
    I'd be looking more at what you want to do - AFAIK, the *BSD's have more emphasis on network throughput (ref: ftp.cdrom.com), whilst linux supports everything under the sun 8-)

    The NetBSD project doesn't state "Of course it runs NetBSD" for nothing. That OS is about the most portable *BSD around, and this is their primary objective (along with "correctness", whatever that means). I'd say NetBSD probably runs on more hardware platforms than Linux, though it's pretty close race.

    NetBSD is a great OS. I run it on my Sun 3/80's because nothing else will , reliably anyway. Who wants to run SunOS 4.1.1? :-)

    I'd say the primary difference between Linux and the *BSD's is not technical, because they're both pretty damn good, but one of licensing terms. The BSD's allow one to take the source and rework it into a completely commercial project, thus allowing re-distribution without releasing source. This is in stark contrast to Linux, released under the GPL, which requires those who both derive from from a GPL'd source tree AND distribute a new product based on said derivative, must also release the new source tree.

    I'm not a licensing zealot, so I think there's a place for both licensing schemes. For example, I suspect the *BSD's would make a better OS than Linux for commercial embedded devices simply because of their licensing terms. However, as an end user who prefers keeping a code base to my OS free and open, I prefer using an OS released under the GPL for my day to day work... so I run Linux on my PC's -- unless I don't have a choice (like with my 3/80's), then I'll run whatever's available. Just a personal preference which says nothing about the quality of the BSD codebase. Those who hack BSD because they prefer the additional freedom of the BSD license have every justification to do so. In fact, the success of BSD in attracting quality developers is in and of itself a validation of their licensing and development model, just as is the success of Linux.

    There. That's about as Politically Correct as I can get. :-)

  • Being glad for more UNIX "support" is good, but not really a concern. After all, the next major release of the Mac OS will essentially be a UNIX, complete with the command line, unofficial (but virtually 100%) POSIX compliance, and pretty good Mac OS backwards compatibility. Or didn't you know?
  • I recently bought and iMac, and, of course, put Linux on it. (Yellowdog, if anyone cares). Now that FreeBSD run's on it, it may be a good incentive to play with it, as I don't have any non-important machines on which I can mess around.

    Cool.

    --Rob

    Comics:
    Sluggy.com [sluggy.com] - It rocks my nads.
  • It's called a Thinko 8-)

    --Rob

    Comics:
    Sluggy.com [sluggy.com] - It rocks my nads.
  • Well, my main mail/web server running 2.0.35 was up for 220 days (until 24 hours ago, when a hardware failure took out the root/usr drive). I haven't used NetBSD (see, I got it right that time 8-) yet, so, we'll see what happens.

    But, on that subject, the open source Unices are getting to the very-low bug level, and they're getting quite hard to crash from a software perspective.

    I'd be looking more at what you want to do - AFAIK, the *BSD's have more emphasis on network throughput (ref: ftp.cdrom.com), whilst linux supports everything under the sun 8-)



    --Rob
    Comics:
    Sluggy.com [sluggy.com] - It rocks my nads.
  • one guy making $80,000 a year (or more). That guy can smugly laugh at the people working there how they need him to set things up for them, but they also laugh at him how he is a huge geek with no life.

    Hurm. You seem to think that there's something WRONG with that. I dunno about you, but I like getting paid twice what my Boss gets, and getting to play with big motherfucking computers all day.

    I see absoloutely nothing wrong with that.

    *shrug*

    --Rob

    Comics:
    Sluggy.com [sluggy.com] - It rocks my nads.
  • I dunno who said this works on iMac's, but I think they're lying. If I explicitly boot the kernel (bf=/tftp/netbsd), it loads, and the first thing it does is say 'USB Not found' -- considering that the iMac is -based- around USB, it's not going to work all that well..

    False advertising? 8-)

    --Rob

    Comics:
    Sluggy.com [sluggy.com] - It rocks my nads.
  • I did.. It was ignored.
    Comics:
    Sluggy.com [sluggy.com] - It rocks my nads.
  • A few questions.. Why are the datestamps on all the files May 11?

    Am I looking in the wrong spot? I went happily to my usual mirror (ftp2.au.netbsd.org), thought there was some NetBSD secret that files are hidden for 2 months before being put on show? Anyway....

    I have an iMAC (as mentioned above), and I'm trying to get the bastard to boot. Not being at all new to bootp, and extremely comfortable with it, I've fired it up, and set up a root filesystem, etc. This is where the clues are needed.
    The page here [netbsd.org] hints slightly that I need the file /usr/mdec/ofwboot.elf as the actual bootloader (That's kinda useful, having the network loader packaged up inside the install. Sigh) - BUT, it's not there. Not at all. There's a file there that's called 'ofwboot', which I thought would be the one, but it seems like the Mac's OF doesn't like it as it says 'unrecognized Client Program format' (case exactly as displayed). I had a quick search through altavista and found precisely zero hits on 'ofwboot.elf' and zero on the message above.

    Help?


    --Rob
    Comics:
    Sluggy.com [sluggy.com] - It rocks my nads.
  • Actually, linux supported the BeBox two years ago (I haven't checked up on the port since). However, it did not support SMP (which kind of is important on a BeBox).
  • maynard wrote:
    this iMac probably outperformed that VAX 20:1

    Heh. Cool.

    Speaking of older hardware... I just got a Sun SPARCstation 10 [netbsd.org] the other day, and I'm having a blast with it. It's only running NetBSD [netbsd.org] 1.3.3 now, but I'll probably upgrade it over the weekend. Anyway, one of the things I love about NetBSD is how I can be on a completely different platform and have exactly the same operating environment that I know and love. I mean, I'm reading SlashDot with Netscape Navigator. Cool.

    My first Unix that I ran at home was NetBSD 1.2-current on a Mac SE/30... When I got some Intel hardware, the transition was utterly painless. X was tougher to set up, but it wasn't impossible. (X on the Sun was a matter of telling it startx. That's it. Heh.)

    Nothing against Linux, but I'm just really happy that NetBSD exists.

  • The iMac at Usenix was running just fine.

    I'd suggest asking for help on the proper NetBSD mailing list, not here.
  • The eMate is a strongarm based system, and NetBSD has been ported to lots of ARM based systems. I'd suggest the only real problem would be the lack of mass storage.
  • NetBSD has also run on the PowerPC for years.
  • I doubt that this means OpenBSD will support the iMac. The kernel has bears little in common with NetBSDs any more. They may be working on their own iMac support, of course, but NetBSD's working on a platform tells you nothing about whether OpenBSD will run.

    By the way: I know the OpenBSD people will claim otherwise, but NetBSD is more or less as secure as OpenBSD. We generally just aren't as loud about it. They sometimes have bugs we don't have, we sometimes have bugs they don't have. In general, NetBSD is very secure.

  • whilst linux supports everything under the sun 8-)


    I think you haven't read what you wrote. F/BSD wants to be the fastest (ftp.cdrom.com is a running F/BSD), but NetBSD runs on more platforms than Linux does.

    seb.
    --
  • A Paraphrase/Interpretation of Be's Position:
    -----------------------------------------------
    *BSD and Linux developers don't get irate phone calls if a chipset revision breaks the OS release on new machines sold under the old name. You see, Be-on-PPC was sold/given mostly to people who were using Macs. Accordingly, they expect the OS to "just work", and get irate if it doesn't.

    The compatibility expectations of Wintel users adopting an alternative OS and of Unix users wanting to run something on a Power Mac are lower. Accordingly, Be not running on your oddball-clone-PC or Linux not running on your undocumented-chipset-revision-G3
    aren't seen as deep failures of the OS vendor, but a ordinary (if irritating) phenomenon.

    Accordingly, Be won't support the new Apple computers until Apple provides the necessary documentation.
    ----------------------------------------------

  • Actually, the NetBSD system is superior. The VM system for NetBSD was recently replaced with a new design that is superior to the Mach-based VM design present in the MacOS X implementation. I am under the impression that the new VM design is in this port, someone from NetBSD can verify this. Also, NetBSD traces its lineage to the 4.4BSD Lite release whereas MacOS X traces back to the Next implementation which uses the 4.4BSD server on top of the Mach ``microkernel''. These two implementations are significantly different. The main similarity is at the kernel API level.
  • This also mens that the next OpenBSD 2.6 will likely support the iMac. FYI: OpenBSD is a security focused BSD that broke off from the NetBSD team in 1995.
    xm@GeekMafia.dynip.com [http://GeekMafia.dynip.com/]
  • You're free to do a code fork under the GPL if you want, and produce eg. "bortux". Of course, that'd be pretty pointless, since, also due to the GPL, if you actually did do anything good in your code fork, it could be merged back into linux.

    There are situations where such forks are cool - eg. RTLinux (Linux goes hard realtime) and
    mu-clinux ( linux for MMU-less microcontrollers used in embedded systems + PDAs)
  • If your brother happens to have an ALi 15xx chipset, the support's in 2.3.x, and there are patches for 2.2.x. (Probably in Alan Cox's 2.2.x patch tree, before they were moved out and into 2.3.x). Obviously, 2.3.x is the development branch, and the support is labelled as being in development, but they seem to work pretty well by now, and the Mandrake 6.0 distro includes a 2.2.9 Kernel RPM with the ALi 15xx support patch backfolded in.

  • Well my VAX 11/785 would squash an iMac like a bug. Bigger IS better.

    --jon
  • Or they got all pissy 'cause Apple bought NeXT instead of Be...
    -------------------------------------
  • - if the alternative is FREE
  • nah, nevermind. /. effect might be too much for the poor newtons...
  • I always thought apple lost money on MacOS, and their entire profit came from selling hardware.
  • So there are other OSes on the new G3's and iMacs...so why can't "Be" get with it and get BeOS onto the new G3's...I have BeOS on my PC and love it....it would be even better it I could get it on my G3 also...
  • - if the alternative is FREE

    "Linux is only free if your time has no value" - Jamie Zawinski

  • Actually, you can carry it around and serve your website from it as long as you can get a modem or ethernet connection. Matthew Vaughn has written a web server for Newton devices running NewtonOS 2.x. Of course it runs a bit faster on a 166mhz StrongArm MP2100 than the 25mhz eMate, but the eMate looks way cooler.


    Newton Personal Data Sharing (the web server) can be found at http://come.to/lightyear_media


    Since the Newt OS is so embedded, I don't think that anyone has tried a *nix port yet. There was a GNUton effort to reverse engineer the system that started a year or so back when they were discontinued, but I don't think it has gone anyhwere.
  • Thanx for the mention.. I'm the "Matthew Vaughn" that wrote NPDS and I guess I have hit it big-time since I got mentioned on /. !!!

    There are a couple guys who use my system to carry wireless web servers in the LA area and one guy who works for NSF is taking his server to the South Pole this spring...
  • My Newts can handle about 1 hit per second.. not too shabby for AA-powered hardware but not Apache running at 500Mhz either ;-)

    If you check the List of Newtons currently online ina couple days, I am sure you'll catch some active. The deal is that when their servers go online, they have the option of automagically registering with a "Tracker" running on my WWW server.

    Folks looking for Newtons online can visit the Tracker and find Newton URLs. This side-steps the problem of the dynamic IP address for a WWW server...
    (Unfortunately, there don't seem to be many on this weekend.)
  • This reminds me. Anyone know if bsd or linux is available for the Apple eMate? Is it even possible? I saw one of them for sale but didn't follow up to see if it has an installable OS.

    It would be pretty funky carrying that around and running my web server from it.

  • When will people understand that Linux setup is easy enough, maintaining it is hard. Why the hell do I have to go into a text file to configure my sound card? Why are there dozens of config files in /etc Why do I have to go into XF86Config to change my screen resolution!

    PS. X is a bloated monster. We should not be using things on modern computers that is 15 years old. And this network even on local machines is just silly.

  • Well, maybe not a Syntax Error... More like a logic error, unless you mean to send the IRC nick "VERSION" the "BillGates" CTCP message.

    /CTCP BillGates VERSION
    ^ Now we're talking.

    Just doing my duty as the Nit-picking Policeman of Inconsequential or Irrelevant Things.

  • Redundant in what sense? In the sense of only needing one unix on them? In which case that would have been NetBSD, since I believe NetBSD booted on the imac before linux or Apple's MacOS X :) (It certainly supported USB first).

    Note: I do not subscribe to that philosophy - I think people should be able to run/port any OS they like.

    I'm afraid I don't understand the comment :)
  • If a BeBox runs LinuxPPC then I would say linux has been ported to it. It may not fully support all the hardware, but it supports enough to make a usable system.
  • OpenBSD is porting UVM to -current (which should not be a massive task given the common heritage to NetBSD), but I do not believe they have made an official release supporting UVM yet. (Its just a matter of time though).

    John Dyson rewrote the Mach VM for FreeBSD. This was a massive effort and a quite incredible achievement - the current performance and stability speaks for itself, but I do not believe he designed and wrote a 'new' VM system.

    UVM was _not_ taken from the FreeBSD VM. If anything it owes its roots to the 3.X BSD VM system, and was designed and written to specifically and efficiently support unix VM needs, and to offer advanced features such as page loanout which can be used for zero copy network stacks (which is under development).
  • The NetBSD 1.4 release uses egcs on all platforms. NetBSD -current has been using egcs for some significant time :)

    The Mach VM system is a general purpose system, not designed specificcally for unix.
    FreeBSD took turned it into a high quality, performant system, and by all accounts it took one hell of a lot of work.

    Chuck Craynor specifically designed UVM for unix VM needs; it has some optimisations and extra features which are not feasible in a Mach derived system.

    FreeBSD has a UBC (Unified Buffer Cache), which is still under development for UVM, which gives FreeBSD a significant advantage in filesystem caching.

    By all accounts they are both very good systems,
    and both work very well, but I believe the underlying design of UVM is cleaner and better suited to unix. (The NetBSD way :)
  • 'Linux' runs on more different platforms than NetBSD, but what is 'linux'?

    The linux that runs on the palm pilot is a totally different product/source tree that just happens to be called 'linux'. Even the sparc and ultrasparc linux sports have split the source tree (though they are working on merging them back).

    The different linux source trees can release at different times. This makes it much easier for each platform to develop at its own pace, but makes extra work synchronising between source trees.

    NetBSD has one central source tree, and has to synchronise all platforms to release at the same time (sixteen architectures as of 1.4). The fact it can do this is a credit to the almost fanatical desire for clean code, particuarly given the massive developer base available to linux.

    I dont believe _any_ OS supports anything like the number of platforms as NetBSD out of the same source tree.

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