Date: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 19:47:11 -0500 (GMT-05:00) From: Andy Ball <andy.ball@earthlink.net> To: "Charles M. Hannum" <mycroft@MIT.EDU>, netbsd-users@netbsd.org Cc: misc@openbsd.org, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: The future of NetBSD Message-ID: <32560229.1156985231112.JavaMail.root@elwamui-sweet.atl.sa.earthlink.net>
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Hello Charles,
Some parts of your message seemed to be flames resulting from some
past personality conflict that I know nothing about, so I won't
comment further on those. Clearly you are more familiar with BSD
internals than I am. I imagine others will pickup various technical
points such as LFS and threading. I can only write from my own
personal perspective as just one ordinary user of NetBSD.
CMH> The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance.
Relevance to whom? It's relevant to me because I use it every day.
CMH> As one of the 4 originators of NetBSD, I am in a fairly unique
> position. I am the only one who has continuously participated
> and/or watched the project over its entire history.
Sincere thanks for the contributions you have made to my favorite
operating system.
CMH> Power management is very primitive. Etc.
I'm not sure what this means. All I can say is that it works for me:
suspend and resume work on my laptop. I know that work is being done
on PowerNow! for AMD K6-2+, Athlon etc. I don't presently use Intel
chips, so I don't know about SpeedStep. Hopefully someone who knows
will clarify this point.
You make several references to a "flash-friendly file system", which I
assume means one that somehow spreads out data to avoid wearing the
carpet too thin. NetBSD works well with my flash cards and JumpDrive,
but I would not want to use either for something heavy like swap
because the nature of the technology (its finite number of write/erase
cycles) does not suit that. That's not NetBSD's fault and does not
pose a problem for me in any case.
CMH> terrible support for kernel modules;
I understand that other operating systems have loadable kernel
modules. Perhaps NetBSD has them too. I don't know because I have
never needed one. If I need a special device driver, I compile a new
custom kernel. It's quick, easy (once you know how) and in my
experience both painless and beneficial.
NetBSD works very well for my modest server-side needs: it's fast,
light, absolutely rock solid, consistent and does not make assumptions
about the work that I need to do or the software that I will choose to
install.
As a desktop operating system it's not quite there yet (depending on
the application). I understand that support for hardware accelleration
of things like MPEG decode and 3D graphics are not yet working. I will
be happy if someone corrects me on this point.
One very underestimated assett of NetBSD is its user and developer
community. The mailing lists and #netbsd on the freenode.net IRC
network have provided me with far superior support than I have
received from any proprietary software vendor and also better than
other open-source products that I use. I have found the people there
friendly, patient and very, very helpful.
This is just my inital reaction to your post, which I fealt like
sharing.
- Andy Ball
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