The future of NetBSD

[Rahul Siddharthan]

On 8/31/06, dereck <dereckhaskins at yahoo.com> wrote:
> [Linux] are copying known work, shooting for a target
> that has already been hit.

Hit by Mac OS X, perhaps.  Which I can't install on my
computer even if I wanted to: Apple won't let me.  The
target -- a user-friendly, reliable unix -- hasn't been hit by
anyone else.

With today's Ubuntu, for example, I can plug in all the
equipment I have -- memory sticks, digital cameras,
whatever -- and it just works.  If I pop in a CD-ROM
it mounts automatically.  If I pop in a DVD the DVD
player opens.  The only exception (out of the box)
was my wireless PCMCIA card, but even that worked
with ndiswrapper; installing the windows ndis driver
was a single command.

This sort of thing should be seen as essential --
today's computers are dynamic objects with
peripherals being plugged in and removed all the time
-- but, of the unixen, only Mac OS X handles it
so easily.  More importantly, the linux people have
recognised this goal and worked towards it for years,
via hal, dbus, etc, and it shows.  Mac OS X hides
its unix under the hood, but Linux has managed to
reconfigure SysV-style Unix to behave well on
modern desktop machines.  The significance of
this shouldn't be underestimated.

But never mind all that: BSD types (I used FreeBSD for
some years and still have Dragonfly on one partition) like
to say how much more reliable BSD is.  Linux's ext2/ext3
always comes in for particular scorn.  Well, I tend to run
unstable software and lately my hardware's getting
unstable too -- so I have crashes now and then.
On FreeBSD with UFS, more than once a crash totally
hosed my system: I had to reinstall. People blamed it
on ATA write-caching: the standard FreeBSD advice is
"use SCSI".  With linux/ext3 I've NEVER had a problem
with a crash.  The only time I got worried with the disk
having mysterious timeout errors, it turned out
to be bad sectors: a fsck with bad sector scan fixed that
and I only lost one unimportant file.

 From my lurking on various lists, my impression is that
UFS+softupdates is a horrendous mess that only
Kirk McKusick understands (it seems I'm not the only one
to suffer from trashed filesystems).  If Linus gets hit by a
bus, no problem for Linux, but if Kirk gets hit by a bus,
better look for a new filesystem.

The filesystem isn't the only thing: FreeBSD's USB
drivers are (or were, last I checked) a disaster.  You
could panic the system just by unplugging at the wrong
moment.   I've never managed to do that with linux.

Some of Linux's progress is indeed from corporate
support, but much of it is from very smart individuals,
like Stephen Tweedie, Andrew Morton, and, yes,
Linus himself.

Linus's "world domination" plans sounded
amusing for years, but now it looks entirely possible.
With the BSDs I can't see a role on the desktop.  Even
something like PC-BSD is where Linux was years ago.

Rahul