NetBSD

Da Wiki di NetBSD Italia.

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Versione delle 13:21, 26 lug 2007

This entire wiki is about NetBSD, so if you don't yet know what it is, you have plenty of opportunity to learn about it.

In short, NetBSD is a Unix-like operating system with an emphasis on portability and clean code. It has a great community and you can have lots of additional software for it (see pkgsrc). Even Linux-specific binary-only programs work, via NetBSD's excellent emulation layer, with virtually no overhead.

NetBSD is very jihbed!

Indice 1 Differences with Linux 1.1 Origins 1.2 Politics 1.3 User's perspective 2 See also

Differences with Linux

Since most people are familiar with Linux, it is instructive to explain what makes NetBSD different and since they're both Unix-descendants, this is a fair question.

Origins

First and foremost, Linux is a complete re-implementation of Unix from scratch. NetBSD comes from a long line of Unix products, starting at the original AT&T Unix, through the Berkeley's System Distribution (BSD) series. After BSD got all of its AT&T license-encumbered code ditched and rewritten, 386BSD filled in the gaps. From 386BSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD were forked. OpenBSD in turn was forked from NetBSD much later on.

Politics

So NetBSD has been around for a while longer, created by a number of teams of respected academic and industrial researchers. Linux was, as we all know, initially hacked together by one student, and then grew very rapidly. The development model of NetBSD is very different from Linux, in that not every contribution is accepted as easily as with Linux. Code is checked for quality and conformance to KNF before it is accepted. With big infrastructural changes, all core developers have a say about how to go about it. There are often long discussions on tech-kern, the technical mailing list about the kernel which is publicly accessible.

As others have said, BSDs are "designed" where Linux is "grown" via a sort of evolutionary process. The result is very visible from the code. Most BSD developers love to complain about how bad a lot of Linux code is when it is compared against the equivalent code in BSD. The reality is that Linux has very good code in parts and very bad code in other parts, which is mostly a result of the many different people who work on it versus the few people who work on BSD. Which is better is a matter of taste (but of course you can probably guess the author's :) ).

User's perspective

From a user's perspective, NetBSD is pretty spartan when compared to the luxuriance of the default installs of some of the most popular Linux distributions. The NetBSD philosophy is that the default install should be compact, secure and void of any unnecessary tools. If there is anything you need to add to the default install, you can always use pkgsrc, which offers choice from a plethora of third-party software. The minimalism is important to ensure NetBSD can still run on all of the supported platforms, most of which (like VAX) are very old and/or have very little diskspace available (NetBSD is also often used in embedded systems).

Because of this, and because of its origin, NetBSD uses a lot of lightweight oldschool programs instead of the larger, more featureful GNU replacements. To the user, this means NetBSD feels more like a "real" or "original" Unix. In any case, it is a lot more transparent than Linuxen, because it uses less databases, XML config files and GUI front-ends and more simple, elegant plaintext files. This is closer to the Unix philosophy.

See also

• Official NetBSD homepage
• The NetBSD project's goals as stated by the project itself
• Main Page
• Tutorials
• Hacking