NetBSD – intriguing.

I’ve been playing around with NetBSD lately. It all started from a desire to do some I/O benchmarks on the various UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems available for the Amiga. You can see the first results of that here. I decided to do NetBSD as it appears to be the only one among Amiga UNIX and Debian that is still actively supported. Amiga UNIX is obviously dead – it died with Commodore. Debian is sort of in between supported and not supported on m68k. I’ll have the opportunity to investigate that more closely soon as Debian is next on the list after NetBSD for the Amiga. NetBSD though…release 5.0, which occurred in April of this year, still lists the Amiga as fully supported. And it installed just fine.

What really floored me, though, was the build.sh system. As I discussed on my amiga.org blog post, I was impressed by how easy it was to build an Amiga NetBSD kernel on a completely different platform. Not only was it AMD64, it was GNU/Linux, and I had a kernel built in about ten minutes. Maybe I shouldn’t be so amazed, but cross-compiling is like black magic to many users. I’ve used a chroot on Debian before to compile 32-bit binaries on a 64-bit installation…that’s kind of cheating though. That’s using native 32-bit compilers and libraries to generate 32-bit binaries (Linux kernels, in that case). Here, I was using AMD64 64-bit Linux binaries to build a m68k 32-bit NetBSD kernel.

I’ve decided to investigate further. I’ve installed the sparc64 port of NetBSD on my Sunblade 150, and the idea is to see if I can get all of failsure.net’s services running on it as they currently run on nanbara (Debian IA32). If I can do that…dunno. Maybe I’ll move failsure.net to NetBSD…probably not on sparc64 though, but on nanbara. Debian is always going to be my favorite I think, but I think I could learn a lot from NetBSD. My Debian pipe dreams will continue unabated :-)

The only thing that really gives me pause is the lack of logical volume management (LVM). I understand this is available with some work in NetBSD current, but certainly not in the 5.0 release. I think I could live without that for now so long as I can use the ffs2 filesystem on IA32 (one big root FS). It doesn’t work on sparc64 for a boot filesystem, but from what I have seen so far that’s due to Openboot more than anything else. I’m a novice so I haven’t figured out if my idea of a separate ffs1 /boot partition with ffs2 root filesystem is feasible on that platform or not.

June 27, 2009 В· agw В· No Comments
Tags: , , , ,  В· Posted in: NetBSD

Leave a Reply