Comment by messe
10 hours ago
> most portable os
Eh... I think the Linux kernel + your choice of libc/userland has it beat these days.
10 hours ago
> most portable os
Eh... I think the Linux kernel + your choice of libc/userland has it beat these days.
The Linux kernel dropped 386 support fourteen years ago.
https://www.theregister.com/2012/12/12/linux_no_longer_runs_...
I'm well aware, thank you. I'm not contesting ability to run on a 386, I'm contesting the title of "most portable OS".
OK. In context -- discussing an article talking specifically about AMD 386 chips -- that was not at all clear.
I was at a talk celebrating NetBSD's 30th anniversary. I wrote about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/04/17/30yo_netbsd_releases_...
They're well aware of this.
But as Linux edges closer to dropping 32-bit x86 completely -- most distros already have -- I think NetBSD may suddenly regain some relevance in this specific area.
There's also a new initiative to improve its jails facility:
https://netbsd-jails.petermann-digital.de/
Modern Linux can't even scratch a 486 and some Motorola platforms. Or VAX. Heck, I run NetBSD 10.1 vanilla under simh 3.8 for 9front emulated on an amd64 laptop (old Celeron, 2GB). Slow, but enough to play Slashem.
On portability on compilers, plan9/9front it's unbeatable. Do you now Go compiling from any OS to any arch? The same here, but just for an OS obviously. Albeit I can still run Golang under i386, and tools like Rclone under 9front i386. That's really cool.
That's a very limited view of what portability means.
Driver support for a niche SoC? Good luck getting NetBSD on before Linux. The sheer amount of SoCs supported by the Linux kernel dwarfs anything NetBSD has to offer.
Yeah, NetBSD's support for modern hardware isn't amazing compared to Linux. I love it (and run my personal web server on it!), but the portability thing feels like a meme from the 4.4BSD days, where it ran on basically every workstation platform.
Like sure, it runs on my VAX, my Sun4/75, and my Alpha box, but it doesn't run on my POWER9 workstation nor does it run my Amlogic A311D ARM device (at least in a usable capacity), and I couldn't even get i.MX 8M running. I didn't try super hard, to be fair, but why would I burn cycles getting an OS with less peripheral support running when Linux "just works"?
4 replies →
Modern Linux dropped support for a lot of old and niche CPUs.
And NetBSD is missing support for an order of magnitude more SoCs. I like NetBSD. I've run it on several systems in the past, and not just as a toy. I like the whole BSD family, and even deploy FreeBSD in production at work, and use OpenBSD on my home router. But NetBSD's claim as the most portable OS doesn't hold up these days.