Re: Which NetBSD?

[hubert.feyrer%rz.uni-regensburg.de@localhost (Hubert Feyrer)]

Burc SADE <gani%dut.net.tr@localhost> wrote:
>    One more question. Does it worth to get 1.3? What do I miss
>   if I install 1.2.1?I couldn't find any doc about it.

>From 1.3/amiga/INSTALL:

It is impossible to summarize the 18 months of development that went
into the NetBSD 1.3 release. Some of the significant changes include:

        Support for machine independent device drivers has been
        radically improved with the addition of the "bus.h" interface,
        providing a high quality abstraction for machine and
        architecture independent device access.

        The bus_dma interface has also been integrated, providing a
        machine-independent abstraction for DMA mapping. This permits many
        good things, including (among many) clean multi-platform
        bounce buffer support.

        Framework support for ISA "Plug and Play" has been added, as
        well as support for numerous "Plug and Play" devices. 

        APM support has been added to NetBSD/i386.

        An initial cut of multi-platform PCMCIA support has been added.

        Support for ATAPI devices (initially just ATAPI CD-ROM drives)
        has been added.

        Support for Sun 3/80s (sun3x architecture) has been added.

        Support for R4000 DECstations has been added.
        
        Integration/merger of 4.4BSD Lite-2 sources into userland
        programs has nearly been completed.
        
        Most of userland now compiles with high levels of gcc warnings
        turned on, which has lead to the discovery and elimination of
        many bugs.

        The i386 boot blocks have been completely replaced with a new,
        libsa based two stage boot system. This has permitted 
        integration of compressed boot support (see below).

        Many ports now support booting of compressed kernels, and
        feature new "Single Floppy" install systems that boot
        compressed install kernels and ramdisks. We intend to do
        substantial work on improving ease of installation in the
        future.

        "ypserv" has been added, thus completing our support for the
        "yp" network information system suite.
        
        Support for the Linux "ext2fs" filesystem and for FAT32 "msdosfs"
        filesystems has been added.

        TCP now has a SYN "compressed state engine" which provides
        increased robustness under high levels of received SYNs (as in
        the case of "SYN flood" attacks.)  (Much of this code was
        derived from sources provided by BSDI.)

        An initial implementation of Path MTU discovery has been
        integrated (though it is not turned on by default).   

        An initial kernel based random number generator pseudodevice has
        been added.
        
        Several major fixes have been integrated for the VM subsystem,
        including the fix of a notorious VM leak, improved 
        synchronization between mmap()ed and open()ed files, and
        massively improved performance in low real memory conditions.

        A new swap subsystem has radically improved configuration and
        management of swap devices and adds swapping to files.
        
        Userland ntp support, including xntpd, has been integrated.

        The audio subsystems have been substantially debugged and 
        improved, and now offer substantial emulation of the OSS audio
        interface, thus providing the ability to cleanly run emulated
        Linux and FreeBSD versions of sound intensive programs.

        A "packages" system has been adapted from FreeBSD and will
        provide binary package installations for third party  
        applications.

        The XFree86 X source tree has been made a supported part of
        the NetBSD distribution, and X servers (if built for this
        port), libraries and utilities are now shipped with our releases.

        The ftp(1) program has been made astoundingly overfunctional.
        It supports command line editing, tab completion, status bars,
        automatic download of URLs specified on the command line,
        firewall support and many other features.
        
        All ports now use "new" config. Old config has been laid to rest.
        
        The ARP subsystem and API has been rewritten to make it less
        ethernet-centric.
        
        A new if_media subsystem has been added which allows network 
        interfaces to be configured using media type names rather than
        device-specific mode bits.
        
        Many kernel interface manual pages have been added to manual
        section 9.

        Several ports support much more hardware. 
        
        Many updates to bring NetBSD closer to standards compliance.

        Most third party packages have been updated to the latest stable
        release.

As has been noted, there have also been innumerable bug fixes.


.....



NetBSD System Requirements and Supported Devices:
------ ------ ------------ --- --------- -------

NetBSD/amiga 1.3 runs on any Amiga that has a 68020 or better CPU with
some form of MMU, and on 68060 DraCos. 

For 68020 and 68030 systems, a FPU is recommended but not required.
68LC040, 68040V and 68LC060 systems don't work correctly at the moment.

The minimal configuration requires 4M of RAM and about 75M of disk
space.  To install the entire system requires much more disk space,
and to run X or compile the system, more RAM is recommended.  (4M of
RAM will actually allow you to compile, however it won't be speedy. X
really isn't usable on a 4M system.)

Here is a table of recommended HD partition sizes for a full install:
        partition:      advise, with X, needed, with X
        root (/)        20M     20M     15M     15M
        user (/usr)     95M     125M    75M     105M
        swap            ----- 2M for every M ram -----
        local (/usr/local)      up to you


As you may note the recommended size of /usr is 20M greater than
needed. This is to leave room for a kernel source and compile tree as 
you will probably want to compile your own kernel. (GENERIC is large
and bulky to accommodate all people).

If you only have 4M of fast memory, you should make your swap partition
larger, as your system will be doing much more swapping.

Supported devices include:
        A4000/A1200 IDE controller. 
        SCSI host adapters: 
                33c93 based boards: A2091, A3000 builtin and GVP series II.
                53c80 based boards: 12 Gauge, IVS, Wordsync/Bytesync and
                    Emplant.*) 
                53c710 based boards: A4091, Magnum, Warp Engine, Zeus
                    and DraCo builtin.  
                FAS216 based SCSI boards: FastLane Z3, Blizzard I and II,
                    Blizzard IV, Blizzard 2060, CyberSCSI Mk I and II.
        Video controllers:      
                ECS, AGA and A2024 built in on various Amigas.
                Retina Z2, Retina Z3 and Altais.
                Cirrus CL GD 54xx based boards: 
                    GVP Spectrum, 
                    Picasso II, II+ and IV,
                    Piccolo and Piccolo SD64.
                Tseng ET4000 based boards:
                    Domino and Domino16M proto,
                    oMniBus,
                    Merlin.
                A2410.
                Cybervision 64.
                Cybervision 64/3D.**)
                
        Audio I/O:
                Amiga builtin (currently 8bit-mode only)
                Melody Mpeg-audio layer 2 board
                    
        Ethernet controllers:
                A2065 Ethernet
                Hydra Ethernet  
                ASDG Ethernet
                A4066 Ethernet
                Ariadne Ethernet
                Quicknet Ethernet 
        ARCnet controllers: 
                A2060 ARCnet
        Tape drives:
                Most SCSI tape drives, including
                        Archive Viper, Cipher SCSI-2 ST150.
        Scanners:   
                SCSI-2 scanners behaving as SCSI-2 scanner devices,
                HP Scanjet II, Mustek SCSI scanner.***)
        CD-ROM drives:
                Most SCSI CD-ROM drives
        Serial cards:
                HyperCom Z3 and HyperCom 4
                MultiFaceCard II and III
                A2232
        Amiga floppy drives with Amiga (880/1760kB) and
                IBM (720/1440kB) encoding. ****)
        Amiga parallel port.    
        Amiga serial port.
        Amiga mouse.
        DraCo serial port, including serial mouse.
        DraCo parallel printer port.
        Real-time clocks:   
                A2000, A3000, A4000 builtin (r/w),
                DraCo builtin (r/o).
                
If its not on the above lists, there is no support for it in this
release. Especially (but this is an incomplete list), there is no
driver for:     
                
        Blizzard III SCSI option, Cyberstorm Mk III SCSI option,
        Ferret SCSI, Oktagon SCSI.



'nuff pasted. :)


 - Hubert


-- 
Hubert Feyrer <hubert.feyrer%rz.uni-regensburg.de@localhost>