NetBSD 9.3 Released With Better Support For Newer Intel & AMD Chipsets

[kpedersen]

Is it even possible that Linux now supports more hardware architectures than NetBSD? I think so...!

I think Linux does. I suppose the difference is that individual Linux distros rarely do. On a technical level this is fairly meaningless but for a user, it is quite nice to be able to download from the NetBSD (or OpenBSD and also FreeBSD) website and grab an image for i.e Sparc64.

I think for Linux, then Debian and Alpine are good examples of projects that offer that similar kind of setup (many are x86* only). Otherwise you are pretty much going to have to start from page one of "Linux from Scratch" which is fun but extremely time consuming (especially if you consider 3rd party packages needing built too)

My slight annoyance (though I suppose I have no right to be. Development is hard!) is that whether Linux or BSD, you download an image, boot it on the hardware. It works but... most of the device support is the bare minimum. Especially the graphics. So in many ways you are still probably better off running the vendor's UNIX; no matter how old and crusty it is. Specifically have IRIX, Solaris, Jetson (and in many cases even Raspberry Pi OS) in mind.

[kylew77]

I think Linux does. I suppose the difference is that individual Linux distros rarely do. On a technical level this is fairly meaningless but for a user, it is quite nice to be able to download from the NetBSD (or OpenBSD and also FreeBSD) website and grab an image for i.e Sparc64.

I think it is funny that some Illumos distros don't support sparc64 anymore, FreeBSD dropped support for sparc64 in 13.x series releases. Now only NetBSD and OpenBSD support sparc64 and I think official Oracle Solaris. Sparc64 is so important to the OpenBSD project that it says on https://www.openbsd.org/want.html "It is important to spread sparc64 around the development community, since it is the most strict platform for detecting non-portable or buggy code." I've always wanted a sparc64 system myself, before these big epic Epyc systems came out from AMD with 64 cores and oodles of cache. SMT4 sparc64 processors were king of the hill!

[roviq]

The thing with AVX2 (and even plain AVX) though is that there are still rather new CPUs that don't have it today, like say the Celeron N5105, it launched early last year, it's even officially supported by Windows 11, but it only has SSE4.2, so there's probably still time before the lack of AVX2 specifically becomes a problem.
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Absolutely agree, however AVX2 appeared with Haswell about a decade ago, and I also have a couple of Haswell machines that perform very well today, as it is basically the precursor to Intel's *lake uarch (I remember the reviews, the upgrade was 'meh', holds today). So, in the long term, a machine bought today might be still working 10 years from now, so it is better to get one with TPM2 stuff required by Windows 11 and AVX2 for the long run. It is kind of sad that Moore's doesn't let us enjoy the 50MHz → 100MHz → 333MHz → 1GHz updates of yore. The only possible dramatic upgrade I can foresee with a spoonful of salt are those Neural Processing Units and similar thingamajigs, but looking closely those are SIMD extensions in the end. I have a J5005 as an HTPC, doesn't have AVX2 and it can't run Windows 11.

[kpedersen]

FreeBSD dropped support for sparc64 in 13.x series releases.

Eeek, another one bites the dust!

I've always wanted a sparc64 system myself, before these big epic Epyc systems came out from AMD with 64 cores and oodles of cache. SMT4 sparc64 processors were king of the hill!

They are quite cool. I have a few Sunfire v210 machines that I test my personal software on. Yeah, they do offer a different enough environment that some types of memory bugs do get flagged up well. These days though they do tend to not quite have the power in comparison. They can crunch numbers well but they tend to take their time to actually start the crunching haha.

[kylew77]

So, in the long term, a machine bought today might be still working 10 years from now, so it is better to get one with TPM2 stuff required by Windows 11 and AVX2 for the long run.

I regret buying my Jasper lake Chromebook wish I would have saved a little more and bought a coffee lake T580 Thinkpad with upgradable memory. Yeah it is a quad core but they are atom cores. No avx2 not even avx. Heck now I'm reading about an 8 core 16 thread Chromebook offering from AMD. I got an Acer 317 and the touch screen IPS 17.3 inch screen won me over. It is the nicest laptop I've ever owned but the upgradability isn't there.

[kylew77]

They are quite cool. I have a few Sunfire v210 machines that I test my personal software on.

What OS are you running kpedersen? Debian? NetBSD or OpenBSD? Official Solaris? Not a lot of linux distros advertise sparc64 support!