NetBSD 10 Beta Brings Much Improved Performance, Long Overdue Hardware Support

[phoronix]

Phoronix: NetBSD 10 Beta Brings Much Improved Performance, Long Overdue Hardware Support

After being in development for three years the first beta builds of the upcoming NetBSD 10.0 operating system release are now available for testing...

https://www.phoronix.com/news/NetBSD-10.0-Beta

[jaypatelani]

Congratulations to Devs. Looking forward to 10.0

[kylew77]

Yay! For being the smallest *BSD with the smallest budget and supporting a ton of architectures this is cool! Finally be able to run NetBSD on something newer than a kaby lake which is starting to show its age! I wish they could have pulled in DRM from Linux 5.15 though. Originally it was gonna be kernel 5.4 last I checked so 5.6 is an improvement! Hopefully we can expect some 9.x vs 10.0 benchmarks here on Phoronix assuming Michael can find hardware old enough to be fully supported (Hint: it isn't gonna be that raptor lake gaming system he has tried recently!) Maybe an ice lake system? or Coffee lake?

[Classical]

Yay! For being the smallest *BSD with the smallest budget and supporting a ton of architectures this is cool! Finally be able to run NetBSD on something newer than a kaby lake which is starting to show its age! I wish they could have pulled in DRM from Linux 5.15 though. Originally it was gonna be kernel 5.4 last I checked so 5.6 is an improvement! Hopefully we can expect some 9.x vs 10.0 benchmarks here on Phoronix assuming Michael can find hardware old enough to be fully supported (Hint: it isn't gonna be that raptor lake gaming system he has tried recently!) Maybe an ice lake system? or Coffee lake?

I just ran some Clear Linux benchmarks on my system, I might compare them to NetBSD 10 Beta and post the results here.

[Steffo]

I also would be interested in benchmarks. :-)

[kylew77]

I just ran some Clear Linux benchmarks on my system, I might compare them to NetBSD 10 Beta and post the results here.

Don't do it with the beta! Reading on the official post said there is still debugging stuff enabled in the beta that is gonna hurt performance. Wait until at least the release candidates if not the official release.

[Classical]

I also would be interested in benchmarks. :-)

I installed NetBSD 10 Beta in VirtualBox and performance in Firefox was very slow. FreeBSD seems to be over 60% faster in Speedometer in my observations in VirtualBox. NetBSD was also much slower than FreeBSD in StyleBench. What I noticed is the lack of browser choice. You don't have any fancy browsers in NetBSD outside of Firefox. Otter Browser can't even connect to the internet according to my test. qutebrowser is a slow (Python) browser.

[kylew77]

I installed NetBSD 10 Beta in VirtualBox and performance in Firefox was very slow. FreeBSD seems to be over 60% faster in Speedometer in my observations in VirtualBox. NetBSD was also much slower than FreeBSD in StyleBench. What I noticed is the lack of browser choice. You don't have any fancy browsers in NetBSD outside of Firefox. Otter Browser can't even connect to the internet according to my test. qutebrowser is a slow (Python) browser.

Thanks for the battlefield report. Good to know. I personally won't pass judgment until NetBSD 10.0 is released into the wild because the beta has debugging turned on. The FreeBSD team is huge compared to the NetBSD team so it wouldn't surprise me if the results hold. I might be wrong but I was always told NetBSD was supposed to take the middle ground between FreeBSD and OpenBSD. FreeBSD is most performant but least secure and OpenBSD is most secure least performant and NetBSD was supposed to be lose some performance to gain some security. NetBSD has KASLR already and OpenBSD has it's auto relinking each reboot, but we won't see KASLR in FreeBSD enabled by default until 14.0. If I recall it was added in 13.0 or 13.1 but not enabled by default.

[Classical]

Thanks for the battlefield report. Good to know. I personally won't pass judgment until NetBSD 10.0 is released into the wild because the beta has debugging turned on. The FreeBSD team is huge compared to the NetBSD team so it wouldn't surprise me if the results hold. I might be wrong but I was always told NetBSD was supposed to take the middle ground between FreeBSD and OpenBSD. FreeBSD is most performant but least secure and OpenBSD is most secure least performant and NetBSD was supposed to be lose some performance to gain some security. NetBSD has KASLR already and OpenBSD has it's auto relinking each reboot, but we won't see KASLR in FreeBSD enabled by default until 14.0. If I recall it was added in 13.0 or 13.1 but not enabled by default.

Firefox felt really slow in that VM running NetBSD. Their version is about 6 versions behind. Another thing I've noticed is that (sometimes) it's hard to find documentation on basic things. For pkgin you often find this link mentioned in independent articles: http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/.. I think this should be http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub /pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/..

I'm currently using GhostBSD which is based on FreeBSD 13.1 and it is a fast system.
KASLR is not going to be a performance improvement: https://openbenchmarking.org/embed.p...ha=432aff7&p=2