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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!bruce.cs.monash.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!cs.utexas.edu!sdd.hp.com!apollo.hp.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development Subject: Re: Could the BSD 4.4 Lite be a new beginning? Date: 17 Feb 1994 23:02:43 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 71 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.94Feb17180243@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> References: <HSU.94Feb14043905@laphroaig.cs.hut.fi> <R60q1p-.dysonj@delphi.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: John Dyson's message of Mon, 14 Feb 94 02:58:31 -0500 Well, I guess today is a good day for advertising... I am a founding member of the NetBSD group. We have done a lot to make NetBSD more stable, and to move it toward existing `standards' (POSIX.1 and .2, and 4.4BSD). Several very broken parts of the kernel have been completely replaced, and others have been extensively modified; the details are too much for me to repeat, and are available elsewhere. NetBSD runs on a wide range of hardware, including (some) Pentiums (depends on the bus; we don't do PCI yet), many models of Amigas and Mac IIs, the HP300 series, some models of SPARC, and PC532 machines. We are close to, but not quite, POSIX.1 compliant. (Some other systems incorrectly claim that they already are.) We've added IP multicast and the full range of System V IPC (shared memory, message queues, and semaphores). NetBSD-current has several things that were previously missing from Net/2-derived systems, including shared libraries (for the i386 port, all the m68k ports, and the sparc port), some old utilities such as at(1), quot(8), units(1) and others, the AMD automounter, a full process file system done more like System V, a loopback file system, etc. There are a few features you will not find in NetBSD-current, however: * We do not supply our own console driver with virtual terminals. However, either pcvt or syscons can be acquired and used with very little effort. Traditionally, these drivers have been large and slow, and they are maintained by third parties. * We do not supply Amancio Hasty's port of the Linux sound drivers. These (or at least the ports to BSD-du-jour) seem to be fairly buggy. Again, this is maintained by a third party, and can be acquired and dropped in with little effort. * We do not supply a colorized ls(1). In his previous post, John Dyson brought up a few points that I would like to expand on: optimized pmap code, Except for two uses of i386 assembler code which in practice make little difference, the one in NetBSD-current is faster, and in particular does fewer TLB flushes. multi-page cluster pageins, You mean `pageouts', I think, and Mike Hibler's VM code for 4.4 does this, and I dare say has been more thoroughly tested. It seems a better choice to me for us to wait for that code to be available. and our if_ed driver, written by our team member, David Greenman, is *very* reliable and attains THE ethernet bandwidth. Before he was officially(?) a FreeBSD `team member', he also donated this code to NetBSD. We have added multicast support and cleaned this up a bit. In addition, `our' if_ep (3COM 3C509 driver) has been clocked at full ethernet bandwidth, and works reliably in NetBSD. The sound driver that we support is very good (as I have heard.) I considered incorporating the ported Linux sound drivers into NetBSD. On inspection, I found several obvious bugs and a few things simply turned off because someone didn't bother to port them properly. This code is not stable enough that I would recommend anyone use it. -- - Charles Hannum NetBSD group Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sparc, mac68k, pc532. In progress: pmax, sun3.