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Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.misc:2147 comp.os.linux.misc:11950 Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc,comp.os.linux.misc Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!mvb.saic.com!MathWorks.Com!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uknet!cf-cm!cybaswan!iiitac From: iiitac@uk.ac.swan.pyr (Alan Cox) Subject: Re: Impressions: FreeBSD vs Linux Message-ID: <1994Mar31.132906.8868@uk.ac.swan.pyr> Organization: Swansea University College References: <2n9f90$9em@great-miami.iac.net> <R8m2Jc1w165w@oasys.pc.my> Date: Thu, 31 Mar 1994 13:29:06 GMT Lines: 59 In article <R8m2Jc1w165w@oasys.pc.my> othman@oasys.pc.my (Othman Ahmad) writes: >How good are all these? I tried the MSDOS emulation before but it was so full >of bugs and limited that I'd rather reboot. I play wolfenstein in it quite regularly, use it to access a novell network and with the exception of 386 protected mode DOS stuff its good. I've never for example got netware clients to run inside of the interactive syste,. > >Linux is full of these experimental features and they keep on piling them >quickly without much thought. Soo Linux will be overwhelmed. It now has many >versions of file systems but still none with the capablility of FFS because >Linus hate it. Linux has had no new features added for well over a month to help refine a stable 1.0 release. The new stuff will start to go into 1.1, and we will all be running our disks twice as fast and running SCO binaries if we wish. Despite that at least one machine here will stay running known stable releases. Linux doesn't support FFS because nobody felt like wading through pages of turgid BSD specific code that might in fact belong to USL anyway (and one or two files it turned out did and will need rewriting for BSD4.4 lite.). I'd be interested when/if someone does a BSD FFS for Linux to benchmark it against ext2. At the moment with the two machines here with fast scsi disks and adaptec cards Linux + clustering ext2fs is faster than BSD FFS is faster than Linux without clustering. Some of this will be very application dependant. There is an old saying that Usenet works best when people who don't know what they are talking about shut up.... You obviously know so little about Linux that you are contributing nothing of use. > The last time I studied Linux networking code, it was adapted Net/2 >code with hacks to make it work for Linux. Otherwise how could they get those >networking utilities up so quickly. Fascinating. The Linux network code was written from scratch by a large group of people. It has no Net/2 code in it at all. A lot of the utilities are BSD based for two reasons 1) While often not too portable (BSD rather than Posix tty etc) most of the BSD networking tools are quite good and worth the porting effort 2) Several of them are not even described properly by RFC's because the older BSD hackers (pre 386BSD) never bothered documenting things - even the lpr protocol was documented afterwards by someone else. What will also be interesting is seeing how well BSD networking and Linux networking adapt to IPng. > >Don't be fooled by features that you do not need. Keep it slim and bug free. Thats good advice. Linux is moving towards loadable modules. BSD has gone from a fat splodge of code to quite clean refined code. > >Linux is ONLY for X86, whereas BSD is for ALL. If you want a toy to play with, >go for Linux, but if you want to go on to greater things, try BSD. Linux is X86 and 68K under development. When the 68K port is finished we will have the portability. This is following the path Unix (thus BSD) took very closely. V7 was not portable until people started doing ports to System3 and friends (There is a good CACM paper on this). Alan