Return to BSD News archive
Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!swrinde!news.dell.com!tadpole.com!uunet!autodesk.com!greywolf From: greywolf@autodesk.com (I can teach you how to fish...) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: 4.4-lite? Date: 18 Jul 1994 19:46:13 GMT Organization: Autodesk, Inc. Lines: 70 Message-ID: <30em65$g17@autodesk.autodesk.com> References: <2vgvc7$3tg@spruce.cic.net> <Bs2yi5F.dysonj@delphi.com> <michaelv.774429899@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu> <Zi2ziVX.dysonj@delphi.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: lonewolf.autodesk.com John Dyson <dysonj@delphi.com> writes in <Zi2ziVX.dysonj@delphi.com> /* * Michael L. VanLoon <michaelv@iastate.edu> writes: * * >John, I don't mean to be hostile, so please don't take it that way, * >but several things you're saying just don't quite seem to sync with * >me. I'm sure you have the best of intentions, so please bear with me, * >and enlighten me if you can. * * I must be over-simplifying the effort, because most of the changes are * clerical in nature. I see that it would be about a 1 month effort to * get the machine dependency bugs out (about 1/3-1/2 of our release cycle.) But * since FreeBSD is truely starting from 4.4Lite, and not backing into it, some * of the complications are probably mitigated. I find it kind of difficult to believe that FreeBSD started with 4.4-Lite, since the litigation was still going on when FreeBSD was kicking off their first implementation; by the time the litigation finished, the 4.4-Lite distribution wasn't even completely available yet (unless there were some unnameable sources who were providing the code on the side). At least, to my understanding, Net/2 and 4.4-lite were not identical (the difference being that Net/2 was still considered "tainted" after the litigation terminated). * * The biggest problem that I have with the continued and biased assertions * that FreeBSD is not multi-platform capable is that it is propaganda that * becomes self-fulfilling. If this continues -- my strategy is to buy * a sparc and do the port (starting with the code contributed to NetBSD.) FreeBSD has never *claimed* to be a multi-platform OS; everyone I have talked to regarding "why doesn't FreeBSD run on <X platform>?" has told me that their desire was to build a stable OS for one platform. Others have informed me that the code is SO x86/*SA-bus-centric that the amount of work required to separate out the different architectures is sufficiently overwhelming as to discourage that progress. (I have since deleted the mail since I'm a NetBSD-type person myself, but I recall the comments pretty clearly). I seriously don't see the extrication of a well-organised machine- independent OS rising out of FreeBSD without a considerable amount of effort spent on re-organizing the source tree. On the other hand, as well, I know several folks who live and die by FreeBSD at this point. The fact that it made out to the X86/*SA-bus family before any other BSD-based *NIX (I still consider it a *NIX, regardless of the lawyers) and seems to be stable on those platforms is probably a contributing factor to that success. But for those of us who prefer not to work with this particular platform for whatever reason, or for those of us who have a machine already which isn't a x86/*SA bus box, NetBSD is a well-thought-out OS which, while it could eventually use some performance tuning, suits our needs. Personally, I have a Sun SPARCstation IPC at home, and I'd rather not trade it in for a machine which is better known for running NT. And I'd certainly like to avoid the two-machine syndrome of which others have complained. * * John * dyson@implode.root.com I hadn't seen any arch-specific directories last I looked at FreeBSD anyway which was, admittedly, quite some time ago. Do any of FreeBSD's core team want to shed some light on this? -- -- Solaris 2 is not an upgrade from Solaris 1. They just want you to THINK it is.