*BSD News Article 33344


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From: wollman@ginger.lcs.mit.edu (Garrett Wollman)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions
Subject: Re: Info on NetBSD & FreeBSD
Date: 25 Jul 1994 20:52:35 GMT
Organization: MIT Laboratory for Computer Science
Lines: 47
Message-ID: <3118mj$ipr@GRAPEVINE.LCS.MIT.EDU>
References: <30ur2j$ege@wsiserv.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>
NNTP-Posting-Host: ginger.lcs.mit.edu
Keywords: NetBSD, FreeBSD

In article <30ur2j$ege@wsiserv.informatik.uni-tuebingen.de>,
Andrej Gabara <gabara@peanuts.Informatik.Uni-Tuebingen.DE> wrote:

>(2) Has dld been ported to either FreeBSD and/or NetBSD? If not, will it be
>    available on NetBSD 1.0 or FreeBSD 2.0?

So far as I know, the answer is ``no''.  However, both systems include
an implementation of Sun's `dlopen'/`dlsym' interface, which will
probably do what you want even though it works somewhat differently in
practice.

>(3) Which, FreeBSD or NetBSD, has better POSIX support? Or are they pretty much
>    the same (I'm especially interested in POSIX pseudo tty interfaces)

J.T. Conklin has done an excellent job with this for NetBSD.
Verifiable POSIX compliance has thus far not been a high priority for
FreeBSD, although we're happy to fix POSIX-compliance bugs if someone
points them out and provides appropriate code to fix them.

At some point in time someone will probably try to get a FIPS 151 test
suite going and do some real verification (or at least document the
deficiencies, if we think POSIX got it wrong).

>(5) When are FreeBSD 2.0 and NetBSD 1.0 coming out?

FreeBSD 2.0 should be out before the end of the summer.  I don't want
to promise a specific date because there's still a lot of work that
needs to be done.  While the most challenging difficulties have
probably been solved, there are a large number of more tedious tasks
which need to be accomplished, like moving over some device drivers
and general code cleanup.

>(6) Do FreeBSD or NetBSD support a MSDOS filesystem such as Linux?

Yes.  At the moment, NetBSD's is rumored to be more robust.  So far as
I know, neither system supports the Linux mechanism for emulating a
real filesystem on top of the DOS fs, or anything remotely like it.
However, with the new ``stackable'' filesystem technology from 4.4BSD,
it should be much easier to actually write such a filesystem layer.

-GAWollman

-- 
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