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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!uunet!news.widomaker.com!escape.widomaker.com!not-for-mail From: shendrix@escape.widomaker.com (Shannon Hendrix) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: BSD CD-ROM : Walnet Creek or Infomagic ? Date: 15 Jan 1995 20:07:13 -0500 Organization: Escape from Widomaker Lines: 53 Message-ID: <3fcgs1$6qk@escape.widomaker.com> References: <3e8t0q$gnp@vishnu.jussieu.fr> <3f281t$3n4@engnews2.eng.sun.com> <D2At12.82@bonkers.taronga.com> <3f7hc4$er9@escape.widomaker.com> <D2EJnL.Mn1@bonkers.taronga.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: localhost.widomaker.com peter@bonkers.taronga.com (Peter da Silva) writes: >In article <3f7hc4$er9@escape.widomaker.com>, >Shannon Hendrix <shendrix@escape.widomaker.com> wrote: >>You are talking about ancient history here. This is more like where >>Linux *WAS*. >It's where Linux is coming from, and there's a lot of stuff that's still >dependent on the 386 environment and had to be reimplemented in the ports. This happened quite some time ago. If they started the ports now it would not be near as difficult. When the ports started the 386 code was not well isolated. >They're still using the 386 model a lot more than the BSDs are. Glad you clarified that. Also, it's *good* that they are using the 386 model for the 386 version. That CPU has a lot of support for an OS like UNIX. The challenge is to encapsulate it better than it currently is without losing the benefits. I'm sure you wouldn't have them remove 386-specific code like TSS segments, tasking primitives, hardware memory protection, certain exceptions, etc? >The point is, though, that saying that FreeBSD is more 386-specific than >Linux is just plain wrong. Well, I've never say BSD was more 386 specific myself. I was under impression that it really is about the same now. Most of the 386 code in Linux is pretty well localized. The overall model... that will take time to change. The Alpha port is already affecting kernel sources. If you search for assembly in the 1.1.62 Linux kernel, it's only around 300 lines of code total. That's in ~200K lines of C code. A quick find piped to wc counted 199156 in the *.c files... not sure what the comment percentage is but it doesn't matter. Not a huge percentage. And even the overall design has changed a lot since the beginning... or even just in the last year. >Heck, in some ways that's a problem for FreeBSD: >it can't use the Linux DOS emulation because that depends on the Linux >80x86 support. Well, I was staying away from BSD because it didn't support my Adaptec 1520 but you are tempting me... :-) -- csh --------------------------------------------------------------------------- shendrix@escape.widomaker.com | Linux... that's it for the moment -----------------------------------+