*BSD News Article 42379


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From: peter@bonkers.taronga.com (Peter da Silva)
Subject: Re: Linux vs. BSD?!
Organization: Taronga Park BBS
Message-ID: <D3uu1C.C16@bonkers.taronga.com>
References: <3h68pj$agf@gateway.wiltel.com> <3hg24j$u9g@usenetw1.news.prodigy.com>
Date: Sat, 11 Feb 1995 21:22:23 GMT
Lines: 31

In article <3hg24j$u9g@usenetw1.news.prodigy.com>,
bill davidsen <davidsen@tmr.com> wrote:
>Linux is a POSIX system, and feels like many workstations, while BSD
>feels like, well, BSD. Virtually every workstation now either runs a
>SysV kernel or a BSD kernel with POSIX extensions and utilities.

That's supposed to be good?

Folks. POSIX is basically a blend of System V and BSD to begin with. System
V provided the stuff that's useful for servers and departmental systems, with
lots of terminals. BSD has always been the workstation platform. The System V
that existed when they started POSIX didn't even come with TCP/IP or the X
window system standard. TCP/IP, X, csh, vi, these are all BSD bits.

>I guess I would call Linux "stable but not static," with usefully
>stable kernels coming out on a regular basis. I run two productin
>systems which have not had a software crash in about a year. The
>development system... well Linux "restore from backup" and "reload
>from CD" work well on that.

I've got a way behind the leading edge FreeBSD box (it's running 1.1, still)
that's had occasional crashes (the X server is still the old R5 one) but
I've never had to reload it. Heck, even the 386BSD system I had when I was
working on the patchkits never died that badly, and I was rebuilding the
whole system on a regular basis. I've had to reload a System V box that
ate its file system recently though.

No matter what you're doing on the system, unless you're doing file system
development or a device driver that directly hits the file system if you
have to reload from scratch more than very occasionally you should replace
it. That sort of unreliability is no longer acceptable.