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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msunews!uwm.edu!homer.alpha.net!mvb.saic.com!news.mathworks.com!newsfeed.internetmci.com!EU.net!Germany.EU.net!news.maz.net!news.ppp.net!news.Hanse.DE!wavehh.hanse.de!cracauer From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer) Subject: Re: Free BSD vs. NET/BSD - whats the diff? Message-ID: <1995Nov10.085417.12294@wavehh.hanse.de> Organization: BSD User Group Hamburg References: <1995Oct31.094013.7072@venus.gov.bc.ca> <DHqCL5.36K@nntpa.cb.att.com> Date: Fri, 10 Nov 95 08:54:17 GMT Lines: 70 dyson@inuxs.inh.att.com (John S. Dyson) writes: >In article <1995Oct31.094013.7072@venus.gov.bc.ca>, >Stuart Lory <lorys@tbc.gov.bc.ca> wrote: >> >>Can anyone tell me the difference between FreeBSD and NETBSD, or >>where I can look for such information? Are the two systems related >>or maintained by the same people? I have been using linux for a long >>time and would like to experiment with BSD but I can't seem to find much >>information on the differences between the two. I have a 386 that runs >>NETBSD but when I try to boot the FreeBSD boot disk it just reboots, >>does this mean that my 386 won't run FreeBSD? >> >Remember I am partisan!!! (and there are many more things to go here, but >I am just talking about the things that I know about): John probably didn't want to be too much partisan, so I felt free to comment on some points. >1) FreeBSD has a more advanced VM system. Even though the machine > dependant layers have been tuned very carefully for the X86, the > machine independent layers have been "fixed" to eliminate some > of the shortcomings of the 4.4Lite stuff. Fork/Execs are very > fast on FreeBSD. Page faults are very fast on FreeBSD (and > much less probable.) The pageout daemon uses a more intelligent > algorithm light-years beyond the old clock-algorithm. FreeBSD does > both page-in and page-out clustering -- makes the disk quieter on > starting up X-applications (especially the first time.) > (AFAIK, the fork/exec time on programs built -static is as fast > as available on a free U**X-like OS today, by at least 50%, this > is useful on WWW servers especially.) While I'm a NetBSD user, I have to admit that I ran some simple tests that showed FreeBSD-2.0.5 and recent snapshots to be about 7 times faster that NetBSD-current/1.1_ALPHA when memory is really overloaded (I tested how long it takes to touch every page in an allocated memory areas that is a little bigger than pyhsical memory and then forked some little childs and I tested how long `ls /` took to answer while the other test is running). >2) FreeBSD has a coherent VM/Buffer-Cache subsystem. Amoung other things, that means you can rely on mmap on NFS mounted drives. NetBSD's situation would probably be better if their standard tools avoided using mmap as long as they have this problem... [...] >7) FreeBSD-current supports Linux's EXT2FS (courtesy of a Lites > contributor, Godmar Back), with full integration with the Merged > VM/Buffer cache. (I fully expect that NetBSD will adopt this soon.) You expect them to adopt the filesystem or the integration? [...] Note that these points make only a small piece of a picture of an OS. I'm a NetBSD user, for other pieces of the picture. John Dyson's work on the FreeBSD kernel makes it very attractive for me, though. Happy hacking Martin -- %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de> - BSD User Group Hamburg, Germany "As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't ex-" "plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin