*BSD News Article 79940


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From: Bryan Scattergood <104312.2206@compuserve.com>
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: will FreeBSD run BSDI binaries
Date: Sat, 05 Oct 1996 09:11:32 BST
Organization: CompuServe Incorporated
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<<2.1.5 release runs Netscape's BSDI version just fine. =)>>

What's the official position on binary compatibility between FreeBSD 
and BSDI?  We had BSD/386 1.1 and FreeBSD 2.1.0 running happily at the 
office and binaries seemed to be interchangeable.  (Scared me the first 
time; my path was badly setup and I managed to unexpectedly run our 
main product using the BSD/386 1.1 binary under 2.1.0.  I couldn't find 
any word in the documentation as to whether it should have worked.)

We've since moved the BSDI machine to BSD/OS 2.1 and while it runs 
FreeBSD 2.1.0 binaries happily, going the other way gets us a core 
dump, even linking statically.  Is this divergence intentional?  Or are 
things likely to converge again in the future?

(I'm asking because I'd like to reduce the number of different Unixes I 
need to keep running.  Currently we have nine machines, all with 
different versions of Unix.)

    Bryan