*BSD News Article 17089


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From: brazile@cs.utexas.edu (P. Jason Brazile)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc
Subject: Re: Digiboards and BSDI/386
Date: 13 Jun 1993 12:12:21 -0500
Organization: CS Dept, University of Texas at Austin
Lines: 24
Message-ID: <m1mnvlINNaod@dimebox.cs.utexas.edu>
References: <1993Jun11.181807.8884@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <1993Jun12.022844.7448@e2big.mko.dec.com> <1993Jun12.040132.18268@fcom.cc.utah.edu> <C8I9E4.A6q@sugar.NeoSoft.COM>
NNTP-Posting-Host: dimebox.cs.utexas.edu
Keywords: Sprite, Distributed BSD

In article <C8I9E4.A6q@sugar.NeoSoft.COM> peter@NeoSoft.com (Peter da Silva) writes:
>Does anyone know if there's an effort to do something with the Sprite kernel?

Even though you ask this because Sprite was a totally rewritten mostly-BSD
kernel and therefore not in jepardy of the lawsuit, I think it merits 
consideration for far more than that.

For those not familiar with it, it is roughly a distributed version of BSD 
UNIX that seems to be (IMHO) an architecturaly better solution than regular 
BSD + NFS + NIS + diskless booting. One very important benefit is that is 
supports process migration.

People have been starving long enough for a real operating system that BSD
is beautiful. However, 386s are cheap enough that you might as well consider
the case that you have more than one of them (even at home).

Running a network of 50 Suns and NeXTs makes me appreciate what such an OS
could do when I see 15 people logged into one workstation (because it is
the fastest) when 20 (albeit slightly slower) other workstations sit idle.

===
Jason Brazile 					brazile@cs.utexas.edu
Graduate Student				Dept of Computer Science 
"People say I'm apathetic but I don't care" 	University of Texas