*BSD News Article 24471


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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!paladin.american.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!xlink.net!fauern!castle.franken.de!devnull.adsp.sub.org!froh
From: froh@devnull.adsp.sub.org (Frohwalt Egerer)
Subject: Re: SUMMARY: FreeBSD vs. Linux
References: <2brq1b$a8j@news.ysu.edu> <2btv9t$4nb@news.cs.tulane.edu> <2bui0j$blb@fw.novatel.ca> <CGCroz.B6r@kithrup.com> <2c1nkr$nkg@jake.esu.edu>
Organization: none
Date: Wed, 24 Nov 1993 01:33:12 GMT
Message-ID: <1993Nov24.013312.1288@devnull.adsp.sub.org>
Lines: 41

kender@executor (System Overlord) writes:

>Slaving away in a dark room, sef@kithrup.com (Sean Eric Fagan) produced:
>>In article <2bui0j$blb@fw.novatel.ca> hpeyerl@novatel.ca (Herb Peyerl) writes:
>>>Run it on a Mac
>>>Run it on an Amiga
>>
>>There are, I believe, both mac and amiga ports of linux happening.

>Well, at least an Amiga port - not sure about the mac port though (besides,
>most of the GNU utilities would probably not get ported to the mac, seeing
>their general attitude towards apple ;), but the porting is going VERY slowly
>(since the linux kernal is VERY [34]86 specific).

As I have an Intelish Linux box and an Amiga I've been following what happens 
on 'the Amiga front' :-)  The Amiga port is going so slow, because there are
so few people (currently) involved with the port. Additionally there is a lot
of different hardware on the Amiga (due to it's modular operating system). It
will be a lot of work to create drivers for all the SCSI and IDE controllers
in the Amiga world, as they suddenly have to be accessed at hardware level.

The 386isms in the kernel have been cleared out quite a while ago. The larger
'processor problem' seems to be the 68040 since it contains a different MMU as
the 68030. (I haven't checked recently if the '040 version of the kernel is 
released now, since it is worked on for quite a while now.) 

The Amiga and the Mac port of the Linux will (IMHO) stay binary compatible, as
the differences between the machines are not too big. (They both use Motorola
processors ;-) )

Froh

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