*BSD News Article 27578


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From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles Hannum)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.development
Subject: Re: Could the BSD 4.4 Lite be a new beginning?
Date: 17 Feb 1994 23:02:43 GMT
Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab
Lines: 71
Message-ID: <MYCROFT.94Feb17180243@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu>
References: <HSU.94Feb14043905@laphroaig.cs.hut.fi> <R60q1p-.dysonj@delphi.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu
In-reply-to: John Dyson's message of Mon, 14 Feb 94 02:58:31 -0500


Well, I guess today is a good day for advertising...

I am a founding member of the NetBSD group.  We have done a lot to
make NetBSD more stable, and to move it toward existing `standards'
(POSIX.1 and .2, and 4.4BSD).  Several very broken parts of the kernel
have been completely replaced, and others have been extensively
modified; the details are too much for me to repeat, and are available
elsewhere.  NetBSD runs on a wide range of hardware, including (some)
Pentiums (depends on the bus; we don't do PCI yet), many models of
Amigas and Mac IIs, the HP300 series, some models of SPARC, and PC532
machines.  We are close to, but not quite, POSIX.1 compliant.  (Some
other systems incorrectly claim that they already are.)  We've added
IP multicast and the full range of System V IPC (shared memory,
message queues, and semaphores).  NetBSD-current has several things
that were previously missing from Net/2-derived systems, including
shared libraries (for the i386 port, all the m68k ports, and the sparc
port), some old utilities such as at(1), quot(8), units(1) and others,
the AMD automounter, a full process file system done more like System
V, a loopback file system, etc.

There are a few features you will not find in NetBSD-current, however:

* We do not supply our own console driver with virtual terminals.
However, either pcvt or syscons can be acquired and used with very
little effort.  Traditionally, these drivers have been large and slow,
and they are maintained by third parties.

* We do not supply Amancio Hasty's port of the Linux sound drivers.
These (or at least the ports to BSD-du-jour) seem to be fairly buggy.
Again, this is maintained by a third party, and can be acquired and
dropped in with little effort.

* We do not supply a colorized ls(1).


In his previous post, John Dyson brought up a few points that I would
like to expand on:

   optimized pmap code,

Except for two uses of i386 assembler code which in practice make
little difference, the one in NetBSD-current is faster, and in
particular does fewer TLB flushes.

   multi-page cluster pageins,

You mean `pageouts', I think, and Mike Hibler's VM code for 4.4 does
this, and I dare say has been more thoroughly tested.  It seems a
better choice to me for us to wait for that code to be available.

   and our if_ed driver, written by our team member, David Greenman,
   is *very* reliable and attains THE ethernet bandwidth.

Before he was officially(?) a FreeBSD `team member', he also donated
this code to NetBSD.  We have added multicast support and cleaned this
up a bit.  In addition, `our' if_ep (3COM 3C509 driver) has been
clocked at full ethernet bandwidth, and works reliably in NetBSD.

   The sound driver that we support is very good (as I have heard.)

I considered incorporating the ported Linux sound drivers into NetBSD.
On inspection, I found several obvious bugs and a few things simply
turned off because someone didn't bother to port them properly.  This
code is not stable enough that I would recommend anyone use it.

--
- Charles Hannum
  NetBSD group
  Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sparc, mac68k, pc532.
  In progress: pmax, sun3.