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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!pipex!sunic!trane.uninett.no!eunet.no!nuug!EU.net!ieunet!news.ieunet.ie!jkh From: jkh@whisker.hubbard.ie (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.questions Subject: Re: Linux or FreeBSD? Date: 29 May 1994 03:01:01 GMT Organization: Jordan Hubbard Lines: 128 Message-ID: <JKH.94May29030102@whisker.hubbard.ie> References: <CqH2z7.29E@dit.upm.es> <2s618a$34t@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <2s86fj$cn4@acmex.gatech.edu> <hastyCqJBED.9yz@netcom.com> <2s8mbn$e1o@acmex.gatech.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: whisker.hubbard.ie In-reply-to: gt8134b@prism.gatech.edu's message of 28 May 1994 20:07:19 -0400 In article <2s8mbn$e1o@acmex.gatech.edu> gt8134b@prism.gatech.edu (Robert Sanders) writes: Ok, everyone generally knows that I'm always careful to stay neutral on the classing FreeBSD vs Linux issue, and I have always felt that it's most important when discussing the two to BE HONEST about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each one. You don't win credibility for your OS of choice by saying things like "Our OS never ever crashes and is totally and absolutely good in every respect and anything you say to the contrary is BS, so there!" With that in mind, I'd like to clear up a few points. were a bad thing. For your information, I've lost filesystems twice, both times due to bad disks; Linux's ext2fs has proven very reliable for me. I'm sure that ext2fs has improved immeasurably since it first came out, but just to note that some of its well-deserved suspicions have come from early instability and the fact that one little f**kup could generally cost you major chunks of your filesystem! If it's since come along to the point where its stability ranks up there with FFS, that's great, but also acknowledge that some people who've known it for awhile have every right to be suspicious until it's really earned its stripes. If you want to impress me with filesystem stability, show me BSD 4.4's log-structured filesystem running under FreeBSD. Then I'll agree that *BSD has a definite advantage over Linux in that area. If that's what it will take, then all I can say is wait about, say, 8-10 weeks or so for the first ALPHA snapshot of FreeBSD 2.0 :-) I'm very well aware of the advantages of both implementations, thank you. FreeBSD's implementation is inherently slower, but the tradeoff is a "cleaner" system. What do you mean by "Dynamic Shared Libraries"? Linux has shared libraries, and symbols in the executable can override those in the shared library. But is the linking done at runtime? No. It's done at compile-time. And we save a lot of CPU and page-dirtying for it. This is another area where I think comparing the two quickly becomes an exercise in thin justifications for Linux's approach (and shouldn't even be raised as a point of argument when Linux has so many other clear strengths that it could raise in its favor!). Sure, Linux's approach is faster, but it's a F**KING NIGHTMARE from the application developers point of view! I've talked about this quite a bit with Warner Losh from ParcPlace (the OI people) and he often goes into convulsions at the mere mention of how much time and agony he had to put in to get OI's shared libs to work with Linux. By comparison, building a shared lib under *BSD is generally no harder than it is on a Sun (which is to say quite easy). Sometimes the advantages of a `cleaner' implementation over the long run far outweigh some of the more minimal run-time overhead issues (which can be made up in other ways as you have time to add optimization), and I think that Linux's approach will come to haunt its proponents more and more as the popularity of it increases, eventually resulting in their being almost _forced_ to go down the same road! Parallels in industry already exist - Sun, DEC and HP generally went the "FreeBSD" approach (though it's more accurate to say the opposite, really) and now customers and important VARs simply accept that as a rather seamless bit of functionality in the system, the fact that almost no one even cares to make special mention of the functionality being a testament to its ease of use. SCO, on the other hand, went the Linux route and their customers and VARs screamed so loud (especially the latter) that SCO is now so publically embarassed by the shared library mechanism as to *actively discourage its use*! I think no more need be said here as history will inevitably prove me right. Like I said, Linux has some great features and I'm always ready to give it its proper due, but its shared library implementation is not one of those features. Yes, thank you. We did do that, but we were rather surprised that the "base" system didn't include many programs we had come to expect. Please read my posts more closely before mouthing off. I think what he meant to say was that such things are readily available (even more so than the raw ports - look in the packages directory). You definately can't please everyone, with 2/3 of the people screaming for *smaller* releases and another third yelling for more "base programs", and the bottom line is that I think we did it right by decoupling a lot of this stuff from the system. In truth, we will probably end up adding PERL as it's such a generally useful tool, but things like emacs and xview will probably almost always remain packages, and I think that's for the best. Did you try actually adding any of the packages? I find it hard to see how anything could be simpler.. It was FreeBSD 1.1 Gamma. At the time, there was no newer kernel except one culled from the -current tree. I thought you *BSD people were so uppity about not having to play patch-of-the-day like Linuxers supposedly do? We are, and if anything I'd have even preferred that you wait for the first RELEASE version before evaluating it, but that's all water under the bridge. Last I heard it wasn't officially available for FreeBSD, either, and you were causing hackles to be raised by insisting that it was. Linux's device drivers Well, it will be present in 1.1.5 so just to make a note of it, it's about to be `officially available' in less than a month's time. >How odd, that Sun OS NFS seems to work with FreeBSD... In which direction? And, if you wish to exchange childish snotty remarks, how odd that SunOS's NFS worked with Linux (Linux->SunOS and SunOS->Linux). I think he was referring to the fact that some Linux user had said that Linux worked fine with all his other workstation hardware and that FreeBSD didn't. Suffice to say that FreeBSD boxes happily coexist in a mixed NIS/NFS environment containing both Suns, ALPHAs, DECStations and IBM's so it DOES work. In some cases, if you use cheap networking hardware (see our most recent FAQ) you will have to reduce the R/W io size in order to get things working properly since the faster workstation will swamp the network card completely. We have examined the problem in detail and found that this is neither a FreeBSD, workstation or NFS problem - it's a configuration problem. Sure, we could pick defaults that make it interoperate in a guaranteed fashion for each and every FreeBSD box, but we'd end up severely penalizing folks with faster 16 bit ethernet cards and speedy PC's (with which most NFS servers are actually configured). Now that it's properly documented in the FAQ (and it wasn't for a long time - our fault!), I anticipate that everyone will be able to get satisfactory performance. Jordan -- Jordan K. Hubbard FreeBSD core team Friend to mollusks