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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!msuinfo!agate!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!solaris.cc.vt.edu!puma.bevd.blacksburg.va.us!briggs From: briggs@puma.bevd.blacksburg.va.us (Allen Briggs) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: 4.4-lite? Date: 18 Jul 1994 22:01:34 GMT Organization: Home, Blacksburg, Virginia Lines: 56 Message-ID: <30eu3u$mct@solaris.cc.vt.edu> References: <michaelv.774429899@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu> <Zi2ziVX.dysonj@delphi.com> <30em65$g17@autodesk.autodesk.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: puma.bevd.blacksburg.va.us In article <30em65$g17@autodesk.autodesk.com> greywolf@autodesk.com (I can teach you how to fish...) writes: >John Dyson <dysonj@delphi.com> writes in <Zi2ziVX.dysonj@delphi.com> > * since FreeBSD is truely starting from 4.4Lite, and not backing into it, some > * of the complications are probably mitigated. > >I find it kind of difficult to believe that FreeBSD started with 4.4-Lite, >since the litigation was still going on when FreeBSD was kicking off their >first implementation; Are you misunderstanding John on purpose? His statement should be clear from other posts on this thread that FreeBSD 2.0 is starting with the 4.4-Lite tape, and the FreeBSD 1.x releases have been based on Net/2. This is different from the NetBSD approach which was to fold the 4.4 changes into that kernel/user-land. >FreeBSD has never *claimed* to be a multi-platform OS; everyone I have talked >to regarding "why doesn't FreeBSD run on <X platform>?" has told me that >their desire was to build a stable OS for one platform. Others have >informed me that the code is SO x86/*SA-bus-centric that the amount of >work required to separate out the different architectures is sufficiently >overwhelming as to discourage that progress. The second point is obviously bogus. FreeBSD hasn't diverged that notably from net/2. I have heard that said about Linux, but since 68k Linux rumors are spreading far and wide, it's probably becoming less true of that OS. No one is stopping Joe Q. User from grabbing FreeBSD and porting to his/her Wombat (tm) box. Since 4.4 works on both little- and big-endian machines, I'd make the same assumptions that John did--that a lot of the endian-independence exists. Not that that's all of the difficulty in a machine dependent OS, but endian problems are a big pain... >The fact that it made out to the X86/*SA-bus >family before any other BSD-based *NIX (I still consider it a *NIX, >regardless of the lawyers) and seems to be stable on those platforms >is probably a contributing factor to that success. Huh? Net/FreeBSD were pretty close, I think. Unless you're talking about FreeBSD before it was FreeBSD--that is, 386BSD 0.1+patch kit ;-) >I hadn't seen any arch-specific directories last I looked at FreeBSD anyway >which was, admittedly, quite some time ago. 4.4-lite has several. -allen ObBias: I am active with the NetBSD/Mac68k port... -- Allen Briggs - end killing - allen.briggs@vt.edu ** MacBSD == NetBSD/Mac ** = Over the years you swam the ocean following feelings of your own [...] = == It's a shame to have to die to put the shadow on our eyes. We don't == === want to care. Under the bridge. Over the phone. Wind on the Water. ===