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From: csgr@cs.ru.ac.za (Geoff Rehmet)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd
Subject: Re: 4.4-lite?
Date: 20 Jul 1994 07:56:02 GMT
Organization: Rhodes University Computing Services
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In <Ct75oE.75p@newsserver.aggregate.com> rhealey@sirius.aggregate.com (Rob Healey) writes:
> But that still doesn't answer why someone like myself, with 8
> months invested in to NetBSD 1.0 would want to spend time
> trying to get things to fly under FreeBSD when that same time
> could be spent building on the work I and others have already
> done on, in my case, the m68k/Amiga port? Now that I have a
> stable port and can start working on applications beyond the
> kernel why would I want to go back to square one?!
I think most posters from the FreeBSD camp have made it clear enough
that if you want multiarchitecture support *NOW*, the only place you
are going to find it is in NetBSD.
It's your responsibility to decide for yourself which of the two is
best for YOUR PARTICULAR environment. What is good for one person may
not be useful to another.
> From my personal tests the NetBSD port appears to hit the limits of
> my hardware. i.e. if my hardware was better it would go faster so it's
> my hardware that is slowing things down, not the OS. How would
> switching to FreeBSD speed it up any?
This probably depends again on what you are doing. The recent
improvements to FreeBSD's VM system have made very considerable
improvements in preformance. (Many users have noted an improvement
from 1.1 to 1.1.5.) I don't know if the NetBSD team has done similar
work on their VM system. What you would really need to do is take
FreeBSD and NetBSD and try both out. (Unfortunately that requires time
and spare hardware.)
> As far as the implication that somehow NetBSD 1.0 is tainted, and I
> doubt this implication is an accident due to it's recurrance in
> FreeBSD postings, I would like to see proof backing up this claim.
Nobody has said that NetBSD *IS* tainted. What some people have tried
to say is that it may be more difficult to prove that it is not
tainted. If USL decided to play nasty, they could make peoples' lives
very difficult by making them prove that their code is not tainted. In
working from the 4.4-Lite tape there can be no question about this.
(Talk to some of the people who were getting nasty letters from USL's
lawyers.)
> Just because NetBSD started from a Net/2 base and replaced whole
> parts with 4.4-lite code when it became legally available is not
> reason to indirectly accuse it of possibly being tainted. Tell
> us where, if any place, it is tainted! Otherwise please stop making
> this implication in postings; thank you.
Because it is Net/2 derived does not make it tainted. It may just make
it more difficult to prove that it is not tainted.
As a parting remark, let me say that if you are presently happy with
NetBSD, and have existing installations which you want to upgrade, then
you would probably want to stick with NetBSD. I know of sites who have
moved from NetBSD to FreeBSD and are now much happier running FreeBSD -
this is again their opinion however - everyone is free to choose.
Geoff.
--
Geoff Rehmet, Computer Science Department, | ____ _ o /\
Rhodes University, South Africa |___ _-\_<, / /\/\
FreeBSD core team | (*)/'(*) /\/ / \ \
csgr@cs.ru.ac.za, csgr@freefall.cdrom.com, geoff@neptune.ru.ac.za