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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!news.uoknor.edu!ns1.nodak.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.clark.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!europa.eng.gtefsd.com!MathWorks.Com!news.kei.com!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!ai-lab!life.ai.mit.edu!mycroft From: mycroft@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu (Charles M. Hannum) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.misc Subject: Re: 4.4-lite? Date: 20 Jul 1994 08:35:42 GMT Organization: MIT Artificial Intelligence Lab Lines: 47 Message-ID: <MYCROFT.94Jul20043542@duality.gnu.ai.mit.edu> References: <2vgvc7$3tg@spruce.cic.net> <3097eh$m2h@pdq.coe.montana.edu> <Bs2yi5F.dysonj@delphi.com> <michaelv.774429899@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu> <30fh47$94i@pdq.coe.montana.edu> NNTP-Posting-Host: duality.ai.mit.edu In-reply-to: nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu's message of 19 Jul 1994 03:25:59 GMT In article <30fh47$94i@pdq.coe.montana.edu> nate@bsd.coe.montana.edu (Nate Williams) writes: The 4.4 'core' platform was the HP series, which is NOT a little endian machine. Therefore, the plethora of endian-ness kernel bugs you allude to in your posting simply shouldn't be in 4.4 due to the x86 influence if 4.4 ran on HP's. (Which is did.) That statement doesn't make much sense. The endian problem were with little-endian machines. Almost all late 4.4-Lite development was done on hp300s and SPARCs; the two little-endian ports, pmax and i386, didn't really work. The i386 stuff didn't even come close to compiling. And I can assure you there were enough endian problems. The inet code thought my machine had a multicast address, and wouldn't respond to any TCP open sequences initiated by another host. Restores of dumps from little-endian machines with old file systems didn't work. LFS was just totally hosed. (It's still broken in NetBSD, but not as badly.) The list goes on. All the ones I know of are fixed in NetBSD. I'm running the code on an i386 and a hp300 right now. I've been there; I've done it. I speak with authority on the subject. Do you? However, since it was done speedily by the NetBSD folks those bugs can still be referenced by the FreeBSD folks or done completely from scratch. Since I've been told that almost all of my patches (and most of them *were* mine, since it was the file system and network code that had problems, and I did that integration almost entirely myself) will be in the second release of 4.4-Lite, you'd be a bit foolish to redo all of it. And yes, FreeBSD could simply pull them in, but I have to wonder why people wouldn't rather use the system where the work is actually getting done. -- - Charles Hannum NetBSD group Working ports: i386, hp300, amiga, sparc, mac68k, pc532. In progress: pmax, sun3.