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Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!constellation!news.uoknor.edu!ns1.nodak.edu!netnews.nwnet.net!news.clark.edu!spool.mu.edu!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!fwi.uva.nl!vdlinden From: vdlinden@fwi.uva.nl (Frank van der Linden) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Subject: Re: 4.4-lite? Date: 20 Jul 1994 13:07:41 GMT Organization: FWI, University of Amsterdam Lines: 44 Distribution: world Message-ID: <30j7it$n58@mail.fwi.uva.nl> References: <2vgvc7$3tg@spruce.cic.net> <Bs2yi5F.dysonj@delphi.com> <michaelv.774429899@ponderous.cc.iastate.edu> <Zi2ziVX.dysonj@delphi.com> <30em65$g17@autodesk.autodesk.com> <Ze9RiNY.dysonj@delphi.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: xavier.fwi.uva.nl John Dyson writes: >The biggest problem that I have with the continued and biased assertions >that FreeBSD is not multi-platform capable is that it is propaganda that >becomes self-fulfilling. If this continues -- my strategy is to buy >a sparc and do the port (starting with the code contributed to NetBSD.) Uhmm, I think you were trying to prove your point that FreeBSD should be as easy to port to new architectures. With this, you seem to be merely proving that you can take the sparc parts out of NetBSD, and add them to FreeBSD. Which means that you'll be using stuff that the NetBSD/sparc folks have been working on for some time (and yes, of course, Chris Torek before that), making life a lot easier for you, and thus not proving your point that porting to a new architecture would be just as easy with FreeBSD. It would just prove that -it is possible-, which noone doubts, I think. The discussion was whether NetBSD has an edge in porting to other architectures because they have done work to prepare their system for that. And yes, I think that they have. They have done a lot of things that did not immediately produce lots of new working ports, but that did provide them with a solid basis for future work on any architecture. With the 4.4-lite code integrated now, I think NetBSD is headed for a pretty good future, and I am sure that new ports will emerge, and existing ones will become more stable quickly. In fact, with CSRG now gone, I think NetBSD is the place to look for BSD in the future (yeah, I am biased, I am a happy NetBSD user, I know). On the FreeBSD enhancements: I do hear good things about their VM improvements, and it would be nice to see a merged VM/buffer cache. But: statements like "users have reported a significant performance improvement" don't really cut it. My NetBSD 1.0-alpha (== NetBSD-current of July 19th) feels a hell of a lot faster than 0.9[ab] when it comes to things like response time in a system that has both X running and a gcc compile at the same time. But I don't have any real numbers to back that up either. Maybe someone could do a benchmark of some sort to compare NetBSD and FreeBSD (in their most recent versions?). That would be interesting. - Frank -- +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+ | I am not sure what a .signature is for, but my mom told me to make one. | | Frank van der Linden, vdlinden@fwi.uva.nl | +----------------------------------------------------------------------------+