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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!simtel!lll-winken.llnl.gov!uwm.edu!vixen.cso.uiuc.edu!uchinews!gw2.att.com!nntpa!not-for-mail From: dyson@inuxs.inh.att.com (John S. Dyson) Subject: Re: Free BSD vs. NET/BSD - whats the diff? Message-ID: <DHqCL5.36K@nntpa.cb.att.com> Sender: news@nntpa.cb.att.com (Netnews Administration) Nntp-Posting-Host: inuxs.inh.att.com Organization: AT&T References: <1995Oct31.094013.7072@venus.gov.bc.ca> Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 15:05:29 GMT Lines: 57 In article <1995Oct31.094013.7072@venus.gov.bc.ca>, Stuart Lory <lorys@tbc.gov.bc.ca> wrote: > >Can anyone tell me the difference between FreeBSD and NETBSD, or >where I can look for such information? Are the two systems related >or maintained by the same people? I have been using linux for a long >time and would like to experiment with BSD but I can't seem to find much >information on the differences between the two. I have a 386 that runs >NETBSD but when I try to boot the FreeBSD boot disk it just reboots, >does this mean that my 386 won't run FreeBSD? > Remember I am partisan!!! (and there are many more things to go here, but I am just talking about the things that I know about): 1) FreeBSD has a more advanced VM system. Even though the machine dependant layers have been tuned very carefully for the X86, the machine independent layers have been "fixed" to eliminate some of the shortcomings of the 4.4Lite stuff. Fork/Execs are very fast on FreeBSD. Page faults are very fast on FreeBSD (and much less probable.) The pageout daemon uses a more intelligent algorithm light-years beyond the old clock-algorithm. FreeBSD does both page-in and page-out clustering -- makes the disk quieter on starting up X-applications (especially the first time.) (AFAIK, the fork/exec time on programs built -static is as fast as available on a free U**X-like OS today, by at least 50%, this is useful on WWW servers especially.) 2) FreeBSD has a coherent VM/Buffer-Cache subsystem. 3) FreeBSD has TTCP (good for web servers in the future.) Do web clients use this yet??? 4) FreeBSD has a dynamically sized Buffer-Cache. Less memory is unused (note that keeping program text around for weeks is not as good as keeping most recently used data longer.) 5) FreeBSD SUPPORTS bounce buffers on ISA systems for the SCSI devices. 6) FreeBSD supports UPAGE swapping on the X86 platform. This allows many more processes in a system without clogging memory with useless UPAGES and page-table-pages. (Has done so for over a year.) 7) FreeBSD-current supports Linux's EXT2FS (courtesy of a Lites contributor, Godmar Back), with full integration with the Merged VM/Buffer cache. (I fully expect that NetBSD will adopt this soon.) 8) FreeBSD-current+ (will be ready this week) has an intelligent async write methodology, giving meta-data performance close to that of Linux while keeping the almost disk-speed-limited sequential performance of FreeBSD. (rm -fr's are d*mn fast -- but safer than a simple async filesystem.) John dyson@freebsd.org