*BSD News Article 65653


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From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: Curious about *BSD History
Message-ID: <1996Apr12.210743.28292@wavehh.hanse.de>
Organization: BSD User Group Hamburg
References: <4k1nue$lm8@orb.direct.ca> <3165791B.52BFA1D7@FreeBSD.org> <4kh916$1pa@cynic.portal.ca> <4kl863$rno@news.rhrz.uni-bonn.de>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 96 21:07:43 GMT
Lines: 60
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:17132 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:2910

volker@carlotta.iam.uni-bonn.de (Volker A. Brandt) writes:

>In article <4kh916$1pa@cynic.portal.ca> curt@cynic.portal.ca (Curt Sampson) writes:
>>In article <3165791B.52BFA1D7@FreeBSD.org>,
>>Jordan K. Hubbard <jkh@FreeBSD.org> wrote:
>>
>>>The NetBSD people wanted to run on as many
>>>platforms as they could, the FreeBSD people being more driven towards
>>>the goal of making *one* system as user friendly and generally useful
>>>as possible.

>>To someone with an Adaptec 1542 and a i486 with 24MB of RAM, NetBSD
>>has made some crippling decisions. On the other hand, if you own
>>anything but a PC, FreeBSD has made some crippling decisions.

My newsfeed missed Jordan's and the previous post, could someone mail
them to me, please?

>Indeed.  I have the bounce-buffer problem. However, I also believe in
>portability, and have an Atari TT.  There are always some tradeoffs
>involved.

If you want a NetBSD-like OS that runs on i386 and Atari, you might
try OpenBSD. They have bounce buffers on i386. However, OpenBSD has
only a "-current"-like state. You need some experience to install and
use OpenBSD, more than to use a NetBSD release (not to speak of
FreeBSD).

I remember someone has bounce buffer patches for NetBSD-1.1. If you
need them, mail me, I'll try to find them.

>Having said that, when will bounce-buffer support be integrated in
>NetBSD-current?

Some of NetBSD's developers want a bounce-buffer solution that is not
specific to one spefic kind of device or one kind of machine. For
example, the DEC Alpha machines have ISA bus, but to use ISA cards
with DMA you *always* have to use bounce buffers, even with 16 MB of
RAM. 

The implementation should share as much code as possible for different
tasks and abstracts the details so that adding additional usage for
bounce buffers is less work.

This is not a comment on the quality of the FreeBSD and OpenBSD bounce
buffer solutions, I don't know anything about them. And I don't speak
for any development team, if you want qualfied comments about the
state of NetBSD's bounce buffers, see the mailing list archives of
current-users and port-i386 on their WWW server. The issue has been
discussed several times over the last months.

I can't resist, sorry, but let me say that you bought a machine and a
SCSI controller that cannot use more than 16 MB of RAM. Now you put 24
MB of RAM in it and want your OS to fix it. Mumble...

Martin
-- 
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Martin Cracauer <cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de>  -  BSD User Group Hamburg
BSD, Lisp and other programming info http://www.bik-gmbh.de/~cracauer