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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mira.net.au!news.vbc.net!alpha.sky.net!winternet.com!newsfeed.concentric.net!news.texas.net!news1.best.com!news.exodus.net!imci4!newsfeed.internetmci.com!swrinde!howland.reston.ans.net!math.ohio-state.edu!newsfeed.acns.nwu.edu!ftpbox!mothost!news-wa16!news-brc9!nntp.portal.ca!cynic.portal.ca!not-for-mail From: curt@cynic.portal.ca (Curt Sampson) Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc Subject: Re: Curious about *BSD History Date: 10 Apr 1996 14:25:58 -0700 Organization: Internet Portal Services, Inc. Lines: 48 Message-ID: <4kh916$1pa@cynic.portal.ca> References: <4k1nue$lm8@orb.direct.ca> <3165791B.52BFA1D7@FreeBSD.org> NNTP-Posting-Host: cynic.portal.ca Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:17173 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:2929 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. In retrospect, I think that this was for the best - it >gave each group the freedom to focus on a specific area of OS design >and prevented any one group from going crazy with too much to do. I >certainly know that I'd have never wanted to be release engineer if I'd >had more than one platform to do releases for! I think that this is a really important point. Some fairly serious tradeoffs have had to have been made in each camp to achieve some of the things that have been done. As an example, I first started using NetBSD perhaps a year and a half ago, and at that time there was some demand for bounce buffers for i386 machines so that people with ISA bus-mastering SCSI controllers could have more than 16MB of RAM in their machines. There are some pretty easy ways of doing this--the FreeBSD code could have been ripped out and put into NetBSD without much trouble. Unfortunately, none of these seem to be able to account for non-PC ISA busses, such as those on Amigas and Alphas. As a result, we still don't have bounce buffer support, though it is being actively worked on, and I suspect it will appear later this year. 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. >The situation today is one of more cautious optimism about the two >groups working together on areas of common interest, and there has been >some progress in that area. I think that, at least at this point, that's about all that can reasonably be expected. Political problems aside, it's apparent to me that an absolutely enormous amount of work would be required to merge the two systems, since FreeBSD is so far behind on multi-platform operability and NetBSD probably nearly as far behind on certain other features (such as the VM system). cjs -- Curt Sampson curt@portal.ca Info at http://www.portal.ca/ Internet Portal Services, Inc. Vancouver, BC (604) 257-9400 De gustibus, aut bene aut nihil.