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Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd Path: sserve!manuel.anu.edu.au!munnari.oz.au!sgiblab!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!uwm.edu!caen!saimiri.primate.wisc.edu!usenet.coe.montana.edu!news.u.washington.edu!serval!hlu From: hlu@eecs.wsu.edu (H.J. Lu) Subject: Re: 386BSD or LINUX? Message-ID: <1992Nov6.184556.11843@serval.net.wsu.edu> Sender: news@serval.net.wsu.edu (USENET News System) Organization: School of EECS, Washington State University References: <1992Nov4.205620.8184@colorado.edu> <1992Nov5.060658.639@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg> Date: Fri, 6 Nov 92 18:45:56 GMT Lines: 72 In article <1992Nov5.060658.639@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg>, eoahmad@ntuix.ntu.ac.sg (Othman Ahmad) writes: |> Drew Eckhardt (drew@kinglear.cs.colorado.edu) wrote: |> : |> : Linux +'s : |> : |> : Shared libraries. This results in a significant disk space savings, |> : especially in the case of 'X' applications that can shrink by |> : an order of magnitude when compiled with shared libraries. |> |> Let us compare sizes: |> I have a simple X11 program which just prints out "Hello world!". It takes about 300K with static libs. With shared libs, it only takes 9K. I can even make it less than 3K. [...] |> : |> : Many kernel structures, such as pty's, are dynamically allocated. This |> : increases the amount of pageable memory that is available. |> |> How do we change its number? CAn we add pty indefinitely`? You know the answer for `indefinitely'. [...] |> : |> : I'd say that if you want BSD, because it's BSD, or if you want |> : stable NFS NOW, and not in two weeks, that it might be worthwhile. |> |> Have you forgotten that it has the VFS(?), which is the Posix complient file VFS? Without it, how can Linux support Minix, Ext, MSDOS, Xenix, NFS ...? |> system. Or has linux used it already? What it does is to have long file names, |> faster throughput because of large block sizes(4K),without much fragmentation |> becaue it can go down to 1K block size as well,or am I mistaken? |> |> It also uses standard BSD library, which makes it easy to port |> software written in BSD systems which is widely used in Academic circles. I am responsible for the Linux C library. It is not that hard to port code to Linux since the Linux C library is POSIX compliant with lots of SYSV, BSD and GNU extentions. For most of PD stuff, you can chose POSIX, which is the safest, BSD (I did it for compress.) or SYSV. I bet porting code to Linux is easier than to 386bsd in general. |> This is the other reason why I choose 386bsd over linux. However it is |> not completely true because 4.3 BSD is slightly different from 4.2 BSD. Use |> of GNU utilities make it slightly incompatible with full blown mainframe |> BSD or those used in ultrix and Sun workstations. You mean GNU utilities have lots of new switches? I just happen to like that. They can do you want them to do. |> The other reason is that linux is more for hackers. Lynne goes to |> great lengths to make 386bsd installation easy for "idiots"/beginners. That is true. Now the FSF is planning distribute Linux. We are trying to make it idiot-proof. But noone can 100% guarantee it. |> |> How about performance comparisons? I've posted the results of iozone 1 to |> comp.unix.bsd . |> I think that depends on the applications. H.J.