Return to BSD News archive
#! rnews 4563 bsd
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc
Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.carno.net.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!news.mel.connect.com.au!munnari.OZ.AU!news.ecn.uoknor.edu!feed1.news.erols.com!howland.erols.net!news.mathworks.com!fu-berlin.de!news-ber1.dfn.de!news-ham1.dfn.de!news.dkrz.de!news.uni-hamburg.de!news.Hanse.DE!wavehh.hanse.de!cracauer
From: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de (Martin Cracauer)
Subject: Re: Differences between BSDI, FreeBSD and NetBSD?
Message-ID: <1997Jan4.095835.23223@wavehh.hanse.de>
Reply-To: cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de
Organization: '(a (cons structive organization))
References: <6OBgx1wrNgB@me-tech.PFM-Mainz.de>
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 97 09:58:35 GMT
Lines: 76
Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.unix.bsd.misc:1875 comp.unix.bsd.bsdi.misc:5512 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:33607 comp.unix.bsd.netbsd.misc:5067
mschmidt@me-tech.PFM-Mainz.de (Michael Schmidt) writes:
>Where are, which are the differences regarding
>A: stability of the system,
>B: available software,
>C: performance of the system in general,
>D: performance of TCP/IP, networking connections,
>between BSDI, FreeBSD and NetBSD?
I have a comparision of NetBSD and FreeBSD at
http://www.cons.org/cracauer/bsd-net-vs-free.html
You missed OpenBSD in your list.
Regarding your questions, the stability of the systems should be quite
the same, if you recognize that the existence of sufficient swap space
is important for all of them (more important than for other Unix-like
systems) and that NetBSD suffers most from that problem.
The availiably of software involves several issues:
- commercial software, availiable only as binaries. Under normal
circumstances, all BSD systems should be able to run the binaries of
other's, while I'm not sure about BSDI's capability to drive other
BSD system binaries.
- software availiable as binaries for other operating systems. NetBSD
and OpenBSD have a SVR4-compat option, enabling Solaris, Unixware et
al binaries. The Linux compatiblity of NetBSD (and therefore
OpenBSD) used to be better than that of FreeBSD 2.1.x. FreeBSD-2.2.x
is much better, I have no idea how it compares to NetBSD. I don't
know about BSDIs capabilities in that areas.
- software aviliable as source code needs to be seperated again:
- software aviliable as a FreeBSD "port" is very straightforward to
install. OpenBSD and - I think - now NetBSD can use FreeBSD's
ports as well, while I assume in some cases manual adjustment has
to be made (#ifdef FreeBSD introduced by the port). I asumem BSDI
can't use FreeBSD ports.
- recent software to be installed from native sources should be
equal for all BSDs.
- In some cases of very old third-party sources I found NetBSD to be
easier to install on because FreeBSD had a rather radical break
from FreeBSD-1.x to 2.x. In old package of my interest areas
(programming language implementations) I more often find NetBSD
support and when I find NetBSD *and* FreeBSD support, the NetBSD
support is more likely to work on recent NetBSD version than the
old FreeBSD suport on recent FreeBSD releases.
Performance-wise FreeBSD has the lead at least in VM
performance. FreeBSD's VM systems is the fastest of all operating
systems I tested, while NetBSD is quite bad. OpenBSD has a few fixes
relative to NetBSD and NetBSD has improvements in the post-1.2 tree,
but they definitivly don't reach FreeBSD's performance. If you use
NetBSD or OpenBSD, you definitvly want enough RAM in your machine,
while FreeBSD is a real fighter under memory stress.
TCP/IP performance should be quite the same for all, but that's an
area I don't know much about. You can generally assume that TCP/IP
bandwidth is sufficient unless you serve multiple 100Mbit
connections. Please note that NFS is a weak point of all BSDs (and
Linux, for that matter).
Martin
--
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin_Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de http://cracauer.cons.org Fax.: +4940 5228536
"As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin
--
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin_Cracauer@wavehh.hanse.de http://cracauer.cons.org Fax.: +4940 5228536
"As far as I'm concerned, if something is so complicated that you can't ex-
plain it in 10 seconds, then it's probably not worth knowing anyway"- Calvin