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>From suter  Wed Dec  5 11:13:58 2001
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Date: Wed, 5 Dec 2001 11:57:47 +1100
From: James McPherson - TSG Engineer <James.McPherson at Sun.COM>
To: general at lists.humbug.org.au
Cc: chris at stallion.oz.au
Subject: Re: [H-GEN] NetBSD vs FreeBSD[HYPERscan M7]
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On 05 Dec 2001, 09:21:41 PM Christopher Biggs wrote:
> Greg Black <gjb at gbch.net> moved upon the face of the 'Net and spake thusly:
> > | > FreeBSD is for people who like to run Enlightenment and all the
> > | > associated multimedia bells and whistles, and think that having 10%
> > | > better filesystem througput is a "killer app".
> > | Well I don't know what Enlightenment is, don't have a sound card installed,
> > | no bells, no whistles, but I'll certainly think twice about saying that I
> > | run FreeBSD... obviously not much better than windoze. Or was that a joke?
> > Sounds more like lack of information to me.
> The differences are almost entirely cultural, and cannot be adequately
> expressed in *any* short message.  Here's another take from a different
> direction:
> FreeBSD concentrates on cutting-edge performance and flexibility on a
> small number of platforms.   For example, FreeBSD is a proving ground
> for next-generation filesystem and virtual memory architectures.

It's interesting for me as somebody who has to analyze solaris kernel crash
dumps (and thus needs to understand how the damn thing works) to try to keep
a finger on the pulse of development in the open/free unix world. I've recently 
come across a paper (presented at usenix 01, see www.parrotcode.org/talks/vmem.pdf) 
which makes some claims about *bsd and linux re rmalloc(..) -- basically the 
paper insinuates that *bsd is "behind" solaris in terms of scalable vm allocation ;) 

(now I'm putting on my asbestos suit...)

> NetBSD and OpenBSD concentrate on "do it right first"---uniformity and
> reliability take precedence, along with maximum portability.  
> Since all these sibling OSen exchange memes and code often, the
> difference is not so much one of disparate goals, but of each camp
> choosing a different *primary* goal.

This also is a reflection of one of the differences between OSen written by
commercial developers (eg Sun and solaris, IBM and aix) and those OSen written
by volunteers (I guess that's the most correct term). [NOTE I'm not speaking
for or on behalf of Sun here...] While the commercial developers do their best 
to "do it right first" there is an expectation that bugs will be found after
release, even if only because there is no way that we can simulate the entire
universe of what customers can and will do when we release. That's not to say
that commercial developers take "near enough is good enough" approach -- we
have design committees (ac!) and some very, very talented engineers to get
the architecture correct before allowing something into the OS (let alone the
kernel). None of the above is intended to annoy anybody btw, and one of the
primary things that I've learnt over the past decade is that you have to take
the most appropriate platform for what you want to achieve, and use that rather
than take a one-OS-to-rule-them-all approach. I know of solaris bigots, *bsd
bigots, linux bigots, NT/w2k/xp bigots -- "you can tell a bigot, but you can't
tell them too much because they'll hit you."

Sorry for the rambling


James C. McPherson

-- 
TSG Engineer (Kernel/Storage)           828 Pacific Highway
APAC Customer Care Centre               Gordon NSW 
Sun Microsystems Australia              2072

Failfast panic: those controlling voices in my head have 
stopped telling me what to do.....

Read about the VOS Initiative at http://www.vosinitiative.com


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