Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FreeBSD on New Architectures

Posted by michael on from the daemon-power dept.

Kartoffel writes: "FreeBSD hackers have been hard at work getting the OS to run on PowerPC, IA64, and Sparc64 machines. These announcements are originally from FreeBSD.org. PowerPC: Benno Rice has committed a mega-patch which added support for OpenFirmware to the FreeBSD loader. The loader can now load a kernel over the network and execute it on an Apple iMac. IA64: After a few months of development Doug Rabson and Peter Wemm have committed patches which extends the FreeBSD/ia64 port's functionality and adds the possibility to boot on real hardware. Sparc64: Jake Burkholder and Thomas Moestl have been porting FreeBSD to the ultra sparc for the past few months and first booted a machine into single user mode on the 18th of October. The log from the serial console is available."

2 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why? by Garrett+Rooney · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The motivation behind these ports is the same motivation for everything else in FreeBSD. There are people willing and capable of doing the work, and it's presence will not adversely effect the rest of the OS. Porting to different architectures will improve the quality of the codebase as a whole, and allow people to use FreeBSD in places they otherwise could not. These are good things.

    Also, keep in mind, that they aren't going out and porting to everything on the planet. They are porting to modern, high quality hardware. As jkh said at some point 'It is not our place to support geriatric hardware, if people want that, they have NetBSD' (I'm probably badly misquoting that...).

  2. Re:why go FreeBSD ... by RLiegh · · Score: 2, Insightful

    I have no idea about other platforms; but my experience recently w/ NetBSD on the i386 platform left a bad (not bitter, unpleasent, kinda like fish) taste in my mouth.

    Here's the things I did not like, from my POV...

    setting up DHCP is a huge PITA under NetBSD, it's automatic under FreeBSD

    There is no (practical) Xfree86 4.x under NetBSD (you have to set arcane options when you re-compile X from scratch); FreeBSD includes X 4.x as an optional package

    FreeBSD is optimized for the x86 platform and shows it when contrasted against NetBSD.

    Just my opinion...