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FreeBSD on New Architectures
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."
In addition to the porting work going on moving FreeBSD to other platforms, I'm really looking forward to new stuff in 5.0-CURRENT.
FreeBSD 4.x doesn't do SMP terribly well, for instance. Version 5.0 brings SMPng, kernel scheduler entities, a preemptable kernel and possibly more. It's gonna be awesome.
It's also particularly nice to see FreeBSD booting on Mac hardware. Sure, Apple's already got big chunks of FreeBSD 3.2 inside Darwin, but now we've got 5.0-CURRENT running on PPC, and the source is available. Imagine how sweet MacOS X could be if Apple MFC'ed from this new PPC FreeBSD work that's going on. Mmmmm...
The first boot on real hardware to single+ 0+archive/2001/freebsd-ia64/20011007.freebsd-ia64
user mode happened about 2 weeks ago. See
http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=3921
The IA64 port is booting multi-user now, and has been for quite some time.
I can understand the IA-64 port, as most of the x86 crowd will eventually be there, but why PPC and SPARC? Those are even more major changes, and makes a lot more work for drivers etc. Given that the SMP code in FBSD is nowhere near that of Solaris, it would make more sense to stick to the workgroup server sized market, with 4-8 CPU machines on x86 (what really needs 1 or 2 proc sun hardware that can't be accomplished on 1-2 way x86 or even 4-way x86?).
Please note that Sparc64 is Fujitsu's 64-bit SPARC processor, which is not completely compatibel with Sun own 64-bit SPARC processor, called UltraSparc. They've been working on getting FreeBSD to work on the UltraSparc architecture, since the DEC^H^H^HCompaq road seems to be a dead end...
... if it's all there in NetBSD?
http://www.netbsd.org/
I submitted an almost identical article like a week ago. Most likely someone lame like cmdrtaco saw it, said "oh this isn't important", and deleted it. Thankfully, micheal found a similar story and posted it.
Note to BSD folks - if you want something posted, submit it multiple times, hours or days apart.
To run FreeBSD on my Ultra 30... :-D
I'm an idiot! ia64 != x86_64. Damn companies and their pet architectures!
What were the skies like when you were young?
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in th recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has stadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dying
All you do is list the interface name /etc/rc.conf like this:
in
dhclient=YES
dhclient_flags="fxp0"
and that's it! Not too hard, was it?
For more details, try 'man rc.conf'.
http://www.openbsd.org/
http://www.freebsd.org
When it's all there in PicoBSD? :)
Who cares about FreeBSD. I used FreeBSD before I've recently converted to NetBSD 1.52. I just fed up with FreeBSD media hype and had to switch to either Linux and other BSD, NetBSD. I think FreeBSD is worst OS in hardware support! I just didn't fully understand my brand new laptop. USB mouse wouldn't work and recently with FreeBSD 4.4, things even got worse and it wouldn't even auto reboot when I do "shutdown -p now" I bought a brand new kensington USB optical mouse but unable to use since FreeBSD wouldn't recognize USB on my laptop. PS/2 mouse works but, mouse begins to behave caotic after a while in X, expecially under KDE (FreeBSD internal fault! poor design). Many ports don't compile..especially the GNOME stuff.. I don't even know why they even add em in ports when it doesn't even compile. Now I'm using NetBSD 1.52 and thank God! Everything works perfect! NetBSD recognizes every hardware in my laptop and KDE 2.2.1 works great without a glitch. NetBSD seem to compile much faster than in FreeBSD. If you're gonna use BSD, use NetBSD, especially if you want full hardware support. I'll say NetBSD hardware support is equal in par with Linux. Everyone knows Linux has very good hardware support. FreeBSD is just full of media hype and in reality, it's technology is years behind compared to both Linux and NetBSD. I must admit NetBSD is a little hard to use for beginners, but for experienced Linux/BSD users, it's a matter of days before you figure out everything. I just started using NetBSD last week and I'm very comfortable with it. I'll never go back to FreeBSD again. Not even when 5.0 comes out. I'm waiting for NetBSD 1.6 now. I just wish NetBSD had better document support and better package manager support. Trying to install any precompiled packages say, KDE 2.2 via ftp is simply terrible, doesn't work! I've installed KDE 2.2.1 but I had to grab the source and compile it. Took good 15 hours!!!
Unproud former FreeBSD user and
Now very PROUD NetBSD 1.52 user.
Now that's funny, especially coming from someone who thought to switch to Linux.