FreeBSD on New Architectures

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Posted by michael on Tuesday October 23, 2001 @08:05AM 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."

9 of 47 comments (clear)

FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT by Kartoffel · 2001-10-23 08:16 · Score: 4, Informative

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...
IA 64 boots to multi-user mode on real hardware by GrumpyOldMan · 2001-10-23 09:11 · Score: 4, Informative

The first boot on real hardware to single
user mode happened about 2 weeks ago. See
http://docs.FreeBSD.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=3921+ 0+archive/2001/freebsd-ia64/20011007.freebsd-ia64

The IA64 port is booting multi-user now, and has been for quite some time.
Why? by akharon · 2001-10-23 10:34 · Score: 2, Interesting

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?).
1. Re:Why? by Garrett+Rooney · 2001-10-24 01:58 · 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? by Anonymous Coward · 2001-10-25 05:39 · Score: 2, Interesting
  
  Given that the SMP code in FBSD is nowhere near that of Solaris
  
  Perhaps you missed the fact that this platforms are being added in 5.0-RELEASE,
  a release who's primary intention is to turn FreeBSD into baby solaris with respect to multiple processors.
  
  ...and don't troll along about what FreeBSD should and should not be doing. See
  this post for reasoning behind additional platforms. By the way, code speaks louder than slashtrash comments, if you think FreeBSD should be doing something that it isn't, perhaps you should be submitting patches.
UltraSparc != Sparc64 by shrike · 2001-10-23 11:14 · Score: 2, Informative

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...
1. Re:UltraSparc != Sparc64 by kl76 · 2001-10-23 21:14 · Score: 2, Informative
  
  Just to clarify, "sparc64" is what FreeBSD and NetBSD call the UltraSPARC architecture; "SPARC64" is Fujitsu's 64-bit SPARC v9 implementation. sparc64 != SPARC64.
Re:*BSD is dying by duffbeer703 · 2001-10-24 06:24 · Score: 3, Informative

As a user of FreeBSD in a large enterprise environment, I cannot agree with you less.

Not only does FreeBSD power our enterprise servers and network archicecture, but it also runs many of our call center's agents pcs as well!

--
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
Re:why go FreeBSD ... by RLiegh · 2001-10-24 17:40 · 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...