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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.
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...).