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OS News Interview with Robert Watson
An Anonymous Coward writes: "OS News
is carrying an interview with Robert Watson about FreeBSD 4.5,
due out almost immediately, and FreeBSD 5.0, due out later this
year. He talks a little about the related kernel development
work between Linux and FreeBSD, including kernel preemption.
Apparently he even reads the linux-kernel mailing list, although he
complained about the volume."
Imagine
John Lennon
Imagine there's no heaven
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today...
Imagine there's no countries
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religon too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace...
Imagine no possesions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
In a brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world...
You may say i'm a dreamer
But i'm not the only one
I hope some day you'll join us
And the world will be as one
Oops. Sorry!
I got carried away after the "Imagine" friendly SGi thread!
Perhaps planning upon (and starting in parallel) a 3.x series with major changes is the way to go.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
I am a long time Linux/RedHat user. I definitely plan on trying out FreeBSD 4.5 and 5.0.
I believe 5.0 will bring FreeBSD's kernel up to rough parity with the Linux kernel. FreeBSD's KSE and Security infrastructure will definitely be ahead of Linux equivalents. Kqueue is already ahead of linux async IO. I'd like to find out how far
and how good FreeBSD's kernel module system works.
But as I've said before fine grained locking is HARD. It'll take some time to settle out.
Also, from the interview, I didn't quite understand his use of the term "Preemptable Kernel". On one had he said they are adding more scheduling points in the code. But that isn't strictly a "preemptable kernel" ala Robert Love's work in the Linux kernel.
I have also heard that FreeBSD is going to integrate the NetBSD init dependency rc system. Which, depending on how you look at it, is catching up to what SysV init does, or accomplishing the intention of Sysv init in a better way. Does anyone here know if FreeBSD is committed to adopting NetBSD's rc system by some specified release? 4.5? 5.0?
FreeBSD/Linux cross polination will be interesting.
-- I am not a fanatic, I am a true believer.
If it only were possible to have both the advantages of TrustedBSD and OpenBSD... To bad they are, at this point, mutually exclusive. I hope the Open guys find the time to integrate some of TrustedBSDs features - of course after a thorough auditing :)
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Hey all,
It is nice to hear him talking about a preemptible kernel, as it will seriously help on older machines, (where it already runs well.)
I can't seem to find any info on pcmcia/pccard development though. I read somewhere that they were working on expanding the support for cardbus cards...
Unfortunately I'm stuck using a cardbus card (till I come up with more moola...) and FreeBSD doesn't have any way to handle it. Pretty standard realtek 8139 card too. Damn!
So I am using Debian. Not ideal but it'll play. If anyone out there has info on the freeBSD networking progress in this area, I would love to hear it.
Regardless, I'm sure that lots of us out here are eager to see 5.0, and will welcome 4.5 happily. Good work- keep it up!
Cuchullain
"If sharing a thing in no way diminishes it, it is not rightly owned if it is not shared." -St. Augustine
FreeBSD 5.0 supports cardbus, it just wasn't
one of his favorite features, apparently.
Set your BIOS to PCMCIA to 16bit instead of 32bit and your card will work just fine, the performace penalty is irrelevant; unless you got a gigabit card. This is because the packages that can be send through the TP cable is much lower than the rate of which the data can be supplied through the 16bit PCMCIA mode.
The only time you really ``need 32bit PCMCIA is when you got a SCSI or FireWire card, for networking the type of mode is to a large extent irrelevant.
Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!
Yet another crppling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently 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 the 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, having lost 93% of its core developers.
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 steadily 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.
Fact: *BSD is dead