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NetBSD Ported to Motorola MVME PowerPC Boards
hubertf writes: "NetBSD/mvmeppc is a new port of NetBSD to the Motorola MVME PowerPC Single Board Computers.
This was made possible through a donation by Gan Starling of two (plus one loaner) MVME160x boards so that a porting effort could be made.
Due to NetBSD's highly portable architecture, the operating system was
up and running multi-user after just two weeks worth of part-time effort.
A NetBSD/mvmeppc specific
mailing list
has been set up for people to
discuss any issues with running NetBSD on their MVME PowerPC boards,
and a snapshot of NetBSD/mvmeppc
is also available for anyone wishing to experiment with the new port.
Steve Woodford
is the NetBSD/mvmeppc port maintainer."
Maybe I am just being a troll, but why put in the effort to port BSD to PPC when Apple has provided a perfectically good (yes i know not free) distro to the PPC already, with optimizations. It seems to me that alot of work in the open source community is wasted in redundant projects. Stig.
Yawn.
Yet another crippling 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.
*BSD is dying
But Darwin is under the APSL, whereas NetBSD is under the far less restrictive NetBSD licence.
If I were choosing between the 2, I'd pick NetBSD. Less legaleeeeeeeze to figure out the license.
So it depends on how free you want your Free to be FREE.
(and, we can bring in some GPL advocates to point out that neither choice is fREEeeeeeeee. Weeeeeeee!!!!)
Why bother? Moto is so behind the times. Where's the PPC System-on-a-chip? Where's the (affordable) PPC ATX-compatible motherboard? Why isn't Moto furoiusly scheduling embedded processor seminars (the way Microchip has done for years) pushing the PPC? Why isn't Moto HOSTING a Darwin OS or application site? Eh...they've probably got a BBS you can dial-up.
Look at the TIVO: great embedded design with a PPC that runs Linux. The processor is not clocked at gigahertzes (it's something like 50Mhz), doesn't have a gigabytes of memory (32MB or something), and stores video on ordinary IDE drives (well, slow, low-power IDE drives are preferred).
Lesson to be learned here.
P.S. Intel isn't much better. If it wasn't for the Microsoft monopoly, Intel would be probably be peddling a 16+24 bit architecture (16 bit addressing with 24 bit wide segment registers).