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NetBSD Now Supports Dual Power PC Processors
djcdplaya writes: "DaemonNews is reporting that the good guys over at NetBSD have gotten dual PowerPC processors working on dual-G4 Apples. The NetBSD mailing can be found here."
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I had read that BSD had lost funding and was dying. Is this true? I didn't think we'd hear any more news from them.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent 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 fittingly 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. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
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 dilettante 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.
Apple Zealot Alarm. All Points Bulletin.
You stupid zealot man-bitch. The only reason I might halfway believe your lying bullshit zealot plug for OS -SHIT X is that Motorola PPCs are so fucking slow they need a custom JVM. I would buy OS X to support Unix on the desktop, but dipshit Apple is still fucking off with gay lame shit mongoloid-tard PPCs. And fuck Altivec, you fucking zealots - check out the SPEC CPU2000 int and fp for the MOT-G4 - oh, wait, pussy Apple wont even publish them! HAHAHA. I have a G4. It was given to me for free. I gave it back to the owner because it sucked. Apple's stupid shit user base is still 80% on native classic. OS 9,8,7 whatever you want to call it is such fucking shit it bends the fabric of space and time. Apple's Xserve is a piece of shit, half the speed of a P4, twice the price, no ECC or SCSI. Dell 1650 and 2650 blow the doors of that shit. Even a P3-1400/512 beats a G4-1000. Look it up slut. Its in the SPEC marks, its on Digital Video Editing's site. Like Adobe says, Evidence that APPLE sucks balls is "everywhere you look." And here it is, the Apple's losing HORRIBLY to the PC in benchmarks where AltiVec is supposed to save the day
And here we go again, a fucking Dual MAC G4-1000 getting its fucking ass kicked hard by a single Dell P4 2.5GHz. Where your Altivec now, fuckheads?
An easy way to see if people say the truth or not when they speak about the respective speeds of their CPUs. I like to see what people say, and compare that to SPECCPU2000 results. The differences are sometimes very surprising. Well, are they so surprising? Let's have a look at the 3 major "vendors" of CPUs systems, Intel, AMD and... Apple (because Motorola doesn't seem to gloat about the performance on the PowerPC G4, only Apple does).
AMD has recently released their new Athlon XP 2200+. Is it really faster than a 2200 MHz CPU? On integer stuff, the AthlonXP is good for 738 points. The funny thing is, a Pentium4 at a mere 2GHz scores the same 738 points. Oh, yes, I know, that's because AMD has a superior floating-point performance. Sure. CFP2000, AthlonXP goes as high as 624 points. And the poor little Pentium4 at 2GHz with its slow FPU only gets 744 points. Please read that again. So, how much floating-point power is there in an Athlon XP 2200+ running at 1800 MHz? Well, about as much as in a Pentium4 running at 1600MHz. Man I wouldn't want to have just read that if I was an AMD zealot, that's gotta hurt.
Don't worry, my AMD friend, your CPU performs more than adequately. Wait until I talk about the "super-computer" G4 that is used by Apple.
G4 1000MHz: 306 points in integer. Just like a PIII at 667MHz. But, as you all know, The G4 is extremely good in floating point, capable of doing billion operations per second. G4 1000 MHz: 187 point in floating point. That's the level of a PIII at 500MHz. Oh my God, if I overclock three-year-old my dual-PIII from 450 to 504 MHz (where it is perfectly stable), I get as much FPU power as a top-of-the-line Mac. I don't know if I should laugh or cry. I just feel sad for all the people who fall in for Apple's propaganda. If a Mac can do all that a "Wintel" PC can do (yeah, right), well, it'll be doing it much much much much slower.
A few comments before people flame me. Or maybe a few comments that'll cause people to flame me...
I picked the baseline results over the peak results. Because I only had baseline results for the G4, and because I think that they are more realistic to show real-world speed: if you're a developer, just use the same compiler flags as Intel, Dell or AMD used, they are published in the benchmark report.
The fact that the G4 benchmarks come from a magazine and are not official results. I would normally have put a disclaimer about that. Well, if you're not happy about the results, please go and put some pressure on Apple to publish official results. I monitor the SPEC results on a regular basis, and I'll be more than happy to take any official results into account.
Some zealots will say that the G4 can do better than that because gcc doesn't use Altivec. Well, now, it's not my fault if you don't have a decent compiler, is it? Do you think that someone with a mind would go spend some time hand-optimizing his/her code in assembly for a CPU that only has a few percent of market share? Imagine a team of 30 engineers trying to release an application simultaneously for Windows and MacOS. 28 engineers write the portable core of the application (and they all develop on Windows with Visual C++ and Purify), 1 engineer is responsible for the Windows adaptation layer and Windows optimization (like, tweak the compile flags for the intel compiler), 1 engineer is responsible for the MacOS adaptation layer, MacOS-specific issues and MacOS optimization (like, deal with a compiler that doesn't support the Visual C++ extensions, deal with a CPU that orders bytes differently, deal with an OS that'll do some things differently, like not have drive letters, use slashes instead of backslashes as a file separator, not support MDI, put the menubar at that top of the screen, and when there's a little bit of time left, re-write in assembly a routine that the original programmer will modify so much before the release date that it'll have to be re-written in assembly 5 times in the coming year). I wouldn't want to be the MacOS guy.
Oh yeah, I've also read that running SPEC benchmarks for PowerPC was unfair because the benchmarks are x86-specific. Well, I guess that the same benchmarks are also unfair for HP-PA CPUs, Itaniums, Sparcs, MIPS, Alphas, POWER... which all manage to beat the G4. The only reason why they're "unfair" for PowerPC is that those benchmarks are written in C, C++ and Fortran, and that the measure as much the compiler as the CPU. Got a sucky compiler? You'll get bad SPEC results. Guess what? Got a sucky compiler? You'll get bad results on everything but the 3 routines that Apple will optimize by hand to make Altivec shine...
So, I guess that the only CPUs worth considering are Intel's. The Pentium4 rocks (I'm dreaming of buying a dual-Xeon 2200 MHz, but I'm not sure I want to afford the $2000 that such a beast costs). Itanium looks very promising, especially with an incredible FPU power (if you want numbers, well, how about 645 points on last year's hardware?).
Not a single one. What do sites like CNN and Google use? Not BSDead, that's for sure.
I think it would be the best way to mourn.
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
It smells like something's dead.
I think it should be small since BSD was pretty frail anyway.
You are a fag. I had an eggdrop bot on linux with an uptime of over 1 year. Its not that fascinating or hard to do. And besides rebuilding the kernel, everything on a running system can be replaced if need be, and if you are crafty, you can even rmmod / insmod modules you fuck with! Whoa! Look at that!
Power failure? How about a UPS. Fires? I've seen just about all the fires I have ever heard about on the fucking news, never in person. Mice chewing wires? What the fuck are you talking about? I heard this bullshit about fucking animals eating wires and I am inclined to believe its urban legend when it comes to mice chewing being a factor ni downtime. I know mice chew on fucking wires, but when was the last time you went to a website after its been down for a day and said MICE CHEWED US INTO DOWNTIME! Hard drive failure? SCSI + Hot swappable SAFTE Enclosure/backplane means hotswappable cures for the common HDD failure. Software or hardware raid.
So Mr Penis Lips? Can you get the faggoty "5 9's" (its such a marketing whore term) for years on end with a real unix in a datacenter. I say hell yes.
I even see Hot Pluggable CPU suport in Linux these days, and I know HPPA machines had addable memory banks.
So, urine licker. Piss off!
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent 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 fittingly 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. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
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 dilettante 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 dying