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Interview with Jay Michaelson of Wasabi Systems

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the getting-to-know dept.

Gentu writes "The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. OSNews talked to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson. Linux in the embedded market is also discussed."

5 of 116 comments (clear)

  1. funny by lingqi · · Score: 4, Interesting
    7. What new CPUs are you working on adding NetBSD support?
    Jay Michaelson: ... We also ported NetBSD to the Xilinx Virtex-II Pro, and the SuperH SH-5 last fall ...

    Virtex-II pro is an FPGA so you can't really "port to it" - though the catch is that they comes with IBM's powerPC cores embedded. Why would he mention that he ported to Virtex-II pro instead of just PowerPC architecture?

    and btw, it's kind of silly to name your company after horse-radish, especially done AFTER the budwiser commercials came out (the company was founded in 2000). Well, at least it's not named after certain rich person's (lack of) manhood, so I stay thankful for that...

    --

    My life in the land of the rising sun.

  2. Interview is (-1 Flaim bait) by satanami69 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Uh oh. Jay Michaelson goes on to quote the GPL "that the GPL requires hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of IP to be shared, and they don't like it. It's a real concern in embedded." I can hear zealots complaining that software needs to be free, etc.

    Honestly though, the BSD license does offer a great reward to users. Companies can offer back to the community and are given a choice. GPL take s the choice away from vendors. Although who knows what gets put into the code unless it's released to all.

    --
    I really hate Dan Patrick.
  3. Scalability by rf0 · · Score: 4, Interesting

    In the interview they said that NetBSD can scale but does anyone have a comparision between says the locks in the linux kernel and the NetBSD kernel? I'm just intrested in how high they can both scale. I know that Linux is now running upto 64 CPU's in the shape of the SGI Altix but I have no idea how far NetBSD goes

    Rus

    --
    Cheap UK and US VPS
    1. Re:Scalability by Arandir · · Score: 2, Interesting

      How many embedded systems do you know that require symmetrical multiprocessing? Seriously now. I'm certain there's a few, but if there are any that require 64 CPU's I would be extremely surprised. I would be mildly surprised if there were more than a dozen that needed 8.

      --
      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  4. Re:Well? by LizardKing · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Does NetBSD support multiple processors?

    Yes, for several years now. Initially it relied on one big kernel lock, just like pre 2.4 Linux did, but it's moving to finer grained locking. The great thing is NetBSD's dedication to portability, and it runs on MP i386, SPARC, Alpha, and Vax(!) systems that I'm aware of.

    For the lowdown, see: http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-smp/

    Chris