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amd64 cross-world completed on FreeBSD

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the bsd-uber-alles dept.

BSD Forums writes "FreeBSD's Dag-Erling Smorgrav reports the successful cross-world build of the amd64 tree (A tinderbox is system designed to test builds and report failure. In the FreeBSD case, tinderboxes build world [the base system], GENERIC, and if applicable LINT kernels. Dag-Erling Smorgrav currently runs all the tinderboxes by cross-building from i386)."

31 comments

  1. amd64 support in -current by kernelistic · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's important to note that this anouncement only affects FreeBSD -current. -current also supports alpha, ia64 (Itanium2), pc98 and sparc64.

    The -stable branch currently only supports i386, pc98 and alpha. When the 5.x branch will be deemed to be stable, all of -current's architectures will get official ISO images and testing using a wider audience will be possible. At this point work on 6-current will begin.

    1. Re:amd64 support in -current by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Can't wait for 6-current. Talkin' about the final frontier!

    2. Re:amd64 support in -current by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0
      It is official; Netcraft now confirms : *BSD is dying

      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

    3. Re:amd64 support in -current by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Wouldn't it be a lot easier to just use Linux? Why reinvent the wheel?

    4. Re:amd64 support in -current by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It is official; Netcraft now confirms it: *BSD is dying

      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

  2. still tier two architecture by JDizzy · · Score: 2, Offtopic

    The ia64 is considered a tier 2 architecture, and as such isn't on the release engineering teams radar yet. Once the tool-chain is self-hosting, aka the ia64 can nativly build the entire world+GENERIC kernel, then it will be considered for a tier 1 migration. This tid-bit of info just means that the ia64 is built on a cross build (with i386 gcc probably). The next step is to take these bits, and install them on real ia64 hardware, and attempt building the tool chain there. A lot of this work hinges on the need to have gcc 3.2 working on ia64, and I hear that there is still a bunch of work to be done in that area before the compiler produces quality code. What would be nice is to import the NetBSD code to the AMD64 stuff, but we need to more unity in the -CURRENt FreeBSD source tree before adding yet another arch. Whats nice is that bus-dma will allow drivers for one arch to work in others with minimal fuss, in theory anyways. ;)

    --
    It isn't a lie if you belive it.
    1. Re:still tier two architecture by nitehorse · · Score: 2

      Was your consistent use of 'ia64' a typo, and you really meant AMD64?

      You do know that IA64 and AMD64 are pretty much completely incompatible, right? The only thing that they share is that they both execute x86 code, but the AMD64 does a much better job at it.

    2. Re:still tier two architecture by JDizzy · · Score: 1

      not a typo, and I pointed that out at the end with the amd64 comment.

      --
      It isn't a lie if you belive it.
    3. Re:still tier two architecture by evilviper · · Score: 2
      Was your consistent use of 'ia64' a typo, and you really meant AMD64?

      I dare say not... x86-64 (AMD) is actually a Tier 3 platform.

      If I was you, I would suggest disrgarding the parent post in it's entirety... Although he is talking about ia64 (and doesn't mention why), he throws in bits like: This tid-bit of info just means that the ia64 is built on a cross build , which is genuinely, completely, incorrect, any-way you look at it.
      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
  3. For a bit more information by edhall · · Score: 4, Informative
    Here is a commit message, which lists what is and isn't working yet. There are still some loose ends (as the message states), but things appear to be coming along quickly.
    -Ed
  4. FreeBSD portability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Please forgive my ignorance, but does FreeBSD have a bus/architecture independant driver model similar to the one found in NetBSD? I hear that such a gerneric/"object oriented" driver model greatly eases the porting process from one architecture to another. Does FreeBSD have such a thing, or does it have separate drivers for each different bus or architecture?

    I was just reading the following page and began to wonder about this:

    http://www.netbsd.org/Goals/system.html

    I would be greatful for any information you folks could give me.

    1. Re:FreeBSD portability by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      www.freebsd.org/projects/busdma

      FreeBSD has been working on alpha, sparc64, ia64, powerpc, mips, s390, arm, and amd64 ports for a while and they've grabbed a little NetBSD code along the way to improve driver portability (adding in their own contributions as well) while NetBSD has grabbed FreeBSD's kqueue code and other goodies. Read the release notes for the various architectures to get a progress report. 5.x branch is the one that supports much more architectures and what not.

    2. Re:FreeBSD portability by DarkHelmet433 · · Score: 1

      Yes. FreeBSD's driver configuration and stacking model goes beyond what NetBSD's does. While FreeBSD picked up bus_space and busdma from NetBSD, it has its own configuration and driver interface (dubbed 'newbus'). It is tree structured, and the bus layer at each node controls device identification and runs the 'auction' of an identified device to all the possible drivers. The pci bus stack happily runs under acpi enumeration or via direct configuration registers - the drivers themselves have no knowledge of where they are. For all they know, they could be on an emulated pci bus on the wrong side of a very creative usb bridge. :) All the driver cares about is 'give me my resources'.

      A light overview is here (The article has some inaccuracies though, new-bus was designed by Doug Rabson, not obtained from NetBSD).

      If you dont have a FreeBSD system, you can follow the cross references here and here.

  5. Re: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Thanks :)

  6. Re:Developer lashes out: What Killed FreeBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Mod Slashdot down: -6 Pathetic Linux Zealots who have trouble with facts and can't even maintain their buggy web site.

  7. Re:Oh piss off and die by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    You probably don't know Linux much less *BSD.

  8. Oh yes I do. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Maybe we discuss Windows at my local LUG? Noooo.

    We also don't discuss *BSD - that's for the widows group that follows.

    1. Re:Oh yes I do. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      that was fucking funny, even if not strictly original.

  9. Three-peat! by usotsuki · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    One, two, THREE copies of this troll!

    There ought to be a filter on /. that bans posting of messages which already exist on the same topic, determined by comparison against existing threads. Or at least use an heuristic and block just the "BSD is dying/dead" trolls *sigh*

    And for an on-topic: Here's to FreeBSD on Opteron!!! *clink*

    -uso.

    --
    Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
  10. Re: by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Sweet, thanks.