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October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has posted the 2003 FreeBSD year-end edition status report. He says many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including SGI XFS port, MIPS, PowerPC on PPCBug-based embedded boards, and networking locking and multithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004."
NTFS is not GPL, but Linux can have it.... the implementation of XFS in Linux is GPL, but there's really nothing stopping someone from implementing it the spec themselves.
And then I suppose OSX could have it, too...
As opposed to any license the author cheeses, which makes no sense whatsoever.
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Apple has a lot of local changes that likely will not be incorporated back to FreeBSD, similarly to the local changes they have in GCC.
I think the primary reason there was more contributing back in the KHTML/Safari case was that there is a lot of user-visible improvement to be done there that everyone can agree on. Apple's focus in the lower-level parts of the system is often different enough from other projects that they aren't applicable directly.
Open source projects (especially the BSDs) have a bit more of a perfectionist "find a good solution before doing anything" mentality compared to proprietary software, where it's more often "we want feature X, make it work somehow".
Actually sometimes I think (feel fee to disagree) Linux has a sort of "lets do it somehow right away and then improve it" mentality, i.e. more by evolution than by design, which also gives good functional results but less consistency.
getting features hacked in as quickly as possible: linux
ridiculous stability as priority: freebsd
As far as platform support, freebsd has never been one to have much outside of x86 and alpha.. This is all new in 5.x.. If you want broad platform support, I'd use NetBSD.
As for your response to networking locking.. It has nothing to do with NFS and everything to do with Giant (the giant mutex that exists in the kernel). FreeBSD 5.x is largely an attempt to break away from this giant lock.
As for multithreading, both linux and freebsd have had it for ages. And it hasn't been that great in either one of them up until KSEs in FreeBSD 5.x and the revamped threading in Linux 2.6. FreeBSD had very good userland threading performance for processes needing to use threads on a single processor, but no native SMP threading support outside of using Linux's threading library (clone()).
As for PAE, correct me if I"m wrong, but it has NOT been several years. PAE, officially AFAIK, is still relatively new to Linux as well.
Insightful?
What idiot modded this up.
well.. here is the trail of logic for the "BSD is dying" troll: BSD is dying -> major computer manufacturer like Apple uses BSD?? -> Apple is dying Then again, I'm not inclined to refer to Apple as a major computer manufacturer (with about 5% of the world personal computer market). Then again, the world computer market is farly big.. so 5% isn't really that shabby.
Anyway, I use FreeBSD. I figure it will maybe change into something else.. but it won't die. Also, I don't see how Apple could hinder the growth of BSD. Also, scroll to the bottom of this page to see where Apple at least implies that they make most, if not all, of their modifications available to the community. That is a pretty good contribution. Yes, it would be nice if they just ported their windowing system to FreeBSD.. but you can't really expect that from them.
p
I agree that they can have it BSD licensed no problems if they program it from scratch, but somehow referring to it as the "SGI XFS port" sounds like they're taking the existing GPL implementation and porting it. My guess is it'll be like the ext2fs parts, GPL code on BSD.