Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 5.2.1 On SPARC64
JigSaw writes "FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform. Tony Bourke tests FreeBSD 5.2.1 on his SPARC machine."
because as we all know *BSD is DYING
propz to GNAA!
*BSD is so DEAD, I managed to get both first and second post!
LORF, I love the Gay Nigger Association of America.
-JesuitX
THIRD POST
Yes folks, count with me
1 2 3! BSD IS DYING!
1 2 3! BSD IS DYING!
1 2 3! 3 TOP POSTS!
I claim this homo hat trick in the name of GNAA! I 3 timecop!
Jesus Christ, 4th GNAA POST in a fucking ROW! BSD IS DYING!
So guys, is it just me, or is it kind of strange that BSD also stands for "Blue Screen of Death"?
Just wondering how FreeBSD can call it a full Tier1 support when they dont support older platforms and no video support?
I'm currently running gentoo on my sunblade 100. Since both netbsd and FreeBSD doesnt support video, only serial connections. I had a hella of a time looking for another OS besides Solaris, and Gentoo was the most up2date one I found. SuSE/Redhat dropped support years ago.
I had to drop SuSE, and switch to Gentoo for a newer kernel and true framebuffer support on my Sunblade. Also the binary packages for the Sparc 2004 is done, so you can install a sparc 5/20 without compiling. (I was told sparc-2004 was done last week on #gentoo-sparc on freenode irc network, but have not confirmed it.) Going to put Gentoo on my Sparc 20.
Also, the article shows they tested the 2.4 linux kernel, would be nice to see how 2.6 on sparc performs. I havn't tried 2.6 yet, as its still development on sparc.
1. Install BSD
A few hours after a person or animal dies, the joints of the body stiffen and become locked in place. This stiffening is called rigor mortis. Depending on temperature and other conditions, rigor mortis lasts approximately 72 hours. The phenomenon is caused by the skeletal muscles partially contracting. The muscles are unable to relax, so the joints become fixed in place.
More specifically, what happens is that the membranes of muscle cells become more permeable to calcium ions. Living muscle cells expend energy to transport calcium ions to the outside of the cells. The calcium ions that flow into the muscle cells promote the cross-bridge attachment between actin and myosin, two types of fibers that work together in muscle contraction. The muscle fibers ratchet shorter and shorter until they are fully contracted or as long as the neurotransmitter acetylcholine and the energy molecule adenosine triphosphate (ATP) are present. However, muscles need ATP in order to release from a contracted state (it is used to pump the calcium out of the cells so the fibers can unlatch from each other). ATP reserves are quickly exhausted from the muscle contraction and other cellular processes. This means that the actin and myosin fibers will remain linked until the muscles themselves start to decompose.
Rigor mortis can be used to help estimate time of death. The onset of rigor mortis may range from 10 minutes to several hours, depending on factors including temperature (rapid cooling of a body can inhibit rigor mortis, but it occurs upon thawing). Maximum stiffness is reached around 12-24 hours post mortem. Facial muscles are affected first, with the rigor then spreading to other parts of the body. The joints are stiff for 1-3 days, but after this time general tissue decay and leaking of lysosomal intracellular digestive enzymes will cause the muscles to relax. It is interesting to note that meat is generally considered to be more tender if it is eaten after rigor mortis has passed.
The only sparc in BSDs future is the sparc that lights the funeral pyre.
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
that's right, ya ballbags!
Just, when i was installing it on my Pentium 200 MHz, 48MiB RAM, it never did end the installation because it was installing at rate 9 KB per second!!!.
Why 9 KiB/s?
I don't know why, but i did a # top and i did see that the CPU was 90% idle and 10% running of cpio, gzip and others programs.
Why 90% cpu-idle for the slower and slower installation?
I don't know why, i believe that FreeBSD's president is hurting us and he wants money with worse and worse code.
open4free
I currently run FreeBSD on x86, i'd run it on sparc64 except they don't support Ultra2's (darnit.)
Somebody mentioned the lack of video support, honestly, there is almost 0-market for a GUI on a FreeBSD/sparc64 machine. If someone wants to run FreeBSD on sparc64 hardware, it's most definitely for a server.
Just be happy, FreeBSD 5.2.x is progressing along nicely, and we're getting closer and closer to -STABLE with it.
One thing to remember when using FreeBSD, is that it's mainly a server OS; that can do userland too, but is primarily for servers.
Error 407 - No creative sig found
I put NetBSD on most of my Sparc hardware. Because then I can run and build from the same exact source tree of packages as I use on my Intel boxes. And run a kernel built from exactly the same source.
Which brings up a point: both NetBSD/Sparc and NetBSD/Sparc64 will run on an Ultra 1, which is a 64 bit machine. Why doesn't somebody install each NetBSD port on two seperate Ultra 1 machines. Then the benchmark comparision can be between the normal apps that build on both systems, running in parallel on two identical systems. Its exactly the same codebase except for the 32 or 64 bittedness.
SPARC machines were designed to run Solaris. Solaris is a fine operating system. Solaris can be downloaded for free for SPARC machines. Why would any sane person use anything else on such a machine?
As it seems, that 90% of the trolling today was sent as Anonymous Coward, perhaps disabling anonymous posting completly would make BSD section of slashdot a nice place to discuss again, just like it should be.
Perhaps, without all these troll posts, Slashdot forum could become a good way to exchange information about BSD vs Linux, or just about BSD in general. As you can see, in the quality discussion, that happened here -- perhaps some Sparc64 FreeBSD users will switch to Gentoo if they want video; perhaps some people trying to install Gentoo on displayless Sparcs will try BSD.
That was just 1 article and 3 comments, and it already helped a few people.
Perhaps, BSD people, who post here stories, could get together and send a petition in some form to Rob Malda, as there is not much sense in seiding him individual e-mails. The situation is not too good.
And, to the trolling crowd... well, in general, I really admire the way you're having fun - all that trolling folklore can be really much creative, and sometimes i ROTFLed watching your nonsense replies - all those penisbird ASCIIs, hidden links to goatse, "mod parent down, site is a goatse link" when the parent was 100% good URL - yea, that was trolling, but that was acceptable trolling, if you ask me (well, I like Monthy Python also, why shouldn't I like some of your posts). Anyway, you don't come up with anything fresh. All that "BSD is dying, you don't have to be Kreskin" - man, I've seen that many, many times. Why do you keep repeating this? It's not funny anymore, it's boring. Also, with some filtering it is very easy to cut it out. Another thing - perhaps if you'd spent some time on actually installing & using some of BSD systems a bit, you'd realize, that BSDs - as all operating systems - have their weak points. Perhaps moving the level of trolling frmo nonsense copy-paste to highly specialized flamewar could bring anything new to the table, because now you aren't creative anymore. And non-creative troll is a lame troll, if you ask me. So, I suggest, that you rather come up with something new, or copy-paste "BSD is dying" posts somewhere else - because continuing to do that doesn't impress me much, really.
Just wondering how FreeBSD can call it a full Tier1 support when they dont support older platforms [...]?
Admittedly the lack of SCSI on Ultra-1 and Ultra-2 boxes keeps it off older 64-bit systems for the most part.
and no video support
Are you up to date? The web page claims sunblade 100 fully supported.
...on my Ultra 5. I cringed thinking about loading Solaris on my Ultra 5 when I decided to use it as a syslog server. I looked around, and FreeBSD 5.2 was the latest and seemed to be the greatest for what I needed. Now I need an rsync server at a remote site and guess what I'm loading on the Ultra 10 allocated for that task? Yup, FreeBSD 5.2 - or maybe I'll splurge and download 5.2.1. Now if I could only install easily without using a serial connection.
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.
Here are the reasons, as I see them
You stoopid N00B!!
RTFM!! (Thats read the fucking manual). It states in there quite clearly that it only uses 10% of the processor because the other 90% is needed to create the occult background murmur during FreeBSD resurrection. You FUCKED IT ALL UP. Stay away from my OS, n00b.
I bet you didn't even draw the FUCKING PENTAGRAM IN ROOSTER BLOOD.
Lighten up. This is slashdot, not the "I BSD bulliten board".
You must be a real picnic at a party.
signatures for a petition to
cut the BSD trolls off slashdot.
Permanently.
The "BSD" section of slashdot should
be disabled, because this isn't a real
topic anymore.
We believe in one Demon,
the Beastie, the Almighty,
compiler of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.
We believe in one Operating System, *BSD,
the only Son of Beastie,
eternally coded in Berkeley,
Demon from Demon, Dark from Dark,
true Demon from true Demon,
coded, not made,
of one Being with the Beastie.
Through him all things were compiled.
For us and for our salvation
he came up from hell:
by the power of the University of California
he became incarnate from Berkeley,
and was made slashbot.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he died again
in accordance with the Documentation;
he descended into hell
and is seated at the right hand of the Beastie.
He will come again in glory to moderate the insightful and the flamebait,
and his kingdom will have no end.
We believe in the Demon, the Beastie, the giver of death,
who proceeds from the Beastie and Berkeley.
With the Beastie and the OS he is trolled and flamed.
He has spoken through the Slashdot Trolls.
We believe in one holy dead and dying Operating System.
We acknowledge one baptism in fire for the forgiveness of bugs.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the death of *BSD to come. Amen.
*BSD is dying
Hear recorded Slashdot headlines on your phone! New service beta testing. Just call (248) 434-5508
BitKeeper confirms, Linux is developed by idiots!
...because I only have Sun/Texas Instruments SPARC boxen, no Fujitsus around here I'm afraid.
Oh, I see, they mean SPARCv9. Why couldn't they say so? Given the number of manufacturers who make SPARC processing units it's a bit of a shame that many Open Source projects only claim to support the one manufacturer's chips.
BTW has anyone got any experiences of running this on TI UltraSPARC IV machines that they'd like to share?
Well bug reports anyhow.
CVS log for src/sys/sparc64/sparc64/uio_machdep.c
Revision 1.2 / (download) - annotate - [select for diffs], Sat Apr 3 09:16:26 2004 UTC (2 days, 4 hours ago) by alc
Branch: MAIN
CVS Tags: HEAD
Changes since 1.1: +1 -1 lines
Diff to previous 1.1 (colored)
In some cases, sf_buf_alloc() should sleep with pri PCATCH; in others, it
should not. Add a new parameter so that the caller can specify which is
the case.
Reported by: dillon
I'll go ahead and ask it here since it's mildly on-topic...
Has anyone ever gotten anything to install on a Sun Blade 1500 other than Solaris 8?
I have a brand new Blade1500 sitting next to me at work and it won't even run Solaris 9.
It's a total piece of crap -- Debian won't boot and I couldn't get NetBSD up either.
Sun really put out a piece of work when their own OS won't run on it...
thanks,
davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Wait a moment... rival distributions and lawsuits are a sign of failure. Guess linux is dying too. (SCO, 1 Million and 1 distros...) OK... I know, don't feed the trolls... But this one was amusingly bad.
Boys from the City. Not yet caught by the Whirlwind of Progress. Feed soda pop to the thirsty pigs.