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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."
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.
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.
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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.
While Solaris can be downloaded for free, it cannot always be used for free. The Solaris Binary License has provisions that allow it for development use and educational use for free, but otherwise you've got to pay to play. No one seems to get that. Does Sun enforce those licenses? Not that I've ever heard, but it's still an issue of legality.
If you've got some old hardware, and you want to run some license-inencombered operating system, then the alternative operating systems are a great bet.
There a numerous other advantages as well, such as much more extended hardware support (Sun wants you to pay $400 for a FE card, where you can use a $10 off-the-shelf PCI card with FreeBSD, NetBSD, etc), access to the source code, perhaps a smaller footprint, access to security patches for applications that Sun might charge for (not all of Sun's patches are free).
While people shouldn't just abandon Solaris, I love it too, there are plenty of cases where the alternatives make more sense than Solaris.
...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.
I exactly known, what you mean about the ports system. FYI, you don't mean "the port system itself", you just have problems with installation of binary packages.
.tgz or .tbz - that's a bit confusing. You're right. It can be done better, just like the way Debian does that. Debian simply rocks when it comes to binary packages - and I am pretty happy, that it exists, so it showed the way in this area.
;). In fact, it can even be the basic package system on your Slack (and it is available from some time, so you don't have to create another Slackware-packaging-system). Oh, wel.
;)
;) Or, perhaps, noone likes to answer troll comments - but you've got a point with that packaging system, so that's why I bothered ;)
Of course, you can pkg_add http://URL, and it will automatically fetch dependent packages, but the problem is, you need to know the exact url. Package name, package version,
I suppose I will be doing some work in this area with NetBSD packages collection (pkgsrc), but that should be easily portable to FreeBSD and OpenBSD ports. The whole idea is, that if you generate an index file for all binary packages on the site. Information would include the description, requirements, size - pretty much everything found in +* files (+DESCR, +COMMENT, +PLIST and other) - perhaps I could use Berkeley DB format for it. Then, in an user-level utility, you just need to give one URL to fetch that description file (bzipped, of course). Then, such utility could work much like Debian's apt-get and apt-cache - a frontend to pkg_add and a quick way to browse all available, but uninstalled software. We'd have a friendly utility for new users for all BSDs.
Also, as pkgsrc is portable and there are already binary packages avialable for Linux (not to mention NetBSD, of course) from the latest branch of pkgsrc -- we'd just need to add that small utility to bootstrap binary kit for pkgsrc, and you'd have then binary pkgsrc available for your box -- pretty much for all Linux distributions. These are all cool projects, and they can give you perhaps much more, than some Linux distributions (especially those ones, who "lock" user in a maze of incompatible binary packages and their dependencies
And, perhaps, if FreeBSD Ports not impress you, when compared to Gentoo, perhaps you should try then NetBSD packages collection. Maybe the number of operating systems and platforms will somehow impress you, it impress me for sure. Of course, there are bigger and smaller problems, as they always are, in any opensource product, but perhaps with more users activley contributing to the project (just by testing the packages -- that's just using some of your CPU cycles on pkgsrc, instead SETI@Home
BSD? Dead? I don't think so. There's massive active development going on in all areas of each of the BSDs, there are thousands of lines of code shared among developers, lot of new ideas submited, lots of problems solved. There are a lot of companies and sites using it (among others, About.com, Yahoo!, distributed.net, Juniper, NASA)... Check uptime stats on Netcraft itself, FreeBSD rules in the top ten.
Its just perhaps BSD people are usually too busy doing their projects to comment here, so you can get a false impression
Have a nice day!