FreeBSD Status Report March-April 2004

Anonymous Coward writes "The FreeBSD project has posted a new status report for March and April of 2004. Work continues on locking down the network stack, ACPI made more great strides, an ARM port appeared in the tree, and the FreeBSD 4.10 release cycle wrapped up."

Comments

Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report..

[apocamok]

It's probably like the guy from Fight Club, he's working on Linux during the day, and unconsciously committing FreeBSD patches during the night.

Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report..

[coolfruit]

Well, These are two different people. Alan L. Cox is a FreeBSD commiter. Here is his homepage : http://www.cs.rice.edu/~alc/

Re:Misplaced effort

[shlong]

Most of the bugs in your list are marked closed, and one is for a package that has nothing to do with disks or the OS. That leaves two entries that are relevant. Guessing the geometry is a lot harder than it sounds, especially if you already installed Windows or another boot loader and it guessed the geometry differently (as is the case with at least one of the entries in your list). This is a common problem in Linux, too. Windows is 'immune' to it because it'll choose whatever geometry it wants and leave any previously installed OS's stranded.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:PF and ALTQ

[agent dero]

Flip a coin, it doesn't really matter which you choose:

FreeBSD is something i'd put on a critical nfs/http/ftp server or something

OpenBSD is something I'd put on a Pentium 200Mhz box to keep that nfs/http/ftp box safe.

Nothing prevents you from doing either one with either operating system. It's just about preference ;)

Re:PF and ALTQ

[ArbitraryConstant]

OpenBSD will always have the most up to date PF stuff.

What you'll notice with OpenBSD is that you're discouraged from messing with the kernel at all, and ports work better. Theoretically, you may notice it's slower, and you'll probably notice that the software isn't as up to date. Debian-stable should also be in consideration, depending on your needs, but its firewalling capabilities are well behind FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

You're giving something up if you commit to anything period. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have dramatically disjoint sets of stuff they're good at. I've never seen an OS good enough at everything (or even most things) to make it worth commiting to. Not if you can deal with multiple OSes on a day to day basis.

Re:One true ports system?

[harikiri]

I think the various ports systems emerged as a result of freebsd only supporting x86 (back in the day), and netbsd having a multi-architecture system (thus more effort was required to 'port' something to each arch, and there were fewer ports). Then OpenBSD came along, and imported in the FreeBSD ports system initially, and went on from there.

The reason why FreeBSD's port system has grown so quickly is probably because there's only been one architecture they had to 'port' applications across to. It would be slowed down if they had to unify the ports system to support not only multi-platform architectures, but also the differences between the kernels for each BSD project.

However, this reminded me of this. NetBSD's package collection actually has released their pkgsrc collection to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

dead trees!

[MavEtJu]

Book: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

I know a birthday present for this year!