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FreeBSD 5.3-BETA5 Available
Nirbo writes "FreeBSD 5.3-BETA5 is now available! Get it while it's hot! Here is the mailing list post. Remember folks, this is currently the last beta that will be released for 5.3, we're only a week from a Release Candidate, and two weeks from a release!"
This is the real FreeBSD arrogant ass in action. No wonder they lose people every day with people like Smorgrav.
Glass
Here's a Black Apology for you.
Well I sho is sorry to hear dat maam.
I haven't done any kernel work, and my kernel knowledge is limited to a Linux driver class and the new McKusick book. So take my comments with a grain of salt. But it seems to me that Linux tends to be very haphazard.
No, it isn't. Linux is the most technically advanced open source kernel available - it didn't become this way by haphazard development.
There doesn't seem to be much evolution towards better subsystems, but instead replacement with alternative subsystems. For example witness the recent VM wars.
You mean 3 years ago? What happened was that the virtual memory scanner in Linux caused behaviour to break down when running some workloads on large (16GB+) highmem (PAE - very nasty) systems. Considering the vm developers didn't have access to these sorts of systems, it is no great failing on their behalf. Once real people started using 2.4 on their real systems, feedback was gathered and it was decided to put in place a new virtual memory scanning policy that was shown to cope with such systems. It was a very successful move.
Also consider that FreeBSD only recently even got PAE support, and has lots of VM trouble on 4GB and larger systems, and has probably never even been run on a 16GB+ PAE system (and probably isn't capable to run on one).
FreeBSD 5 is going into beta in what I see as a very *haphazard* way. There are lots of known major instabilities, there have been memory and filesystem corruption problems, next to no benchmarks and performance comparisons. Performance comparisons that are performed are quickly shouted down, and nobody even tries to reproduce the shown problems ("oh, there is *no way* Linux could be beating FreeBSD at *anything*, so I won't even waste my time testing this").
It will be amusing to see what happens when FreeBSD 5 goes stable. No doubt there will be lots of people working on coming up with reasons why it isn't fair to compare it to Linux.
Fuck you, mods.