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A Comparison of Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD Kernel
v1x writes "An article at OpenSolaris examines three of the basic subsystems of the kernel and compares implementation between Solaris 10, Linux 2.6, and FreeBSD 5.3.
From the article: 'Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux are obviously benefiting from each other. With Solaris going open source, I expect this to continue at a faster rate. My impression is that change is most rapid in Linux. The benefits of this are that new technology has a quick incorporation into the system.'"
If only they could compare the NT kernel along with them
*sigh*
perpetually dwelling in the -1 pits
n/t
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
At this point, in order to see the kernel, you have to sign off on MS's shared source license. By doing that, anybody in the OSS world who signs, is then at risk of being at the receiving end of a MS lawsuit. It would be just as bad as signing off on a SCO license.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
I can't get my printer or digital camera to work with any of them. Believe, I've tried....
Since Solaris has DTrace (and FreeBSD will have it soon as well), wouldn't they automatically be better than the Linux kernel? With the design of the Linux kernel (macrokernel instead of microkernel) it would seem to me that porting something like DTrace to Linux would be impossible. Without features like this, I don't see how Linux could compare in the enterprise.
And let the flamefest begin...
Cheers,
RoadkillBunny
" A Comparison of Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD Kernel"
One is crunchy, the other's chewy, and the last is malt flavoured.
Solaris 10, Linux 2.6, and FreeBSD 5.3... all have strengths, weaknesses, features, and deficiencies... so why hasn't the OSI succeeded in the cross-pollination of these three great OS's? If they're really going to benefit from each other, why not get some linux kernels with SMF or better SMP out there? When will apt finally replace /usr/ports in FreeBSD? And when will Soalris' TCP stack not suck by implementing code from Linux or BSD? I hug all three of these OS's on a daily basis, but if open source is really working why can't we seem to make an OS out of these three that flat out rocks?
Does anybody know why ReiserFS 3 hasn't been ported to any of the BSDs yet? ReiserFS 4 looks as though it's pretty revolutionary, if distributions settle on that as a default, I can see that giving quite an advantage to Linux compared with the other kernels.
I noticed that the article didn't mention LUFS. This alone allows for tremenduous possibilities, not least of which is rapid development of filesystems. Do any other systems (besides GNU HURD) have userspace filesystems?
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
The article was a little bit short and without sufficient substance to be noteworthy on slashdot, I think.
For every problem, there is at least one solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.
Solaris provides statbility, reliability and enterprise features. It's a bit lacking in the usability arena, such as plugging USB and firewire devices.
Linux is a stinking piece of shit. One minute it crashes, the other it needs to be recompiled for various security and stability patches. It has much wider support for PC hardware than Solaris, although the drivers are unprofessional and often cause unidentified problems, such as system reboots.
BSD is as good as dead, but in its Apple reincarnation, it's quite decent because it bundled with a nice GUI and things just tend to work in general.
A Comparison of Solaris, Linux, and FreeBSD Kernels
by Max Bruning
October 14, 2005
I spend most of my time teaching classes on Solaris internals, device drivers, and kernel crash dump analysis and debugging. When explaining to classes how various subsystems are implemented in Solaris, students often ask, "How does it work in Linux?" or, "In FreeBSD, it works like this, how about Solaris?" This article examines three of the basic subsystems of the kernel and compares implementation between Solaris 10, Linux 2.6, and FreeBSD 5.3.
The three subsystems examined are scheduling, memory management, and file system architecture. I chose these subsystems because they are common to any operating system (not just Unix and Unix-like systems), and they tend to be the most well-understood components of the operating system.
This article does not go into in-depth details on any of the subsystems described. For that, refer to the source code, various websites, and books on the subject. For specific books, see:
* Solaris Internals: Core Kernel Architecture by McDougall and Mauro (visit Solaris Internals)
* The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System by McKusick and Neville-Neil (visit The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System)
* Linux Kernel Development by Love (visit Linux Kernel Development, 2nd Edition) and Understanding the Linux Kernel by Bovet and Cesati (visit Understanding the Linux Kernel, 2nd Edition)
If you search the Web for Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris comparisons, most of the hits discuss old (in some cases, Solaris 2.5, Linux 2.2, etc.) versions of the OSes. Many of the "facts" are incorrect for the newest releases, and some were incorrect for the releases they intended to describe. Of course, most of them also make value judgments on the merits of the OSes in question, and there is little information comparing the kernels themselves. The following sites seem more or less up to date:
* "Solaris Vs. Linux" is pretty one-sided for Solaris 10 over Linux.
* "Comparing MySQL Performance" on Solaris 10, Linux, FreeBSD, and others.
* "Fast Track to Solaris 10 Adoption" has some comparisons between Linux and Solaris.
* "Solaris 10 Heads for Linux Territory" is not really a comparison, but reviews Solaris 10.
One of the more interesting aspects of the three OSes is the amount of similarities between them. Once you get past the different naming conventions, each OS takes fairly similar paths toward implementing the different concepts. Each OS supports time-shared scheduling of threads, demand paging with a not-recently-used page replacement algorithm, and a virtual file system layer to allow the implementation of different file system architectures. Ideas that originate in one OS often find their way into others. For instance, Linux also uses the concepts behind Solaris's slab memory allocator. Much of the terminology seen in the FreeBSD source is also present in Solaris. With Sun's move to open source Solaris, I expect to see much more cross-fertilization of features. Currently, the LXR project provides a source cross-reference browser for FreeBSD, Linux, and other Unix-related OSes, available at fxr.watson.org. It would be great to see OpenSolaris source added to that site.
Scheduling and Schedulers
The basic unit of scheduling in Solaris is the kthread_t; in FreeBSD, the thread; and in Linux, the task_struct. Solaris represents each process as a proc_t, and each thread within the process has a kthread_t. Linux represents processes (and threads) by task_struct structures. A single-threaded process in Linux has a single task_struct. A single-threaded process in Solaris has a proc_t, a single kthread_t, and a klwp_t. The klwp_t provides a save area for threads switching between user and kernel modes. A single-thre
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
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 the Amazing 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: FreeBSD is dying
Interesting comparison between the Linux and Solaris kernels from someone who used to work SunSoft in the kernel group.
http://www.ultralinux.org/faq.html#q_1_15
While not entirely equivalent, kprobes do give you an excellent way to examine and monitor the current system state.
However, the quality of a kernel is not automatically improved by the inclusion of DTrace. Not to disparage Solaris and FreeBSD, but DTrace is primarily for kernel developers and sysadmins. The common user and app developer have little use for either DTrace or kprobes.
This seems to be just another thinly-veiled attempt by Linux fanboys to put it in the same category as BSD and other commercial-grade operating systems. Its a shame the slashdot editors greenlighted such gratuitous misinformation.
How about data from this century?
They wanted to test a real OS, one that can scale to more than 2 processors.
For hyperthreaded CPUs, FreeBSD has a mechanism to help keep threads on the same CPU node (though possibly a different hyperthread). Solaris has a similar mechanism, but it is under control of the user and application, and is not restricted to hyperthreads (called "processor sets" in Solaris and "processor groups" in FreeBSD).
I am positive that the 2.6 kernel understands hyperthreading and does something similar to FreeBSD. Why wasn't that mentioned? Did the author not know that?
Overall through, it was interesting. I'd read it as a longer series, if they had one. This is an area that I'm interested in. I read kernel-traffic, and subscribe to LWN (you should to!) almost entirely to read the kernel page. I've learned so much about operating systems and computers from reading about the improvements in the Linux kernel, why the old version wasn't good enough, etc. While I no longer use Linux since I got my Mac (OS X fills all my needs), I continue to learn a large amount about computer architecture and operating system concepts from it.
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Plan 9 had userspace filesystems. Moreover, it encouraged services to export control interfaces as filesystems -- so you could mount a service and then configure it using open(), read() and write().
Have a look at the Plan 9 wiki. You can even run it inside vmware or Xen.
Anyone know if FreeBSD is still using the big lock for SMP?
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
ext2 Extent-based file system
goatseFS gaping ass fuck based file system
afs AFS client support for remote file sharing
As most of us know, goatseFS is NOT a filesystem.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Thats completely twisting the articles wording around. What gives; pay attention when you read things. He was comparing what happened, assuming a failure had already happened, from a developing perspective. From my non-biased eyes, I could see that he was trying not to flame differences, but to instead show similarities, to show how they each approach things with a different overall goal in mind.
I gathered from it that; linux wants speed and compatability (x86 oriented goal), solaris wants customizeability and reliability (speed and compatability arent an issue if you make your own souped up hardware), and BSD is somewhere in between (???).
1. The SELinux kernel wasn't mentioned; it's security model is different, perhaps better in the final analysis than OpenSolaris.
2. The concept of Solaris containers is nearly science fiction. Building them and then watching them through dtrace is a work of art, as in the Sistine Chapel. LVM is a different school of thought that gets to a similar conclusion; this all skewed by the beauties of VMWare and multiple instance/clustering management possibilities.
3. The licenses-- very important differences in licenses-- are glossed==> ignored. There's all that messy intermingling of licensing trivia that's somehow an invisible characteristic of all of this. Fooey.
4. While Sun can speak anytime Sun wants, at least there were other citations mentioned early. This is Sun propaganda. Remember that. Well thought out propaganda, but propaganda, not a third party examination of the facts and implications.
5. There are other *nixes missing. Consider that real-time OS and embedded OS considerations are real, and while BSD and Linux has made progress there, Solaris is essentially missing, unless you consider weird programming profiles still based on non-Solaris OS.
These are just the extemporaneous thoughts. Take this article with a grain of salt, although it's not bad for a vendor-hosted view.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
I know plenty about ReiserFS. Had you read my post you would have understood that the problem is not with the concepts and algorithms of ReiserFS. The problems are not with the idea nor the Linux implementation, but instead with trying to tack the Linux implementation onto the FreeBSD kernel.
You cannot take code from two radically different projects, stick them together as is being proposed by others, and then have it magically work. You could run into issues with the FreeBSD file buffering subsystem, for instance. Code that may work perfectly under Linux may very well fail under FreeBSD. And you can't have filesystems failing.
It's a problem of merging two distinct and different codebases, not a problem with ReiserFS itself.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
There was no mention of XFS or JFS for Linux. Indeed, for certain server applications those filesystems prove to be very effective.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
ones in software the resignatiol&n
Moderators:
Before moderating CyricZ's posts, please take the time to view his posting history.
He posts a LOT and only makes stupid and/or overly obvious points, and he often mis-represents people's comments when replying.
Basically, he is full of himself, and reviewing a few of his posts reveals him.
Read this comment for more information.
Indeed, the professionalism of the Solaris and FreeBSD developers can serve as a model for the entire open source community. Now, it's not surprising that the Solaris developers project a very professional image, considering their business roots. Many of the FreeBSD developers are professional consultants, who know how to properly deal with clients.
Indeed, the instance of the KOffice developer who went around publically insulting a long time KDE and KOffice user is a perfect example of the sort of unprofessional behaviour that should be avoided.
One thing you do not see from the Solaris and FreeBSD developers is insults directed at their users, clients and customers. There may be internal squabbling between the developers, but as true professionals they will keep this between themselves.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
he claims that due to it's abstraction Solaris should be easier to port then Linux.
if so why does Solaris only run on 2 CPU types (x86 and Sparc) while Linux runs on far more (somewhere around 20 IIRC, Debian supports over 11)
Since they wrote the linux kernel, SCO engineers had a lot of skill and foresight to create such a great operating system.
Don't say it isn't true - or our lawyers will be calling.
The article is purely technical, and does not focus on topics (like licensing) that often lead to flamewars and other disagreement. Indeed, it is written in such a way that only the technical issues are discussed, rather than ideological issues.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
"As most of us know, goatseFS is NOT a filesystem."
GoatseFS is sort of the Roach Motel(TM) of filesystems. Your data checks in, and no one wants it back.
I fucked your mother and fisted your sister
It mainly has to do with historic reasons. Until a few months ago, Solaris was a proprietary, closed source system running only on Sun's SPARC-based hardware, and on some x86-based systems (albeit with fairly poor hardware support). Sun had very little reason to perform ports to other platforms, and since the source code was not available to others under an open source license, such ports were not performed by a third party.
But we're seeing that change now. There's a PowerPC port in the works, for instance.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I put the title in all caps because I am responding to dozens of people claiming Solaris is monolithic. It is not. The Solaris microkernel is a stripped-down SVr4 kernel. Drivers are loaded from it and run in the same context for performance reasons, everything else outside of scheduling, interrupts, and a few other services runs strictly in user space and is dynamically loadable. I've heard the model referred to as an "object-oriented" architecture, since modules can call functions in other modules, though Mach, the famous microkernel, is also pretty thoroughly object-oriented, as is Windows XP's kernel, so this is somewhat confusing when used as a term to differentiate the architecture from a microkernel.
(%i1) factor(777353);
(%o1) 777353
Moderators:
Before moderating CyricZ's posts, please take the time to view his posting history.
He posts a LOT and only makes stupid and/or overly obvious points, and he often mis-represents people's comments when replying.
Basically, he is full of himself, and reviewing a few of his posts reveals him.
Read this comment for more information.
Wow... you obviously don't know jack about FBSD community...
/. user getting forcibly corrected (rightfully so), and somehow stating that as the norm, and that a community that has had some seriously obnoxious prima donna devs is a good model.
Granted, not stating all are asses, not even stating a significant percentage; merely pointing out that you're being an idiot and pointing at one example of a
So... you're trolling, effectively. Good job also, I took the bait.
I wish I had mod points right now plus the ability to Moderate this entire article as Flamebait :)
But flamewars are so much fun to read, so bring it on!
I find it quite interesting that (at least according to the article) Solaris (which supports a few x86, and mostly Sun's Sparc line) has a full abstraction, while Linux (which supports some large number processor architectures) goes with less abstraction; with FreeBSD somewhere in the middle. It certainly does yield higher performance for Linux, and makes sense in that respect...It's just interesting that the OS that seemingly runs on fewer processor architectures and has been controlled by an incorporated company would take the abstraction route, while the OS that runs on a far greater number of processor architectures and is not tied to corporate funding (directly, at least) is more focussed on less abstraction & fewer layers.
P.S. Sorry to repeat myself on that...just not sure how best to say it.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
If I was wrong then it would have been more than acceptable for that KOffice developer to point out that I was incorrect. However, I was not. I was completely right. That's why he had to resort to insults in his discussion with me. Since I was wielding the truth, he had to rely on childish namecalling.
Regardless, it was a very unprofessional act to perform. At least there are others on the open source community who do set a good example for the other developers.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Those VMware images are for older versions of vmware and do not run under current 5.x version of VMware. Or at least I was unable to get them working in the 15 or so minutes I spent with them.
...as a server. As a desktop it sucks ass. Freaking generic sound card in a laptop won't even work correctly.
Its been what, 2-3 years since the open-source solaris announcement came out? How much has been open sourced? AFAIK, all the have opened sourced is DTrace (a very cool tool/framework), but nay else. Lets see them open up the kernel internals like the thread model... I am skeptical that Sun will ever release their Kernel as open source as I recently had Sun reps argue with me that Linux/FreeBSD is 'single threaded' and cant scale across more than one cpu, to which I replied 'Bovine Scatlogical Pathology'. Sun is a hardware company people, and keeping Solaris uber-elite and closed source is their only way to sell expensive hardware.
Wow! Is that all it takes to get a +5 Insightful now? So I guess this will be modded Troll or Flamebait.
I can never really understand why FreeBSD ports is better than Debian's APT. Perhaps it's only because they look at "package installation" as the only use for these tools, whereas I use these tools for "package management". Everything comes down to the packagers who make and maintain the packages and the quality of the tools used to make and maintain the packages. I've used FreeBSD, Gentoo, and finally Debian for servers and desktops. Based on my experience APT is a more elegant solution to package management compared to FreeBSD Ports and Gentoo Portage for the following reasons:
Package Building
Although building Debian packages can be a bit overwhelming especially for newcomers, it really shines especially if you have installed debhelper, dh-make, dbs, dpatch, and lintian. What's really great about APT is the automatic runtime dependency resolution prior to packaging the final debs. After building the package and before it gets packed into a deb, a dependency checker is run through it and it will automatically figure out the runtime dependencies for you. On FreeBSD Ports and Gentoo Portage, you have to figure out and specify runtime dependencies yourself.
The "Dusty Deck" Problem
When I install a package using ports or emerge, it will also install the dependencies. But most of the time you will essentially be installing from source (and yes I am aware that Ports and Portage also have pre-built packages). When you do that, Ports and Portage will install and build the build-time dependencies of the package you are installing. Now, that's fine if those build-time dependencies are also needed at run-time. But some dependencies are only used at build-time and will never be used again until you upgrade the packages that depend on them. You can decide to remove them after build time, but then when you update the package they will be downloaded, rebuilt, and installed again. You eventually grow tired of this cycle that you just leave these build-time only packages and then they continue to accumulate on your disk mostly wasting space.
This is probably the reason why there are "developer" packages for libraries that contain only the header files and the link libraries. Once you're done with building, you can uninstall the developer package. Try doing that under Ports or Portage. Oh, wait! You can't. The runtime and build-time dependencies are all in one package.
Package Uninstallation
Now this is where Ports and Portage, IMHO, really suck. When I uninstall a package from my system I want it gone. apt-get remove --purge and a properly packaged deb will do that for you. Ports and Portage will leave "package cruft" on your system. "Package cruft" can be anything from stale config files to build-time dependecy packages. You will have to track and remove those things manually.
I know these three points can be resolved on both Ports and Portage if the packages are done correctly. This is where APT has an advantage over Ports and Portage: being able to make a proper package. On Debian, with the tools I mentioned above installed, a package maintainer's life is greatly simplified.
Ports (and Portage) does Rock, but only if all you ever care about is package installation and not package management (package building, installation and uninstallation).
Did you not see that the FS table is a partial list? The author only mentions it like two times.
The article is quite fair, generally, and honest in what's included vs. left out of the discussion.
The articles pointed to by this article seem to be pretty blatant solaris propaganda (or at least solaris fanboyism). Just check out this gem that the article claims contains facts. Here's just one great quote from the article:
"Currently Solaris 10 patches are still free for servers without support contracts which is nice for enterprise, but is really important for home users and hobbyists. Of major Linux distributions only Debian and Gentoo has free patches available, but using Debian puts you into the situation that is called "Not a Red Hat"(NRH): Red Hat commands well over 60% of Linux marketplace and that instantly shows in the availability of RPMs, commercial applications, books and other things. "
When was the last time I wished I could go through rpm hell instead of just apt-get install? Idiotic.
--
The Switchboard, a free, browser based, internet phone
You know shit, you fatherless bastard child of crackyness.
Just because there's a version of NT that can run on a 128-CPU SMP box doesn't mean it scales that in real-life situations.
If it did, with all Microsoft's billions of dollars, how come there's no NT equivalent to this for Linux, or this for Solaris?
Those two bad boys scale damn near linearly. I know that, I don't have assume that. I can afford a 7-figure house because I can make those things sing. That Sunfire E25K has 72 CPU slots, and each UltraSPARC-IV chip has 2 full CPUs on each die. The IBM 595 has 64 CPU slots, and when I was at SC-04 in Pittsburgh last year, IBM claimed they were working on an 8-way version of their Power CPU. That's 512 CPUs on an SMP box.
There's nothing like that in the NT world that anyone could buy. And you don't have to sign some NDA that would keep you from getting a job in a lot of places to see the source code for either OS.
Keep your damn toy OS, and your self-admitted assumption that "NT knows how to handle more than 2 processors", because there's no commercially-available system to support that assumption.
And they're coming to Linux in 2.6.14, the port of the 9P protocol has been included. FUSE (a alternative filesystem-in-userspace approach) has also been included
I was very surprized given Linux's advantage of the "Viral" GPL license and big development bucks (although Apple puts $ into FeeBSD), that they were so close. Omitted in Linx's favor is its much faster thread implementation. LET COMPETITON RULE!
Actually, I have several children. They're all adults now, too. And to top it off, I was correct. That's probably why the KOffice developer had to resort to insults, rather than the truth, in our discussion.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
And there he goes again. More babbling with practically no point.
How is it that this troll keeps getting modded up? I'm guessing it's because he comes close to looking legitimate, but how many times can you fall for it?
By all means, moderators, read the original thread CyricZ linked to.
I just fucking love how you subtly misrepresent the whole thing by implying it's a developer "publically insulting" a "long time" user, when really it was a developer simply refuting the *misinformation* posted by YOU.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
Yes, people buy this in thousands ... Itanium ??? I wonder what the uptime of such a beast would be. 2 days ? Hell m$ os is really damm leaky if you start putting pressure in the hw. Perhaps m$ is the customer ... (that may suffice)
I can't speak for JFS, but I have FC4 and centos boxes here using XFS with the stock redhat kernels. Try again, troll.
Sun originally used Motorola 68030 chips but was moving toward the SPARC. Furthermore, the SPARC chip was specified in terms of a RISC design by (among others) software engineers. This led to an entire instruction set being specified prior to the hardware technology being available to implement it.
Instructions not implemented in hardware would generate an illegal instruction fault, which would emulate the instruction in software and then return control. It was not until later that operations such as division could be done in silicon, or floating point operations, or the like. Optimizing for a particular processor meant not issuing instructions that were not implemented for that processor. That is why SPARCv8 instructions can run on SPARCv7 chips, they just are not as efficient.
Of interesting note is the subsequent addition of the VIS instruction set, which drastically departs from the original technology to compete with Intel's MMX technology 9now incorporated into every chip).
You EXPECT 32/64 bit "ifdefs", and some assembly in each mentioned Solaris module?
Go read the source. Go read Linux source.
Then come back and comment.
I know this is Slashdot, but PLEASE!
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
For the record, that language construct can almost always be re-written as "OpenBSD secured [something in the kernel] a few years ago". I'm not even a particularly big OpenBSD fan, but if someone's talking about adding entropy to something that might possibly be too predictable, then OpenBSD probably did it five releases back.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Reiser's a sharp guy, but he doesn't have the only game in town.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
To whoever was trolling/FUDing about FreeBSD's "market share" etc... here's what Netcraft was actually saying in their most recent article about this OS last year:
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames (...) since July 2003."
Full text + stats
See the e2fsck documentation. This isn't normal of course; "ext" means "extended". That is, it allows filesystems larger than the 64 MB of the original Minix filesystem.