Date: Sat, 6 Jan 2001 18:05:24 +0100 From: Brad Knowles <blk@skynet.be> To: FreeBSD Chat Mailing List <freebsd-chat@freebsd.org> Subject: NetBSD vs. FreeBSD? Message-ID: <v04220802b67cfb78ebe0@[172.17.1.121]>
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Folks, I've been looking a bit more closely into what it would take for me to be able to make my PCI PowerMacintosh 7200/90 usable with some *BSD variant. Theoretically, it's usable today with MkLinux, but we know that this is a dead-end project, and I'm not interested in dead-ends. I looked, and of course FreeBSD does not currently support PowerPC. This leaves NetBSD and OpenBSD. Looking into them, OpenBSD has support for the latest round of hardware (most anything after the iMac), but nothing in beige (and nothing for any of the upgrade vendors). NetBSD does support both beige and newer hardware, but not the 7200/90 (this machine doesn't have OpenBoot Firmware). I found a site that has 7200 logic board upgrades available (see <http://www.micromac.com/products/lb_pm7500_upgrade.html>), and for about $600 (after the $200 rebate they send you when you send in your 7200 logic board), you can get a machine that should be minimally usable with NetBSD. However, looking a bit more in-depth into NetBSD (even the latest incarnation), it seems very very rough, and like much earlier versions of FreeBSD. I'd almost be tempted to say that NetBSD 1.5 is probably a lot like FreeBSD 2.2.5 -- in particular, they don't have any support for SMP (that doesn't result in the box crashing a few minutes later ;-), and what SMP work is being done is of course exclusively for x86. Is NetBSD really all this bad? Have I missed something fundamental? Is there anyone on this list that's used both recent versions of NetBSD and FreeBSD on previous generation single CPU hardware and can give me a reasonably fair comparison and contrast? My home needs are not that extraordinary, so even a single CPU PPC604 chip at 100Mhz would probably be fine (although I'd want to try to upgrade to a G3 or a G4 when I could), just for a simple machine to do firewall+squid+caching nameserver+mail downloading (behind a connect-on-demand ISDN line), and I might even be able to make it stretch to performing as an externally visible web/ftp/mail server if I were to go with a permanent ISDN line. However, I'd want to make sure that at least at the basic command-line level, and at the level of building and installing modern programs like ipfilter, squid, apache, sendmail, postfix, BIND 8 & 9, etc... that the machine would be able to build them without much trouble, as well as run them reasonably well. I guess I'm just a little disconcerted by some of the apparent rough edges, and not having much experience with NetBSD, I'd like to hear more from folks that do, especially when it comes to diverging from "./configure; make; make install". Thanks! -- These are my opinions -- not to be taken as official Skynet policy ====================================================================== Brad Knowles, <blk@skynet.be> || Belgacom Skynet SA/NV Systems Architect, Mail/News/FTP/Proxy Admin || Rue Colonel Bourg, 124 Phone/Fax: +32-2-706.13.11/12.49 || B-1140 Brussels http://www.skynet.be || Belgium "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." -Benjamin Franklin, Historical Review of Pennsylvania. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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