Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:15:22 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: Warner Losh <imp@village.org> Cc: "Hr.Ladavac" <lada@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at>, Dennis <dennis@etinc.com>, hackers@freebsd.org Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs. Linux 96 (my impressions) Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.94.960903105556.4107A-100000@covina.lightside.com> In-Reply-To: <199609031554.JAA26836@rover.village.org>
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On Tue, 3 Sep 1996, Warner Losh wrote: > E-mail message from Dennis contained: > > You left out one big disadvantage. The Kernel implementation is a pile > > of crap, and that different combinations of drivers will yield almost random > > results in terms of reliability and stability. > > Having tried to port OpenBSD and Linux to a MIPS PC, I'd have to say > that OpenBSD is *MUCH* easier. Linux is a moving target and just when > you think you understand the structure, it changes out from under you > radically. Especially in the ports area. OpenBSD has been a joy to > work with, and I get this HUGE book written by the system architects > to explain the whole thing to me. > > Linux does have other advantages, but kernel interface stability isn't > one of them. Not that that would matter to most people.... Good point. I much prefer BSD's boot procedure in terms of flexibility, and since it's been around for so long, the kernel is fairly well understood in terms of adding devices. That's why we only need one boot disk (and "boot -v" will allow device driver parameters to be editing for things that don't autoprobe correctly) vs. a ton of Linux boot disks, each tweaked for slightly different configurations. Since I wrote that article, I've discovered one more advantage to Linux, along with three problems: Advantage: Linux supports the Amiga filesystem. Pretty cool since I happened to have an Amiga-formatted Zip disk lying around! The interesting thing is that the kernel supports both the Amiga RDB partition info (in addition to the usual DOS FDISK) as well as the Amiga filesystem. So if had an Amiga-partitioned Zip disk with a Linux filesystem, you could read it (or maybe not, I forget whether ext2fs is byte-swapped on 680x0 or not!). It is supposed to understand FreeBSD and Solaris slice info as well, but I couldn't get that to work. Disadvantage: I couldn't mount either FreeBSD or Solaris-formatted UFS filesystems, even though there is a (read-only) UFS filesystem support. I just got a bunch of messages (including "f**king Sun blows me" whatever that's supposed to mean!!) and an empty mount point. Disadvantage: As somebody mentioned in private E-Mail, Slackware is not considered the premiere Linux distribution. The fact that there are multiple, incompatible, distributions, is a disadvantage. But since my original list related to the Linux kernel and utilities, the particular distribution I installed shouldn't be relevant. Disadvantage: Did I mention Linux's PPP daemon sucks? I swear, I was getting at least 15-30% better performance (over an ordinary 28.8kbps modem) under FreeBSD's user-mode ppp, and it was more consistent speed (vs. Linux which ranges all over the map from 1.7K/sec to 2.8K/sec, FreeBSD was consistently 3.0K/sec or higher). It makes me want to port the tun device to Linux, if I wasn't so afraid of the kernel (see above). Anyway, as I said originally, I'll probably reinstall FreeBSD on my second partition after the next 2..2 snap with GCC 2.7.2.1 on it. In the meantime, I would prefer spending my limited resources to improve FreeBSD because I like to build on a solid foundation. I don't regret installing Linux, though, because often it's nice to see how "the other half lives". -- Jake
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