From owner-freebsd-hackers Tue Sep 3 11:56:31 1996 Return-Path: owner-hackers Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id LAA18638 for hackers-outgoing; Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:56:31 -0700 (PDT) Received: from phaeton.artisoft.com (phaeton.Artisoft.COM [198.17.250.211]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id LAA18630 for ; Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:56:19 -0700 (PDT) Received: (from terry@localhost) by phaeton.artisoft.com (8.6.11/8.6.9) id LAA04790; Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:53:32 -0700 From: Terry Lambert Message-Id: <199609031853.LAA04790@phaeton.artisoft.com> Subject: Re: FreeBSD vs. Linux 96 (my impressions) To: jehamby@lightside.com Date: Tue, 3 Sep 1996 11:53:31 -0700 (MST) Cc: imp@village.org, lada@ws2301.gud.siemens.co.at, dennis@etinc.com, hackers@freebsd.org In-Reply-To: from "Jake Hamby" at Sep 3, 96 11:15:22 am X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL24] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-hackers@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk > 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. Heh. Their VFS architecture is inherently damaged in design. This isn't obvious until you try to do something complicated with it (ext2fs isn't complicated, even though it is -- kinda -- nifty). The BSD VFS architecture is an inherently clean design, damaged in implementation. Right now, for instance, neither one of them could be used easily to implement a writeable NTFS that was as reliable as NTFS when it is run under NT (Microsoft's IFS architecture is a kludge, but it is an internalling consistent kludge). But if I had to choose somewhere to implement a read/write NTFS (instead of Linux's read-only NTFS), I would definitely start hacking the FreeBSD before the Linux. Before anyone blames this on native bias, I have contributed a number of fixes for memory leaks in error cases to the Linux FS architecture, and have hacked on UMSDOS, and even implemented a full FS in it, so I am not someone speaking from ignorance here. Supporting a Solaris FS is pretty trivial, and I plan to do it as soon as I can get my JAZ drive to reliably act as a boot device. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers.