Date: Mon, 1 Mar 1999 18:34:26 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: rab@pike.cdrom.com (Robert A. Bruce) Cc: Dave@Yost.com, freebsd-advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, rab@pike.cdrom.com Subject: Re: The Linux PR firestorm disaster (w.r.t. FreeBSD) Message-ID: <199903011834.LAA13695@usr09.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <199903010058.QAA24952@pike.cdrom.com> from "Robert A. Bruce" at Feb 28, 99 04:58:42 pm
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> What does FreeBSD have that Linux doesn't? I don't think that such > a table would be very "forbidding". > > Seriously, I am working on a chart to hand out at the FreeBSD booth > at LinuxWorld next week, and I am having a hard time coming up with > a list of things that FreeBSD does better than Linux. > > Most claims of FreeBSD superiority boil down to: [ ... listening to the wrong claims ... ] > If I was trying to come up with the opposite list (areas where Linux > beats FreeBSD) the job would be much easier: > > 1. Linux runs on way more platforms (sparc, powerpc, mips,... heck it > even runs on a PalmPilot). > > 2. Linux has better support for realtime operations. No, it doesn't. No more than FreeBSD does with Peter's modules loaded. Neither one of them support deadlining, deterministic interrupt processing times, rate monotonic scheduling, etc., etc.. The lack of a commitment to had RT support is one of my biggest misgivings about FreeBSD, but Linux is certainly no better. > 3. Linux supports more perephrials (USB, etc.) Depends on how you count. If you count only hadware currently in production... > 4. Linux has real multiprocessor threads No. Linux has kernel threads, and kernel threads have a certain scalability to SMP. But the cost for this is too high, and it limits SMP scalability severely (most literature suggests 4 CPU's as the point of diminishing returns for this architecture). FreeBSD is no better (since it also has Linux kernel threads, as an LKM), but the Linux kernel threads, surprisingly, perform better in a FreeBSD kernel than they do in a Linux kernel. > 5. Linux has a lot more native commercial applications. Linux applications run on FreeBSD. So do FreeBSD applications. But FreeBSD applications don't run on Linux. > 6. etc... etc. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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