FreeBSD Status Report March-April 2004

Anonymous Coward writes "The FreeBSD project has posted a new status report for March and April of 2004. Work continues on locking down the network stack, ACPI made more great strides, an ARM port appeared in the tree, and the FreeBSD 4.10 release cycle wrapped up."

Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report..

[Everlone]

Nope, this is a different Alan Cox.

Something tells me I once saw an FAQ list once that involved this same question but I could be wrong ;-)

Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report..

[coolfruit]

Well, These are two different people. Alan L. Cox is a FreeBSD commiter. Here is his homepage : http://www.cs.rice.edu/~alc/

Re:Misplaced effort

[shlong]

Most of the bugs in your list are marked closed, and one is for a package that has nothing to do with disks or the OS. That leaves two entries that are relevant. Guessing the geometry is a lot harder than it sounds, especially if you already installed Windows or another boot loader and it guessed the geometry differently (as is the case with at least one of the entries in your list). This is a common problem in Linux, too. Windows is 'immune' to it because it'll choose whatever geometry it wants and leave any previously installed OS's stranded.

Re:An ARM port eh?

[killjoe]

Where is the PPC port? I am amazed that I can't install freebsd on my mac.

PowerPC port

[IRLQBall]

Where is the PPC port? I am amazed that I can't install freebsd on my mac.

The current status of the FreeBSD on PowerPC is here [freebsd.org]

Short version: It's a Tier 2 [freebsd.org] architecture which means it's not quite there yet. According to the project page it's "on the verge of booting to single-user mode".

Re:One true ports system?

[harikiri]

I think the various ports systems emerged as a result of freebsd only supporting x86 (back in the day), and netbsd having a multi-architecture system (thus more effort was required to 'port' something to each arch, and there were fewer ports). Then OpenBSD came along, and imported in the FreeBSD ports system initially, and went on from there.

The reason why FreeBSD's port system has grown so quickly is probably because there's only been one architecture they had to 'port' applications across to. It would be slowed down if they had to unify the ports system to support not only multi-platform architectures, but also the differences between the kernels for each BSD project.

However, this reminded me of this [netbsd.org]. NetBSD's package collection actually has released their pkgsrc collection to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

Re:One true ports system?

[Strog]

Pkgsrc is available for many OSes. It's most matured on BSD/Linux. It would be cool if several of the BSD's and Linux would use it. Check it out www.pkgsrc.org [pkgsrc.org]

NetBSD
OpenBSD
FreeBSD
Linux
Solaris
Irix
Darwin (OS X)

Re:PowerPC port

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X is based on Next's Unix which was one of the hybrid Mach/Unix jobs from the early/mid 90s. The only real difference was that Next used BSD instead of a sysV Unix. What happens is OS X is actually a Mach microkernel with several layers on top of it. The BSD networking code and other parts of the kernel were made to run on top of Mach to give it a Unix layer that a lot of other things build on. This unix layer is augmented by a freebsd 5.1 userland (at least that's what I have on my new powerbook).