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."

Interesting note from the SMPng status report..

[harikiri]

From here [freebsd.org]:

Several folks continue to work on the locking the network stack as noted elsewhere in this report. Outside of the network stack, the following items were worked on during the March and April time frame. Giant was pushed down in the fork, exit, and wait system calls as far as possible.

Alan Cox (alc@) continues to lock the VM subsystem and push down Giant where appropriate.

Same Alan Cox of Linux kernel hacking fame? Woot! We've attracted him to the dark side... ;)

Re:An ARM port eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Considering the One-chip SMP Multiprocessor Core [slashdot.org], things could get very nice.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:PF and ALTQ

[ArbitraryConstant]

OpenBSD will always have the most up to date PF stuff.

What you'll notice with OpenBSD is that you're discouraged from messing with the kernel at all, and ports work better. Theoretically, you may notice it's slower, and you'll probably notice that the software isn't as up to date. Debian-stable should also be in consideration, depending on your needs, but its firewalling capabilities are well behind FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

You're giving something up if you commit to anything period. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have dramatically disjoint sets of stuff they're good at. I've never seen an OS good enough at everything (or even most things) to make it worth commiting to. Not if you can deal with multiple OSes on a day to day basis.

One true ports system?

[killjoe]

When are freebsd, openbsd, and netbsd adopt the one true ports system? Is there any logical reason to have three different source based ports systems?

dead trees!

[MavEtJu]

Book: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

I know a birthday present for this year!

Re:PowerPC port

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, if you visit the mailing list archives, they're probably a lot further along than that. The developers working on porting it are a bit lazy in updating their status page.