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Re: [Sheflug] BSD

And Lo! The Great Prophet Will Newton uttered these words of wisdom:
> 
> Last time I looked, none of the BSDs were anywhere near as good as Linux on 
> SMP machines, and the hardware support was a little patchy (although FreeBSD 
> is pretty good on some particular manufacturers kit).
> 

They still aren't. FreeBSD is getting there slowly - it's original SMP had
a big kernel lock which essentially meant that even on two processors, you
really were still running as one - with 5.x there's a more fine grained 
locking system, but it's still short of Linux.

OpenBSD /has/ an SMP project, but it's a long way off being merged into the
main tree. I can't remember what NetBSD's support is like, but given the
state of Free and Open, I doubt Net is better off (but I could be wrong).

If you're looking for hardware support, if you're running i386 then Free is
the best route - this is Free's original target, and contains the most 
hardware support, though you may have problems finding drivers for older or
more obscure kit. Net and Open only support (from last look) the generic
chipsets and other common kit - you'll need to check hardware compatability
lists for definate for Net and Open.

> BSD is quite fashionable, it's more obscure than Linux, and for a long time 
> had a much better TCP/IP stack, but these days I don't think there's much in 
> it.

I like BSD's "ports" system... generally I like BSD-style more that SystemV
style (which is what Linux mostly is, but it's a crossbreed in some areas).
If it wasn't for some of my needs (SMP and audio apps especially), I'd
probably run it on the desktop. As it is, Open sits on the firewall as I
much prefer it's firewall to Linux's constantly changing mix.

Chris...

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \ NP: the creatures - 2nd floor
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk    ~-----,   
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------, 
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