Sunday, November 07, 2004

Disturbing Discussion on FreeBSD and NetBSD

Here is one disturbing discussion about FreeBSD 5.3 and NetBSD 2.0. From what I'm reading it isn't the case anymore [at least to this one guy] that FreeBSD is faster on x86 than NetBSD. That would really really really suck.

The hope is that this isn't the case. I've seen some interesting ideas come out of the FreeBSD camp and I'd *really* hate to see that they painted themselves into a coner and need a drink of water. I guess the only way to see if it is the case is to run some tests of my own. He did say that it was most noticeable on an older machine [which I have] and doubly so on a Uni-processor machine [also have that]. Times like this it's nice to work in a Unix shop.

Oh why am I concerned over this? I have an old machine at home running redhat 7.3. It's a nice machine, but there are times that I think that it needs a boost in coolness. It runs ok and all, but there are no more patches being released for it really, and some day in the near future I can see people starting to stop putting out rpms for it. WHen that day comes it is going to be a real bitch to install the latest and greatest packages that I tend to really use. Or if the ssh I have is a security threat, I'd really like to just do something like apt-get update or emerge ssh or cd /usr/ports/security/openssh ;cvs update ; make && make install.

No comments: