Date: Fri, 24 May 1996 11:28:03 -0700 (PDT) From: Jake Hamby <jehamby@lightside.com> To: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: Fred Condo <fred@lightside.com>, Adam Leff <adam@lightside.com> Subject: Mac Linux: Nothing to worry about :-) Message-ID: <Pine.AUX.3.91.960523220732.22381B-100000@covina.lightside.com>
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I was very disappointed with the DR1 release of MkLinux for PowerMac. I know it's not fair to complain about minor problems with what is obviously an early developer's release, so instead I will concentrate on the major architectural and philosophical faults, which will be the hardest to fix later. :-) Anyway, here are some salient misfeatures: 1) No shared libraries. None! These are ELF binaries by the way. Everything is statically linked. For X programs this is particularly disgusting, e.g. xlogo is a 1.2MB executable. I can only guess that either a limitation of Linux's ELF support or a limitation of the GNU development tools prevented the developers from porting shared lib support to PowerPC for this release. I plan to inquire further about this oversight since the PowerMac I tested on is short of disk space, and I consider shared libs a _necessity_ for any modern Unix. 2) In the useless bundled crap department, I discovered the following packages in the BASE distribution: Perl 5 (6MB), GNU Emacs (24MB), as well as other bloaed GNU utilities, all installed in /usr/bin of course. I was going to complain about the many minor (though still unexcusable) flaws, e.g. bad /dev permissions, X server doesn't work in thousands of colors (and you must reboot to MacOS to change the monitor to 256 colors!), unusable terminfo entry for console, bad stty settings made my password visible when I typed it in, and it just seemed SLOW, repeatedly seizing up for a second or two on the simplest operations. This is a PowerMac 7100/66 with 16MB RAM, btw. But these flaws are minor, and I expect will be fixed, although with the Linux experience of RedHat (who seem to have helped with bundling utilities, since the source was in .rpm format) you would not expect any permissions/packaging problems however. The lack of shared libraries, and the decision to bundle in crap like Emacs, however, seem unexcusable, even for an early developer release. There is one fortunate thing out of all this: The OSF and Apple-developed source code to the Mach kernel and Linux server are all freely available and covered under a standard BSD-style copyright! Whoohoo! This means a Free/NetBSD port to PowerMac is now feasible! Unfortunately I lack the PPC assembly language and kernel hacking knowledge to undertake such a beast, however I sincerely hope somebody else (Terry?) decides to take this on. The question is: Would it be best to build a BSD "personality" server on top of a Mach kernel, as MkLinux is built, or scrap that idea and build a traditional BSD kernel? OSF claims the advantage of Mach lies in SMP, real-time, and portability (port the microkernel to a new architecture, then simply recompile the Linux server), but obviously this is going to use more RAM and CPU than a "native" BSD kernel. Comments? ---Jake
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