Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Wed, 10 May 1995 05:56:13 -0700
From:      Gary Palmer <gpalmer@westhill.cdrom.com>
To:        Caspar Arquint <arquint@inf.ethz.ch>
Cc:        questions@FreeBSD.org, platforms@FreeBSD.org
Subject:   Re: Ports of FreeBSD 
Message-ID:  <11472.800110573@westhill.cdrom.com>
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 10 May 1995 10:20:18 %2B0200." <199505100820.KAA04889@tau.inf.ethz.ch> 

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
In message <199505100820.KAA04889@tau.inf.ethz.ch>, Caspar Arquint writes:
>I wonder what the intention about porting of FreeBSD is.
>Currently there are only 386/486's supported - right?

Not quite - see below...

>Is there maybe an intention like "FreeBSD only supports 386/486" ?

Not as far as I am aware - in fact, in the past I have been encouraged
by several core team members to get another platform supported.

>Or are there any other plans to support Pentium or even to port 
                                         ^^^^^^^

Pardon? I happen to have a Pentium (P5-90) sitting on my desk at work
running FreeBSD ... :-) And freefall (aka FreeBSD.ORG) and wcarchive
(aka ftp.cdrom.com & ftp.FreeBSD.ORG) are P5's also! So I get the
impression that Pentium processors are supported ... :-)

>to PowerPC? Sure FreeBSD will already run on a Pentium machine but
>this CPU has some more feature than a 486 or even a 386 has, which
>if supported by the OS directly may make a machine even more faster...;-)

PowerPC? Show me the market for such a port! A high percentage of the
PowerPC's in circulation are in Mac's at DTP houses (or art
departments, or wherever, where specialised s/w is needed, which isn't
available under FreeBSD) ... not much call for FreeBSD there ... And
there isn't such a thing as a PowerPC ``PC'' yet AFAIK.

P5 features are supported by the OS when it's sensible to do so
AFAIK. We haven't yet gone through the kernel trying to bend over
backwards to make the P5 run faster, and much of what we could do is
up the the GCC optimiser probably (sour laugh is heard in the
background) ...

Also, there are efforts underway to port to at least 2 other
architectures ... (3 if I ever get any spare time (ha ha ha)).

Gary



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?11472.800110573>