Date: Sun, 20 Aug 2000 13:29:01 -0700 From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.osd.bsdi.com> To: Darren Reed <darrenr@reed.wattle.id.au> Cc: jkh@zippy.osd.bsdi.com (Jordan K. Hubbard), mjacob@feral.com, freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.ORG, freebsd-arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Integration of Net/OpenBSD code (was Re: your mail) Message-ID: <98351.966803341@localhost> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sun, 20 Aug 2000 18:42:42 %2B1000." <200008200842.SAA07457@avalon.reed.wattle.id.au>
next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
> I think people should build upon their strengths, at this stage, > rather than spread themselves around. From comments made by others, > I tend to think that it is less than trivial to add sparc plus it > would seem that resources for it aren't exactly overwhelming. This is very true, though fortunately only half-true. The resources for doing a quality FreeBSD/sparc port are actually present in the community, they're just lying dormant, like gophers in the winter. :) This makes what you say true from the perspective of not having such resources available right now, but leaves grounds for hope that what happened with the Alpha will also happen with the SPARC, e.g. a couple of mavricks will dive into it and rapidly advance things to the stage where Something Serious(tm) is happening on that front. At that stage, many of the sleeping rodents suddenly wake up and you now have a full team working away on it. I also think the Alpha port was an important step for the project in that it got us 64 bit clean well before the IA64 arrived and it validated the concept that we could do something non-x86 based on an ongoing basis. For the network appliance market, a important and growing segment of what some of FreeBSD's core "PC interest group" is morphing into, we need to get onto architectures like MIPS, PowerPC and StrongARM and doing any sorts of non-x86 ports are good practice for this. > If people are saying the x86 part of FreeBSD is weakening (some Only one person has said this so far and I think he was actually about as wrong as one can get about that. If there was a groundswell of such opinion then that would obviously be a big wake-up call for us, but such is definitely not the case as the x86 remains the principal focus for an overwhelming majority of FreeBSD's developers. Almost too much so I think sometimes. As to the IA64, that's basically stalled simply because there are so few people out there with the equipment (once that changes, things will accelerate greatly). For the same reason, it's not a major priority for the corporate world yet either. - Jordan To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-arch" in the body of the message
Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?98351.966803341>