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Date:      Fri, 8 Feb 2008 13:52:51 -0500 (EST)
From:      doug@safeport.com
To:        freebsd-questions@freebsd.org
Subject:   RE: Some ideas for FreeBSD
Message-ID:  <20080208131809.F12870@fledge.watson.org>
In-Reply-To: <20080208083120.Q1424@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>
References:  <BMEDLGAENEKCJFGODFOCEEFOCFAA.tedm@toybox.placo.com> <20080208083120.Q1424@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl>

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On Fri, 8 Feb 2008, Wojciech Puchar wrote:

>> It is one thing to add support for a POSIX call into FreeBSD.
>> That's fine.
>> 
>> It's quite another to break a header or supply hacky 32-bit-only
>> code in a library or some such just because Linux does the same
>> brain-dead stuff and the Linux maintainers are too stubborn or
>> stupid to fix Linux.
>> 
> don't forget that linux changed from being good unix OS to be windows 
> competitor. and it's competing well.

I am only responding to two narrow points so I am only responding to the list. I 
apologize in advance if this is a protocol error.

Linux got (and gets?) a boost from law suit over the name "unix" that was in 
progress around the advent of the BSDs. Linux seems to, at least initially, done 
a better job of being easier to install. Perhaps in the past even we FreeBSD-ers 
were willing to cede the desktop to other O/S-s. As a result Linux is probably 
more competitive with Windows than FreeBSD is as a desktop. I think that has 
nothing to do with the technical merits of this (or any) discussion.

The other point is when FreeBSD starts swapping to any degree, thrashing is not 
far behind. There is no cure for not having enough memory. Email is not 
generally an interactive endeavor and can probably tolerate much swapping than 
running KDE. Actually running KDE on a 128MB system I know this for a 
absolute fact :)

Swapping systems may have performed better when thrashing started because they 
had lots of controls to say who (or what type of workload) got screwed when 
memory was scarce.



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