Date: Thu, 20 Jan 2000 21:07:08 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: noslenj@swbell.net (Jay Nelson) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com (Terry Lambert), chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: funny repair remark Message-ID: <200001202107.OAA16183@usr01.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.05.10001181810310.1352-100000@acp.swbell.net> from "Jay Nelson" at Jan 18, 2000 06:21:11 PM
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> >IBM has also supported the idea of "FreeBSD certification" of > >IBM systems; Doug Ambrisko spent some time validating a > >machine, only to have the Advocacy group _not_ show up with a > >FreeBSD certification logo. > > Interesting. I always wondered what FreeBSD would be like on an SP. Any real advocate, I think, has wondered the same thing. > Are they willing to open up information for MCA, SSA and other useful > devices? The MCA stuff is well documented. I have a 386 PS/2 box that runs using ABIOS and FreeBSD circa 1995, though I haven't cranked it up in a year or so. The MCA stuff is documented at: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/ Along with a lot of other stuff. You have me at a disadvantage with "SAA"; I assume you mean AS/400. The AS/400 is unsuited to running C. It uses a 64 bit pointer, 8 bits of which are a check-value. This means that running C code that does pointer arithmatic or array indexing would be nearly impossible with a free compiler. > Rephrased, will we benefit from the current Linux hysteria at > IBM? FreeBSD will benefit, if FreeBSD grabs the opportunities it is presented; just as FreeBSD has been able to benefit from other aspects of the Linux phenomenon. The lack of tangible benefit in past situations is more a FreeBSD problem, than anything else. > As an aside, there was some discussion in the past about the > functionally useless but politically beneficial business of > certification. Has anything changed and is there such a thing? IBM's > backing of a FreeBSD certification would carry a lot of weight in > the corporate and govt worlds. FreeBSD certification is different than certifying hardware to have been tested and verified to have drivers for all its components for FreeBSD so that people can buy off the shelf hardware for FreeBSD use, without fear. I remember a FreeBSD certification discussion, as well as a "FreeBSD Certified Engineer" discussion (an attempt to get in on the RedHat certification frenzy), but nothing really came from that, as all of the hacker types shouted down all of the business types that wanted it. > Do you know what IBM is doing with the *BSDs? The WebConnections product is based on a customer premesis equipment provided by IBM, and services. The equipment being provided is a Whistle InterJet. InterJets run FreeBSD. IBM has also been publically recognized to be bidding FreeBSD into school districts in Taiwan. NTT is bidding InterJet hardware into school prefectures for approximately 28,000 schools in Japan. There are a number of FreeBSD projects scattered around IBM, now that the due dilligence has been passsed on Whistle. Some projects are using Linux, but only because they haven't heard of FreeBSD, or because they are on non-Intel chips, and the alternatives are Linux or NetBSD. At least one project at Almaden has switched to FreeBSD. At least one person responsible for the IRDa standard, and an IBM employee, is working on drivers for some IBM hardware. And then there's a lot of stuff that I can't tell you about, but which I personally find exciting. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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