Date: Thu, 11 Mar 1999 16:10:38 -0800 From: David Greenman <dg@root.com> To: Greg Lehey <grog@lemis.com> Cc: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@zippy.cdrom.com>, "Jan B. Koum " <jkb@best.com>, cvs-committers@FreeBSD.org, cvs-all@FreeBSD.org Subject: Re: BSD/OS compatibility (was: cvs commit: src/sys/i386/conf .. Message-ID: <199903120010.QAA10104@implode.root.com> In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 12 Mar 1999 10:36:15 %2B1030." <19990312103615.J490@lemis.com>
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>On Thursday, 11 March 1999 at 15:43:57 -0800, Jordan K. Hubbard wrote: >>> I think it is better to give people boxes which can be tweaked to the >>> max then for us to worry about BSDi compatibility. >> >> Well, more to the point, we shouldn't just fall over kicking the >> minute somebody installs us on a "server class" machine that we claim >> represents our bread-and-butter market. Something similar to this >> (>64MB memory detection) is what cost us a major magazine performance >> review against Linux and BSD/OS when we ended up getting tested with >> 64MB of memory and the other OSes saw and used the full 128MB, skewing >> the benchmark results against us for the high-load case. That really >> sucked and we don't need that happening again, a whole lot more than >> we need to run a very diminishing number of BSD/OS binaries. Most >> ISVs appear, sadly, to be rapidly abandoning that market and BSDI >> itself isn't all too healthy these days. > >None of this really answers my question (well, indirectly I suppose it >does). Sure, I understand the necessity of maintaining performance on >machines with large memory, and if it breaks BSDI compatibility, this >may be a necessary evil. But most machines don't have 2 GB of memory, >and it might make sense, for example, to make the choice a kernel >configuration option. We actually haven't had compatibility with modern BSD/OS binaries now for several years. We simply don't support their rather unusual shared library mechanism. What we're giving up is some shakey compatibility with v2.0 and older binaries. The answer is that I have no plans to personally solve the compatibility problem. If someone else wants to do this, then that would be fine with me. -DG David Greenman Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe cvs-all" in the body of the message
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