[Tfug] BSD flavors

[Jeremy C. Reed]

On Tue, 6 Mar 2007, Stephen Hooper wrote:

> On 3/6/07, Matthew T. Eskes <meskes at gmail.com> wrote:
> > From what I've seen, fBSD runs just about on par with what you see in 
> > linux and the nice thing about it, is that it's actually a UNIX. Other 
> > than that, there's a lot of drivers from what I've seen that have been 
> > borrowed from the linux kernel.

Very little should be borrowed from the Linux kernel. FreeBSD has 
different licensing goals and rules which prevent this re-use (in addition 
to that in most cases the code has to be rewritten anyways due to 
different kernel technologies).

> Last time I used it had less support from commercial companies: like
> NVidia, Dell, RAID manufacturers, etc.

Depends. A lot of my customers use FreeBSD with Dell and various RAID.

It's not in the news yet, but Intel is allowing FreeBSD to distribute some 
firmwares for many Centrino-branded Intel PRO/Wireless devices. (This is 
in the development branch of the FreeBSD source.)

As for Matthew P.'s question about DragonFly: DragonFly has significantly 
fewer developers and due to huge changes in FreeBSD 4.x and FreeBSD 5/6/7, 
some code can't be immediately reused.

DragonFly is an amazing project -- and very leading edge. It does several 
things that FreeBSD doesn't have, such as its Process Checkpointing and 
virtual kernels. One of DragonFly's main goals is to cluster CPU, memory, 
disk and other resources efficiently over a WAN. This work is in progress. 
I can't wait :)

  Jeremy C. Reed