I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest
hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment.
I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development
could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old
hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and
features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below
1ghz for x86 I would be happy
Supporting older hardware is not some bad decision made by core, it is
a general design and philosophy point of not only FreeBSD, but unix
and the community in general. That is a very selfish statement, and
rather rediculous actually, that the tens of thousands of people
running older hardware (example: Yahoo! - pentium of about half that
speed serving hundreds of thousands of http requests per day) should
upgrade to 1ghz machines because that's what you use. Even Windows
runs on less than that.
But you are always welcome to make your own version that supports only that.
I said it in terms of an over the top example to maximize a trigger of
thoughts in this area of topic, such as an example of movement as those
more in the realms of what MS do with what their standard is in hardware
support for modern operating systems, luckily I am just 'some guy' on
the mailing list and have little what so ever say to what happens on
FreeBSD.
I don't believe its a very selfish statement at all. When I say get rid
of old hardware the one of the largest flow of thoughts that go through
my mind is the support future world energy needs. Most scientists tell
you that there will be a world energy crisis sometime in the future and
people should be prepared to pay money money for the energy they use.
Its energy crisis web sites are all over the Internet. While some people
fear a nuclear attack from terrorists or nuclear war in general if you
want to fear a day of doom some people will tell you there is something
even more terrifying and just as destructive coming our way, that is
running out of cheap energy, hard to understand? I recommend to any one
using a PC for the single use of a home gateway or using power in ways
that aren't ideal but simply because energy is cheap simply because they
can get away with it the get the DVD 'The End of Suburbia'. It will
tell you that as the world hits its energy peak the cost of fuel will
always go up in the world market every time there is any kind of issue
and barely go back down (as it has lately). They claim the cost of
moving around in suburbia will get so expensive that the value of the
suburban house will fall through the floor and ruin a lot of lives since
most people put their life savings investing in their home assuming it
will increase in value over time.
http://www.endofsuburbia.com/
http://www.energycrisis.com/
While most people aren't using a pentium 1 to run a water sprinkler
system, there are a countless amount of people using machines for things
that aren't ideally power efficient. A lot of people using old PCs and
Internet gateways in their home network and nothing else. This is a 24
hour PC running just to provide Internet where a basic Netgear home
router 500ma device can do it just as well, (5volts * 0.5amp =
2.5watts), a lot of people use FreeBSD as a server in some way on a
network and need to keep it somewhat up to date for security reasons
this also means 24 hour running. A lot of people on the FreeBSD mailing
lists like the idea of getting rid of their clunky old PC routers and
still using a good firewall like Packet Filter by using the MIPS based
linksys WRT54G router that could run FreeBSD, while there is no port for
this on FreeBSD the closest front for this would be NetBSD.
Its really a case of the dark side of the force is clouds your vision.
Most people who have a properly functioning conscious mind who setup a
PC as nothing more then a gateway for a small band of traffic feel a bit
of guilt when they do it while others are just ignorant or work under
the theme of what they can get away with is OK. Lets just continue this
line of thought, how about the rich and powerful nations go dropping
barrels of nuclear waste out of airplanes on poor nations, this is
something they could probably 'get away with' but its not right thing to do.
A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel
chips.
In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was
just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt
ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech and
look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor.
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/perfperwatt.jpg
Big tech industry is trying to take some responsibility for people and
Intel and AMD are already making it easier to build desktop systems
using their mobile chips, check out more on Anandtech for that.
If Yahoo are using countless thousands of old Pentiums as stated earlier
then they should take a chunk of the countless millions of dollars they
have made over the years using FreeBSD and invest it back into FreeBSD
so they can enjoy a better 'performance per watt ratio' as Steve Jobs
calls it and condense the amount of systems they have. Apple should be
doing the same thing and giving back to FreeBSD if its taken so much of
its work, unfortunately big business thinks exactly the same way as a
guy who runs a PC as purely a low bandwidth home gateway and thats what
I can 'get away with' is OK. The only thing that often works in these
situations is discussion and public pressure. There is selfishness in
every direction but I believe my points of view aren't selfish at all.
I am not trying to particularly push anything but I do enjoying
providing some thoughts for those who fail to think.
Mike
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