On 10/6/05, Nadav Har'El <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
I didn't say they were alternative as in 'interchangeable' packages. They are 2 different architectures. The idea is to keep the kernel dependent code to a minimum, so packages are build from the same source for both kernels with minimum of changes.
We are still very far from binary compatibility for both architectures, but yes, the ultimate goal would be a single architecture with interchangeable kernels. The middle-upper layer of applications doesn't need to care which kernel it runs on, as long as it uses a common interface. FreeBSD has it's Linux binary emulation and there is linprocfs.
Nowadays we don't have those problems. We have 2 dual 3.2G Xeon servers hosted at Internet Zahav and Bezeq, so the compilation time and download times aren't an issue anymore :)
I'm not trying to continue a flame war, but rather trying to understand this
statement. How can the type of kernel (rather than, say, the version of a
specific kernel) be a "package", with Linux and freebsd being alternative
packages?
I didn't say they were alternative as in 'interchangeable' packages. They are 2 different architectures. The idea is to keep the kernel dependent code to a minimum, so packages are build from the same source for both kernels with minimum of changes.
Also, many many packages on a typical "Linux" distribution are strictly
Linux specific: consider programs like "ps" (which works with the /proc
filesystem specific to the Linux kernel), "mk2efs", "reboot", and probably
dozens of others. Do all of these have Linux and BSD kernel variants, or
do you produce versions that work (as binaries) on both kernels?
We are still very far from binary compatibility for both architectures, but yes, the ultimate goal would be a single architecture with interchangeable kernels. The middle-upper layer of applications doesn't need to care which kernel it runs on, as long as it uses a common interface. FreeBSD has it's Linux binary emulation and there is linprocfs.
A decade ago, I was using what you might call a GNU/SunOS operating system:
I kept the SunOS kernel, but mostly everything else was either GNU or other
free software (X11 from MIT, etc.), that I downloaded and compiled myself.
But keeping up with all the packages I needed was a chore. Not once did I
need to perform compilations that took hours to complete (X11 and gcc were
the worst), or move sources on tape because my Internet connection limitations
(X11 was about 60 MB, an unbelivable whopper at that time).
Nowadays we don't have those problems. We have 2 dual 3.2G Xeon servers hosted at Internet Zahav and Bezeq, so the compilation time and download times aren't an issue anymore :)
But today, I don't need to do that any more, because my Linux distribution
(which is Fedora, but that is incidental) has almost every package that I ever
needed, ready, and constantly updated and upgraded. This is the primary
reason I use a Linux distribution, and not some sort of home-brewed Gnu+Linux
combination. It's simply easier this way. So, if your distribution doesn't
have that advantage, and for many of the packages that I use I'd need to
compile them myself, well, I guess your distribution is not for me.
It depends what you do with the system. As I said before, all the packages I need for my work are constantly updated (many times even before the upstream announcements). The rest of them is more problematic, and there we have problems. Just for the kicks, can you name some of the software packages you are using ?
--
Robert Wallner
