On Mon, 2007-02-05 at 17:30 +0800, Happy Kamote Foundation wrote:
> *cough*
>
> NetBSD has had maximum portability as its chief design focus for the
> last seven years of its open source development. NetBSD's most
> distinctive feature is its wide platform support: as of the date of
> this writing, it runs on a technology-leading fifty one ++ different
> hardware architectures.
I beg to disagree on this assertion for the following reasons:
1.) Linux and NetBSD do not have the same qualifications for
architectures. Linux counts architectures according to chip/CPU
families. NetBSD counts ports as architectures, regardless of CPU/chip
family.
2.)Linux runs on the following chip/CPU families:
Diverse PDA / embedded / microcontroller / router devices:
* Advanced RISC Machines, Ltd. ARM family (StrongARM
SA-1110, XScale, ARM6, ARM7, ARM2, ARM250, ARM3i,
ARM610, ARM710, ARM720T, and ARM920T)
* Analog Devices, Inc.'s Blackfin DSP
* Axis Communications ETRAX series ("CRIS" = Code Reduced
Instruction Set RISC architecture)
* Elan SC520 and SC300
* Fujitsu FR-V
* Hitachi H8 series
* Intel i960
* Intel IA32-compatibles (Cyrix MediaGX,
STMicroelectronics STPC, ZF Micro ZFx86)
* Matsushita AM3x
* MIPS-compatibles (Toshiba TMPRxxxx / TXnnnn, NEC VR
series, Realtek 8181)
* Motorola 680x0-based machines (Motorola VMEbus boards,
ISICAD Prisma machines, and Motorola Dragonball &
ColdFire CPUs, and Cisco 2500/3000/4000 series routers)
* Motorola embedded PowerPC (including MPC / PowerQUICC I,
II, III families)
* NEC V850E
* Renesas Technology (formerly Hitachi) SH3/SH4 (SuperH:
link1 link2)
* Samsung CalmRISC
* Texas Instruments's DM64x and C54x DSP families
* Intel 8086 / 80286.
* Intel IA32 family: i386, i486, Pentium, Pentium Pro, Pentium II,
Pentium III, Celeron, Xeon, and Pentium IV processors, as well
as IA32 clones from AMD (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX,
486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Elan, K5,
K6/K6-II/K6-III), Cyrix (386DX/DXL/SL/SLC/SX,
486DLC/DLC2/DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2, Cyrix III), IDT
(Winchip, Winchip 2, Winchip 2A/3), IBM
(486DX/DX2/DX4/SL/SLC/SLC2/SLC3/SX/SX2), NexGen (Nx586),
Transmeta (Crusoe), TI (486DLC/DLC2), UMC (486SX-S, U5D/U5S),
VIA (C3 Ezra "CentaurHauls", C3-2 "Nehemiah"), and others.
* Intel/HP IA64: Trillian, Itanium, Itanium2/McKinley
* x86-64 x86-64 family including AMD Hammer/Opteron/K8/Athlon64
and Intel Prescott/Nocona/Potomac
* Motorola 68020-68040 series (with MMU): m68k Mac, Amiga, Atari
ST/TT/Medusa/Falcon, HP/Apollo Domain, HP9000/300, sun3, and
Sinclair Q40.
* Motorola/IBM PowerPC family: Most PowerMac (including
G3/G4/G5) / CHRP / PReP / POP, Amiga PowerUP System, and IBM
PPC64 (AS/400, RS/6000, iSeries, pSeries, PowerMac G5).
* MIPS: most SGI, Cobalt Qube, DECStation, Sony PlayStation2, and
many others
* DEC Alpha
* HP PA-RISC
* SPARC International SPARC32 / SPARC64
* Digital VAX minicomputers and MicroVAXen
* Mainframes: IBM S/390 models G5 and G6 / zSeries models z800,
z890, z900, and z990 and Fujitsu AP1000+ (SuperSPARC cluster)
2. NetBSD on the other hand, runs on the following architectures, with
the following 51 ports as follows:
CPU:Port
alpha:alpha
arm:acorn26 acorn32 cats evbarm hpcarm iyonix netwinder shark
zaurus
hppa:hp700
i386: i386 xen
m68010: sun2
m68k: amiga atari cesfic hp300 luna68k mac68k mvme68k news68k
next68k sun3 x68k
mipseb: evbmips (either eb and el) ews4800mips mipsco newsmips
sbmips (either eb and el) sgimips
mipsel: algor arc cobalt evbmips hpcmips playstation2 pmax
sbmips
ns32k: pc532
powerpc: amigappc bebox evbppc ibmnws macppc mvmeppc ofppc pmppc
prep sandpoint sh3eb evbsh3 (either eb and el) mmeye sh3el dreamcast
evbsh3 hpcsh sh5 evbsh5
sparc: sparc
sparc64: sparc64 (Can also run sparc binaries)
vax: vax
x86_64: amd64 (Can also run i386 binaries)
Just correcting a minor misrepresentation.
The good thing about NetBSD is that all of the ports they support come
from one source tree. Quality is quite variant across the ports though,
but it's not as dismal as the state of architectures and ports in Linux.
--
Paolo Alexis Falcone
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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