after Linux, what? in place of Hurd, Eros, Brazil,...?

[JoeHill]

On Wed, 29 Oct 2003 16:46:01 -0500
Toomas Karmo <verbum-qazKcTl6WRFWk0Htik3J/w at public.gmane.org> uttered:

> The problem is that Hurd is tied to Mach, which never really got
> properly finished, and which is tied to architectures that are rapidly
> getting obsolete.  Hurd only supports filesystems up to 1GB in size,
> to name the most problematic antifeature.  I can readily have more RAM
> than that on hardware that is relatively pedestrian.  And the hardware
> I_want_ supports on the order of 16GB.

Well, FreeBSD 4.9 supports up to 64GB of memory, and it runs on almost
any architecture.

>From their "features" page:

    "FreeBSD's developers attacked some of the more difficult problems
in operating systems design to give you these advanced features:

 * A merged virtual memory and filesystem buffer cache
continuously tunes the amount of memory used for programs and the disk
cache. As a result, programs receive both excellent memory management
and high performance disk access, and the system administrator is freed
from the task of tuning cache sizes.       
 * Compatibility modules enable programs for other operating systems to
run on FreeBSD, including programs for Linux, SCO UNIX, NetBSD, and
BSD/OS.       
 * Kernel Queues allow programs to respond more efficiently to a variety
of asynchronous events including file and socket IO, improving
application and system performance.       
 * Accept Filters allow connection-intensive applications, such as web
servers, to cleanly push part of their functionality into the operating
system kernel, improving performance.      
 * Soft Updates allows improved filesystem performance without
sacrificing safety and reliability. It analyzes meta-data filesystem
operations to avoid having to perform all of those operations
synchronously. Instead, it maintains internal state about pending
meta-data operations and uses this information to cache meta-data,
rewrite meta-data operations to combine subsequent operations on the
same files, and reorder meta-data operations so that they may be
processed more efficiently.       
 * Support for IPsec and IPv6 allows improved security in networks, and
support for the next-generation Internet Protocol, IPv6.

    Work in-progress includes support for fine-grained SMP locking in
kernel, allowing higher performance on multi-processor machines, support
for Scheduler Activations, allowing parallelism in threaded programs,
filesystem snapshots, fsck-free booting, network optimizations such as
zero-copy sockets and event-driven socket IO, ACPI support, and advanced
security features such as Mandatory Access Control."

But can I watch The Matrix and play Quake? ;-)

-- 
JoeHill
Registered Linux user #282046
Homepage: www.orderinchaos.org
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