Few simple questions about FreeBSD

[Jan Grant]

On Wed, 30 Apr 2003, Sharma, Tarun wrote:

>
> Hi all,
> I am a new user for FreeBSD operating system. Can anybody
> tell me answer for
> these questions:
>
> 1. what all steps does FreeBSD takes when it gets start. I
> mean it reads from ROM and then loads the operating system etc etc.

You probably want to look at the freebsd documentation. The handbook is
available online.

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.html

Chapter 7 is entitled, "the FreeBSD Booting Process" which is probably
what you're after.

> 2. Does freebsd kernel supports thread architecture. If yes
> then how ? I know about sunOS and it supports threading.

The 4-STABLE branch has userland pthreads and/or rfork-style
linuxthreads.

Work on KSE is ongoing in the development 5-CURRENT branch. This is
m-to-n style threading (much like solaris lwp threading), but that work
is still in the develpoment stages. I understand that it has been used
as the basis for 1-1 threading using kernel scheduler support. The -arch
list had a discussion about the merits of this a while ago. I'm not sure
what the conclusion was, but I _believe_ the idea was to integrate that
work with 5-CURRENT vith a view to it becoming 5-STABLE and carry on the
full KSE work in 6-CURRENT.




-- 
jan grant, ILRT, University of Bristol. http://www.ilrt.bris.ac.uk/
Tel +44(0)117 9287088 Fax +44 (0)117 9287112 http://ioctl.org/jan/
We thought time travel was impossible. But that was now and this is then.