FreeBSD on Xserve?

[Igor Shmukler]

Why do you think that 970 does not have BAT registers?
There are 16 special purpose registers specifically to implement Block Address Translation.

I don't know what's a story with fan-drivers. Personally, I was under impression that G5 has liquid cooling system.
Not that should be a major show stopper for FreeBSD support of G5 boxes.

AFAIK, PPC port of FreeBSD is incomplete, but moving ahead quite fast.

If original author wants to mature OS with MAC and SMP support SELinux might be a good candidate.
However, Linux does not have jails. Only other OS that has them is Solaris 10 which does not run on PPC.

I am not sure what kind of stack protection was referred in the original email. OpenBSD has propolis, but I was under impression there is no such option in FreeBSD. I recall that it was decided that security by obscurity will not make it into the kernel.


> I don't think we have G5 support yet.  G5's are significantly different
> from G4s in a few ways that really matter to operating systems.
> Missing BAT registers and other "fun stuff" like fan-drivers have meant
> that even platforms that support 64bit PPC don't necessarily support G5
> [like the L4 microkernels I've been playing with]
>
> Dave
> On Sep 12, 2004, at 2:30 AM, jade at oxymail.org wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > I'm planning on buying an Apple Xserve G5 bi-processor. I know mac os
> > X (server)
> > is running on it and that's a modified version of freebsd.
> > So here are my questions :
> >
> > - I've been using freebsd for a while now and if I buy the Xserve I'd
> > very much
> > like to replace mac os X by a freebsd 5.2 / 5.3 if this is possible. My
> > motivations are that I want to make intensive use of Jails and
> > Mandatory Access
> > Control (MAC). I'd also like to recompile the whole thing with stack
> > protection
> > (if possible).
> >
> > Yet I have no idea if Mac os X can run jails, and MAC (anyone an idea
> > here ?),
> > but if not, I'd switch to Freebie.
> >
> > So in general :
> > - has anyone experienced the change
> > - would it be difficult to replace OS X by FreeBSD ?
> > - would it be possible to run these options (Jails,MAC,stack
> > protection) on this
> > hardware ?
> >
> > Thanks for the hints, because I'm a little lost.
> >
> > By,
> > Jade.