Status of 6.0 for production systems

[Peter Clutton]

On 11/11/05, Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm at toybox.placo.com> wrote:
> >-----Original Message-----
> >From: Michael Vince [mailto:mv at roq.com]
> >Sent: Thursday, November 10, 2005 7:35 PM
> >To: gayn.winters at bristolsystems.com
> >Cc: 'Ted Mittelstaedt'; freebsd-questions at freebsd.org
> >Subject: Re: Status of 6.0 for production systems

> >Admittedly if Microsoft were trying to make Windows XP run well
> >on a 486
> >it wouldn't be nearly as a likable OS it is today.
> >
>
> That's not true either.  If Microsoft were trying to make it work on a
> 486 it
> would run a lot better on bigger hardware because they would have to
> prune
> all the fat off it.
>
> Haven't you ever noticed with Windows that the user interface speed is
> still the same today, with brand new hardware, as it was 10 years ago
> on older versions of Windows?
>
> Try running Windows 98 one day on brand new hardware - it is almost a
> religious experience.  Open a window and Bang - it's there, completely
> drawn in, so fast you can't even see it draw.  THAT is how it's supposed
> to be.  The problem is the stupid consumers don't understand that every
> year that they buy newer and faster hardware it just helps Microsoft to
> make their stuff slower.  So they never get ahead.

Wow, that's really true, and i hadn't thought of it like that. The
interface has definitely stayed the same speed. I think FreeBSD is
choosing the perfect happy-medium in regards to support. Speed is
increased with newer generation hardware, yet older hardware is more
than sufficient to run it, and works well. If they were to sacrifice
the advantages of newer hardware to the extent nedded to support the
386, i think that would be a bad decision. Likewise if they made the
reverse decision.

Gary Winters:
>I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest
>hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment.
>I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development
>could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old
>hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and
>features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below
>1ghz for x86 I would be happy

Supporting older hardware is not some bad decision made by core, it is
a general design and philosophy point of not only FreeBSD, but unix
and the community in general. That is a very selfish statement, and
rather rediculous actually, that the tens of thousands of people
running older hardware (example: Yahoo! - pentium of about half that
speed serving hundreds of thousands of http requests per day)  should
upgrade to 1ghz machines because that's what you use. Even Windows
runs on less than that.

 But you are always welcome to make your own version that supports only that.