[KLUG Members] Question on differences between NetBSD, Open BSD, Free BSD

[Peter Buxton]

On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 06:34:56PM +0530, Sanjay Chigurupati was only escaped
   alone to tell thee:

> What are the differences in them? I would be interested in user
> experiences.

With little experience myself, most info on *BSD goes like this:

FreeBSD: most applications, most support for non-traditional Unix features.

OpenBSD: most secure.

NetBSD: runs *anywhere*.

Some people complain about OpenBSD's lack of third-party applications,
and others complain about the first people being buttheads. I've never
heard anyone complain about NetBSD, but I think it has the lowest
profile of the three. You should read their websites and look at what
ports and packages they offer.

By non-traditional Unix features, I mean filesystems and threading, two
things that Unix is rather odd on. Unix has always preferred fork() and
exec() to threading, and, on a system where everything is a file, it's
tough to upgrade the FS technology because most programs have very
specific ideas as to how they should work. On FreeBSD, you don't choose
between ext2/3, Reiser, XFS and JFS, you install UFS2 (unless you ask
for UFS1).

Linux just got, as of 2.5.x, 1:1 threading, where each application
thread is handled directly by the kernel. Below,

http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/624

you can read about how FreeBSD implemented a 1:1 thread model just to
bootstrap things while they worked on perfecting M:N threading. M:N
thread models, create one M kernel thread to manage N application
threads: the two thread types are very different and have little to do
with each other. Linux had a M:N thread model at one point, but walked
away from it in favor of Drepper/Molnar's 1:1 implementation (NPTL).

Time will tell which is best.

Also, whereas Linux uses all the GNU tools to manage things, *BSD tend
to write and package these things themselves. This makes *BSD at once
more coherent and more closed.

-- 
-9
OS/2? Hah. I've got Linux. What a cool name. -- l.torvalds