New to DragonFly...

Dmitri Nikulin dnikulin at gmail.com
Wed Apr 26 15:26:08 PDT 2006


On 4/27/06, walt <wa1ter at xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> NetBSD (and also its derivative OpenBSD) runs on more hardware platforms
> than DragonFly, and that is not likely to change so quickly.  But given
> a little time, I believe that will change also.

Who cares about being able to run on every evaluation board and game
console? DragonFly's greatest utility is on fast networkable (for
clustering) and SMP machines, for anything less it doesn't offer a
compelling use over NetBSD, which is 'fast enough' for uniprocessor
machines already, and improving with every version. So while a Sparc
port would be useful, even bothering to compete with half of NetBSD's
ports list is a fantastic waste which will just pollute the source
tree and take away valuable developer time :P

Worthy archs are Alpha, Sparc (32 and 64), AMD64, i386, PowerPC,
POWER5, IA64. The rest is not very useful. Am I missing one? Can you
SMP ARM or MIPS?

Heck, get EFI support done and you have covered the extremely common
IBM clones *and* the increasingly common Intel Macs, which is a huge
share of commodity hardware already. Long mode AMD64 would be nice
(speeds up some algorithms like AES, and gives you a native NX bit)
and if I had any Sparc, PowerPC, etc. hardware I'd sure want to
DragonFly it at some point.

  -- Dmitri Nikulin






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