Re: Is FreeBSD just a sandbox for hackers?
- From: Andrew Reilly <andrew-newspost@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: 29 Oct 2008 22:53:11 GMT
On Wed, 29 Oct 2008 19:42:37 +0000, Ranter wrote:
My memory says this kind of highly preventable error didn't happen
during the early days, while Jordan was still heavily involved.
Is my memory faulty?
It's mostly because in the early days, FreeBSD was just a Unix, maybe
with X and TWM if you felt like it. It ran fine on a 33MHz single-pipe
processor with 4M of RAM, and would install on about an 40M disk. The
kernel fit entirely into the bottom 640k chunk of memory, which
simplified the boot process no end. There was no sense that a real-time
media playing framework that could select from dozens of reverse-
engineered or proprietary codecs on the fly was something that it should
be able to do. At the time, the big argument (well, the most amusing
one, anyway) was how to make the interrupt handler and scheduler fast
enough, and real-time capable enough to deal with the very nasty
constraints of the floppy disk controller without stalling the rest of
the system (answer: "no" -- floppies still require spin loops in the
driver I think, but I doubt that anyone has checked or cared for a very
long time.)
Your memory is faulty, though. There were plenty of ports that didn't
build if you looked at them funny, or selected just the wrong options, or
had the wrong things set in /etc/make.conf. Always have, always will.
Use the pre-built packages if that bothers you.
--
Andrew
.
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