was [TriLUG] OT: hardware question & OpenBSD Now sparc Linux vs sparc BSD.

[Mike Johnson]

John F Davis [johndavi at us.ibm.com] wrote:
> Mike and Chris, this is directed mainly at you guys.
> 
> Like I said before, its been a long time since I ran openbsd on sparc, so I
> don't know the current status of openbsd.  Anyways, how much improved is
> openbsd on sparc now?  Do they have virtual terminal support now. ie.
> ALT-F1 switch to term 1, ALT-F2 swith to term 2, etc.  Is openbsd
> supporting sparc32 as much as it supports sparc64?  It seems that in linux
> kernel land, the sparc32 is dead and that all new development is being done
> on sparc64.

There is no virtual terminal support, nor will there ever be.  They
don't want to work on it.  I imagine it would take quite a bit of
work.  There is plenty of support for sparc32, but it's reached a
point of maturity.  sparc64 is still a new platform for them, so there's
lots of work to be done.  Since you don't see new Sparc32 hardware
coming out, there's no big leaps in development that need to be done.
However, any new features that go into the main tree are inherited by
the sparc32 platform (pf, for instance).  I wouldn't call sparc32
dead.

> Also, do you really feel that openbsd is snappier than linux?  I heard that
> BSD was supposed to support the sparc architecture better linux, but from
> my humble experience, I couldn't see much difference at all in terms of
> speed.

*shrug*  It's gonna be hard to see a huge difference in speed.  I don't
see one, but speed isn't really what I'm after.  Bloat has a few
different meanings.  In this instance, when I say bloat, I'm referring
to all the crap that modern Linux distributions install that I will
-never- use.  OpenBSD doesn't install nearly as much crap.

Mike
-- 
"Let the power of Ponch compel you!  Let the power of Ponch compel you!"
   -- Zorak on Space Ghost

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