> Time and time again we have all seen people get bit in the rear because >BSDI compatibility was broken. Broken for a good cause, mind you, because >FreeBSD seemed to lose a little of that "power to serve" when it died >horribly on newer servers :) > So, the good news is, we can now support large memory configurations >(and I recall that 4G might not be that far off). The bad news is, the >fairly decent number of programs which are available for BSDI but not >FreeBSD won't run on FreeBSD now. > > Anyway, we all know that. But what I would like to know is: how does >BSDI support large memory configurations? I'm confused on how it is that >the $1000+ commercial BSD derivative can't handle running on newer >servers (although it is pleasing to think a $0 BSD derivative can :) ) >Surely, this cannot be the case, though. > > So, I'm curious, why is it that we needed to break BSDI compatibility in >order to support large memory configurations. It would seem that the two >shouldn't be mutually exclusive.
BSD/OS compatibility for v2.0 static binaries can be had again with a few modifications. Someone with access to BSD/OS v2.0 binaries, time, and appropriate knowledge, just needs to make them. The brokeness actually comes from a design screwup that BSDI made in the v2.0 crt0 which they apparantly later fixed in v3.0. We should be able to run v3 and later static binaries. We've never had support for any version of their shared binaries. -DG David Greenman Co-founder/Principal Architect, The FreeBSD Project To Unsubscribe: send mail to majord...@freebsd.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-current" in the body of the message
