OK, I will give it a try... For background, I have been actively using and
contributing toward the development of several OpenSource projects for
many years. I have enjoyed experimenting with the variety of OSes, often
times contrasting them to each other and to other commercial products. In
addition I have been lucky enough to regularly be retained by a variety of
companies to perform work such as performance characterizing and tuning of
various aspects of the systems. All of this has resulted in the opinions
that I make on this list, and other places that I am involved.
To the specific points of your inquiry though, I should probably refer to
the history of how the 3 primary OpenSource *BSD projects have come to
exist (FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD). All of them have some fairly good
background on their web pages. As a summary statement though, you will
find that all three of the projects had closely related roots, and to this
day continue to have a considerable amount of cross-pollunation with their
developers. For example, look at the source code for the Digtial Ethernet
drivers in the source pools. Or alternatively, look at the change logs and
you will see many comments about integrating changes originated in one and
then carried to the other OS(es).
The above should help to explain a bit of why I characterize the OSes as
being similiar. That said, there are definitely differences too. For
example, the security provided by the encrypted swap mechanism in OpenBSD
is currently not something that you find in other OSes. For fun, launch a
"nmap -O" probe against each of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and if
you have it handy, B1 or C2 secured Digital Unix. Pay particular attention
to the "Difficulty" value and the OS it believes it has detected. You may
be supprised at the results. Of course, this is just one small aspect of
looking at the security of an OS.
As for performance, my last serious pass through network performance was
in October/November 1999, and at that time I found that FreeBSD-current
was able to achieve higher peak untilization levels on the network
adapters I was testing (100M and 1G ethernet), and used less system
resources then what was available during that same timeframe and of
a similuar bloody development level in the other OpenSource OSes. My
particular tests forcused largely on caching as a target application.
Does this help? If there are particular things that you would like me to
try to expand upon, I would be happy to try...
- Marc
On Thu, 17 Feb 2000, Paul Courchene wrote:
> Marc Evans said:
>
> >>(tests) I have run indicate that FreeBSD probably has the
> fastest network functionality.
>
> >>The security in FreeBSD tracks very closely
> to OpenBSD too...
>
> Since I know that you have "heavy duty expertise" in the above,
> would you expand on these "one-liners" so that those of us
> with general interest in (Linux and)
> Operating Systems per se', may learn more (???)
>
> thanks
>
> paulc
**********************************************************
To unsubscribe from this list, send mail to
[EMAIL PROTECTED] with the following text in the
*body* (*not* the subject line) of the letter:
unsubscribe gnhlug
**********************************************************
