[TUHS] Re: Fwd: [simh] Announcing the Open SIMH project

[Warner Losh <imp@bsdimp.com>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 2669 bytes --]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2022, 5:48 PM Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Fri, Jun 03, 2022 at 04:52:52PM -0600, Warner Losh wrote:
> > > The problem is there was {386,Net,Free,Open,DragonFly}BSD where there
> > > should have just been "BSD".  One, not a bunch.
> > >
> >
> > Except from 1993-1996 there were only two of those BSDs. NetBSD and
> FreeBSD
> > forked in 1993 due to the inability of the patchkit to adequately cover
> the
> > problems
> > in 386BSD governance.
>
> Um, so there were 3: 386, Net and Free.  That's already 2 too many.
>

No. 386BSD died before then.

> > Where do you think Linux would be if there was {A,B,C,D,E,F,G}Linux?
> > > There is one kernel.  One and only one.  With everyone working on that
> > > one kernel.
> >
> > Except there never really was only one kernel. There have been hundreds
> > of forks of the Linux kernel over the years. Most of them have been
> > commercial
> > of some flavor (Redhat, Debian, OpenSUSE, MontaVista, WindRiver, Android
> > etc)
> > had hundreds or thousands of patches on the base Linux kernel for a long
> > time
> > and trying to move from one to another if you also had patches was a
> > nightmare.
>
> So I had a successful commercial product that ran on all of those variants
> without issue.  I supported linux on everything from ARM to IBM's z-system
> mainframes and all the arches inbetween.  I think I have one #ifdef SPARC
> in there because there was a cache flush bug but that was a hardware issue,
> not a software issue.
>
> I also supported {Free,Net,Open}BSD and I had way more problems with them
> than I did with Linux.
>
> > Kernel.org has kept going, and many of the chanages from these systems
> were
> > lost.
> > Some were not as good as what came in upstream, while others were
> encumbered
> > by commercial contracts that made them unappealing to upstream. True,
> many
> > of
> > them did wind up in kernel.org, but to say there aren't forks in Linux
> is
> > stretching
> > reality a bit...
>
> There is one kernel development stream that matters.  RedHat knows that
> if they don't get their stuff into Linus' tree, they have a nightmare
> on their hands.  That's why RedHat paid so many of the kernel developers.
>
> Sure, there are forks, but there is one tree that matters, and that is
> Linus' tree.  You can't say that about BSD and that is the problem in
> it's entirety.  If I want to change BSD, which one?
>

By your standards, only FreeBSD matters... so that's easy.. but you already
said Redhat is all that matters... and that kernel differs somewhat from
Linus'. Ditto if you are dealing with Android... it's not just one Linux
and never has been.

Warner

>

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3833 bytes --]