Some Of The Early Ideas For Intel's New FreeBSD Improvement Effort

[phoronix]

Phoronix: Some Of The Early Ideas For Intel's New FreeBSD Improvement Effort

Two weeks back we shared the news that one of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver veterans decided to change roles and is now focused on improving FreeBSD for Intel hardware. Ben Widawsky is working on FreeBSD improvements that can at least relate to Intel and it turns out the company has a new team of developers on the task...

http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Intel-FreeBSD-Improvement-Ideas

[larkey]

The PlayStation is FreeBSD based and intel wants to develop GPUs... hm.

[aht0]

The PlayStation is FreeBSD based and intel wants to develop GPUs... hm.

Old whine about Playstation and Sony. Playstation has as much relation to FreeBSD PC than Android device has to Linux PC. Memory architecture is different on Playstation, it's not quite x86 hardware-wise and of the operating system it's a mix of FreeBSD kernel, userland and Sony home-grown software. How much use you could have of your Android drivers on a PC platform? How's using Android device's kernel on a fucking Linux PC? How similar it is to vanilla Linux kernel? Wanna send me 4.15 kernel for my S7 phone (3.x something)?

At least that's positive - with Intel's work, most of the arguments Linux-bigots yammer about, are going to become meaningless.

[WolfpackN64]

Old whine about Playstation and Sony. Playstation has as much relation to FreeBSD PC than Android device has to Linux PC. Memory architecture is different on Playstation, it's not quite x86 hardware-wise and of the operating system it's a mix of FreeBSD kernel, userland and Sony home-grown software. How much use you could have of your Android drivers on a PC platform? How's using Android device's kernel on a fucking Linux PC? How similar it is to vanilla Linux kernel? Wanna send me 4.15 kernel for my S7 phone (3.x something)?

At least that's positive - with Intel's work, most of the arguments Linux-bigots yammer about, are going to become meaningless.

Don't be so salty. And the PS4's CPU is bog-standard x86 hardware wise, just a low-powered AMD implementation. There's no special sauce.

[AsuMagic]

Don't be so salty. And the PS4's CPU is bog-standard x86 hardware wise, just a low-powered AMD implementation. There's no special sauce.

The PS4 is surely x86, but nothing like a PC. See fail0verflow's slides on PS4: https://fail0verflow.com/media/33c3-slides/#/22

[grok]

It was wrong to write not quite x86-wise (perhaps it even wakes up as a 8086, for one microsecond) but you might certainly say it's not quite PC hardware. No UEFI or BIOS. Does it even have a PCIe/PCI bus?, a copy of old PC/AT hardware like the interrupt controllers and timers?
Intel themselves released Atom for smartphone which was PC incompatible (not even a PCI bus). It ran Android.

Though anyway, if Sony decides to use a potato or a banana for their next hardware, they'll run a custom FreeBSD kernel on it.

[larkey]

Old whine about Playstation and Sony.

Oh, I was whining? Good to know, apparently you know better. Can you tell me how I currently feel, you seem really good at guessing my feelings. Not.

Playstation has as much relation to FreeBSD PC than Android device has to Linux PC.

The Playstation hardware is no classic IBM PC, that's true, but intel isn't working on I2C or whatever anyway.

Memory architecture is different on Playstation,

how does this matter for intel?

it's not quite x86 hardware-wise

Yes, it is.

and of the operating system it's a mix of FreeBSD kernel, [...]

which is pretty much the only thing intel is probably caring about, ...

[...], userland and Sony home-grown software.

... while this isn't. So the only thing intel is changing is what's shared between an IBM-PC FreeBSD and the Playstation.

How much use you could have of your Android drivers on a PC platform?

This heavily depends on the driver actually, there are projects which are not unsuccessful getting mainline to run on normal Android devices. Quite much is shared on a good codebase, which Linux isn't actually, but it still works quite well there.

At least that's positive - with Intel's work, most of the arguments Linux-bigots yammer about, are going to become meaningless.

Now I understand where all the Linux-bigots *you* whine about are: In your head.

Anyhow, I'm actually one of those who aren't really happy with Linux (the kernel), so yes, I really think this is a good thing (although I'd have preferred Solaris).

[Guest]

At least that's positive - with Intel's work, most of the arguments Linux-bigots yammer about, are going to become meaningless.

You made my day freebsd bigot. It was proven for many times you have no arguments. Netflix? No kidding, it's running on Linux. Servers? The same and so on. Oh, are you aware it's just ONE developer?

[danboid]

The ongoing FreeBSD vs Linux arguments on here are sad, pathetic and pointless.

[Kazuo-Omura]

This is good news and I'm happy to see on of the most vital competitors to Linux getting some love from Intel.

On these petty arguments between FreeBSD supporters and Linux supporters I try to just ignore them. Especially after reading Pawlerson's post history I want no part of that.

All I'm for is competition and the status quo being constantly reworked, in particular I'm hoping all of this RedHat-ware that has been hoisted onto the modern Linux desktop, I.e. dbus, gstreamer, polkit etc. Be replaced by something far more cohesive that actually fixes the underlying issues of the Linux kernel, I.e.:

The lack of a good STREAMS protocol implementation rather than trying to put an object-based IPC into an OS concept it doesn't work well in.

The lack of good media and audio libraries as well as poor kernel support (ALSA is rubbish due to its blocking I/O, and Pulse introduces latency and other issues by trying to fix it.)

And application developers and distro devs reinventing the wheel regarding desktop security while essentially chasing their own tails in a circle.

Not to say the BSDs do not have serious issues or that Solaris/illumos or any other OS doesnt have them itself, but a cohesive design philosophy is something the Linux ecosystem lacks.