Re: [TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives

Henry Bent <henry.r.bent(a)gmail.com> wrote: Nothing in the open-source (OS) world churns and moves around and grows and wiggles as much as Linux. The rate of change of the kernel is simply incomprehensibly staggering. Linux userland isn't much better off. In the commercial (OS) world Microsoft might be churning at a similar rate. Apple on the other hand is relatively stable by comparison -- too stable at times and not always regularly picking up fixes from third-party projects they make use of. Apple is guilty of extreme churn in their GUI though -- at least from a user's perspective (perhaps their APIs are a bit more stable, but somehow from observing them from afar I highly doubt it). Apple's ABIs seem relatively stable -- I still run a few binary apps (albeit quite simple ones) I installed over a decade ago and haven't updated since. At Mon, 8 Feb 2021 22:05:57 -0900, Michael Huff <mphuff(a)gmail.com> wrote: Subject: Re: [TUHS] Macs and future unix derivatives Indeed, NetBSD/i386 is still a "tier 1" port as of the 9.1 release last fall: http://wiki.NetBSD.org/ports/ Note there is a caveat with regard to true 80386: "Any i486 or better CPU should work - genuine Intel or a compatible such as Cyrix, AMD, or NexGen." Also NetBSD comes with a good group of compatability and emulation modules for its kernel ABI, including support for both all of its own older releases, as well as for port-specific third-party ABI emulations, such as Linux and SCO Unix. See for example: https://wiki.NetBSD.org/guide/linux/ I've only once ever needed to run a Linux binary, and quite a long time ago, so I'm not so up to date on these things, but it may well be that NetBSD/i386 can run old 32-bit Linux i386 binaries better than any current release of Linux. Personally I work in a world where there's source code for every application I use, which means I generally only need backward compatability for the earliest release I might be running at any given time -- I.e. just enough to keep things running after an upgrade while I get it all re-compiled and tested. Really good backward compatability for older kernel and library ABIs is a cornerstone of NetBSD release engineering. It is very well designed and implemented and it is pretty much guaranteed to work or get fixed. Unlike Linux it doesn't rely on shared libraries to work, and also the system shared libraries have very good backward compatability support as well. I.e. NetBSD backward compatability is far more complete and reliable at all levels (including ABIs and their APIs) -- Greg A. Woods <gwoods(a)acm.org> Kelowna, BC +1 250 762-7675 RoboHack <woods(a)robohack.ca> Planix, Inc. <woods(a)planix.com> Avoncote Farms <woods(a)avoncote.ca>