[SunRescue] Objective facts and biased opinions about OS choice <very long>

[Patrick Giagnocavo]

> OpenBSD: I'll say it straight out, OpenBSD is my favorite operating system.
> It runs very well on every hardware platform I have used it on, and I
> consider it to be the best operating system available for x86 systems.
> OpenBSD is mainly derived from NetBSD which is probably the most widely
> ported OS on the planet. If a platform isnt specifically supported by
> OpenBSD, it can often be "upgraded" to OpenBSD standard from NetBSD.
> 
> Properly configured OpenBSD is probably the fastest OS available for x86,
> older SPARC, 68k, and PPC. It runs well on UltraSPARC and Alpha but the
> kernel doesnt efectivley take advantage of 64 bit architectures. OpenBSD has
> excellent SMP support and is extremely scalable. It has a very low resource
> footprint, running reliably on machines with 16mb or less (a LOT less in
> some cases) and can have extremely low disk utilization. Also thanks to the
> wonders of lxrun, many Linux binaries will run on OpenBSD.

I am confused here.  IIRC OpenBSD has virtually NO SMP support, and the
lxrun program is for Solaris, not OpenBSD.  OpenBSD has a "emulator" where
you can almost-transparently run Linux, FreeBSD and BSDi binaries, and
depending on platform can handle SunOS , etc.

> OpenBSD is in my experience the most secure commercially available general
> purpose network operating system. All of it's core and much of it's ancilary
> code is continuously security audited. OpenBSD has gone as much as three
> years without a remote root compromise.

It is VERY good.  I like it a great deal.  Once they get even better
threading than they have now, that will be wonderful.  One of my apps is
threaded and doesn't run so well under OBSD.

> That being said, it does what most USERS want, which is email, web browsing,
> listening to music, and playing games. It is also the king of commercial
> applications availability.

The answer really is to let the end users have the pretty desktop and then
do anything that MATTERS under Unix.  For instance, you can have ODBC
connecting to a remote Unix-based database, rather than fscking around with
Access "multi-user" mode.

> Windows NT: A good network operating system gone bad ;-) NT started life as
> a serious NOS. It was there to provide file, print, and directory services
> ala novell or VMS. Which is appropriate since the core VMS guys are also the
> core NT guys. Then Solaris started getting some real press about desktop use
> in the financial and scientific communities, and Microsoft decided they had
> to make NT a general purpose OS. SO they grafted on a desktop and user
> systems, and voila instant mess.

I knew this would happen when they decided to put the graphics device driver
INTO the kernel.  They claimed that they couldn't get good performance
otherwise.  Meanwhile X servers with equivalent graphics performance were
running out of kernel under Unix.  Lyin' SOBs...

> NT is a huge resource hog. In theory NT will run properly on a 486dx33 with
> 24mb of ram. Realistically I wont run NT on anythign with less than 128mb if
> given a choice. Anyone who uses NT on a regular basis will tell you, more
> RAM means happier box up until 512mb or so. After that the rather
> inefficient memory management kicks in and you start gettgin memory
> management issues and leaks. The more RAM you have the worse they get.

A friend of mine was told in his MCSE class that basically, NT's mem. mgmt
is "reserve half for the kernel, apps get the other half".  I don't know if
that is literally true or just a rule of thumb to use for sizing RAM req'ts,
but it sounds right.

> As far as security goes, forget about it. In my opinion, because of the
> inherenet insecurity of windows networking, you cannot effectivley secure an
> NT system in a windows networking environment. The only thing you can do is
> stick a firewall in front of it. Without windows networking, NT is
> effectivley isolated, unable to share files or print, thus not very useful
> in it's intended role.

You CANNOT turn NetBIOS OFF.  Period.  Probably this is fixed in 2K, maybe.

> BeOS: Elegant, very very elegant. Great memory management, great graphics,
> great sounds, good looking, resource efficient.
> Horrible networking, no security, little application availability, poor
> hardware support.

QNX for graphics and C++ nerds, IMHO.

> Classic is very easy to use, and looks very good. Someone who's never used a
> computer before will have a much easier time figuring out a Mac than jsut
> about nay other computer.

What IRIX would be if the original designers only had 4MHz and 128K to play
with.  :-) 

> OS-X is essentially the first release of a new BSD based UNIX, with a lot of
> propietary extensions. It's immature thus far, but has a lot of potential.
> And of course being BSD based in particular Mach microkernel BSD based, the
> problems that classic had are greatly alleviated.

I disagree a little.  The core is a reworked version of
NeXtStep/NEXTSTEP/NextStep (you can spell it any way), while they upgraded
stuff and changed some things, the issues that they had to deal with were
well known.  Avi Tevanian has been working with Mach since about 1983.
There's another guy whose name escapes me (Rick Rashad???) who had some
input as well.  I think both were from CMU in Pittsburgh originally.

Cordially

Patrick Giagnocavo
patrick at zill.net