Re: choosing the right platform

On Wed, Apr 09, 2003 at 01:13:46PM -0400, Matthew Nuzum wrote:
> Finally, can someone suggest a *BSD to evaluate?  FreeBSD 4.8? 5.0? Is Apple
> a good choice? (I've heard it's based on BSD Unix)

FreeBSD has 3 different branches:

-current:
This is bleeding edge. Definitely need to be careful with this one, and
it's not recommended for production.

-stable:
This is still a 'live' branch that any FBSD coder can (generally) commit
to, but they are far more careful about breaking this branch. Not as
stable as a release branch, but it's probably suitable for production so
long as you're careful to test things.

release branches:
Every time an official release is done (ie: 4.8), a branch is created.
The only code committed to these branches are security patches and fixes
for very serious bugs. These branches are extremely stable.

5.0 is the first release after several years of development in -current.
It incorporates some major changes designed to allow the kernel to run
multi-threaded. However, unlike what usually happens, 5.0 is not
considered to be -stable yet. First, this is still very new code;
second, I believe there's some performance issues that are still being
addressed. The intention is that 5.1 will be the first -stable release
of the 5.x code.

Because you're looking for something that's production ready, you
probably want 4.8 (cvs tag RELENG_4_8). However, if you don't plan to
hit production until late this year (when 5.1 should be out), you might
want to try 5.0.

Far more info is available at http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html

BTW, I've heard of many, many companies moving their Oracle installs
from Sun to RS/6000 because RS/6000's typically need 1/2 the processors
that Sun does for a given load. If you're going to look at big-iron,
RS/6000 is definitely worth a look if you see anything.
--
Jim C. Nasby (aka Decibel!)                    jim@nasby.net
Member: Triangle Fraternity, Sports Car Club of America
Give your computer some brain candy! www.distributed.net Team #1828

Windows: "Where do you want to go today?"
Linux: "Where do you want to go tomorrow?"
FreeBSD: "Are you guys coming, or what?"