At 07:47 PM 11/11/2005, Michael Vince wrote:
I prefer the idea of the FreeBSD team aiming at only the latest
hardware, all I use is brand new server equipment.
I don't like the idea that FreeBSD features and performance development
could be hampered by the core guys trying to make stuff work on old
hardware, in fact if it was a fact that a lot more performance and
features could be in 6.x if they dropped support for everything below
1ghz for x86 I would be happy
Supporting older hardware is not some bad decision made by core, it is
a general design and philosophy point of not only FreeBSD, but unix
and the community in general. That is a very selfish statement, and
rather rediculous actually, that the tens of thousands of people
running older hardware (example: Yahoo! - pentium of about half that
speed serving hundreds of thousands of http requests per day) should
upgrade to 1ghz machines because that's what you use. Even Windows
runs on less than that.
But you are always welcome to make your own version that supports only that.
I said it in terms of an over the top example to maximize a trigger
of thoughts in this area of topic, such as an example of movement as
those more in the realms of what MS do with what their standard is
in hardware support for modern operating systems, luckily I am just
'some guy' on the mailing list and have little what so ever say to
what happens on FreeBSD.
I don't believe its a very selfish statement at all. When I say get
rid of old hardware the one of the largest flow of thoughts that go
through my mind is the support future world energy needs. Most
scientists tell you that there will be a world energy crisis
sometime in the future and people should be prepared to pay money
money for the energy they use.
Its energy crisis web sites are all over the Internet. While some
people fear a nuclear attack from terrorists or nuclear war in
general if you want to fear a day of doom some people will tell you
there is something even more terrifying and just as destructive
coming our way, that is running out of cheap energy, hard to
understand? I recommend to any one using a PC for the single use of
a home gateway or using power in ways that aren't ideal but simply
because energy is cheap simply because they can get away with it the
get the DVD 'The End of Suburbia'. It will tell you that as the
world hits its energy peak the cost of fuel will always go up in the
world market every time there is any kind of issue and barely go
back down (as it has lately). They claim the cost of moving around
in suburbia will get so expensive that the value of the suburban
house will fall through the floor and ruin a lot of lives since most
people put their life savings investing in their home assuming it
will increase in value over time.
http://www.endofsuburbia.com/
http://www.energycrisis.com/
While most people aren't using a pentium 1 to run a water sprinkler
system, there are a countless amount of people using machines for
things that aren't ideally power efficient. A lot of people using
old PCs and Internet gateways in their home network and nothing
else. This is a 24 hour PC running just to provide Internet where a
basic Netgear home router 500ma device can do it just as well,
(5volts * 0.5amp = 2.5watts), a lot of people use FreeBSD as a
server in some way on a network and need to keep it somewhat up to
date for security reasons this also means 24 hour running. A lot of
people on the FreeBSD mailing lists like the idea of getting rid of
their clunky old PC routers and still using a good firewall like
Packet Filter by using the MIPS based linksys WRT54G router that
could run FreeBSD, while there is no port for this on FreeBSD the
closest front for this would be NetBSD.
So, it's better to buy a shiny new piece of low power equipment, than
to use an older yet perfectly suitable piece of equipment that needs
more power to operate? I wonder how long it would take for the
additional power consumed by the older equipment to equal the amount
of power it took to design, build, distribute and market the shiny
new piece of low power equipment... the second law of thermodynamics
comes to mind...
Its really a case of the dark side of the force is clouds your vision.
Most people who have a properly functioning conscious mind who setup
a PC as nothing more then a gateway for a small band of traffic feel
a bit of guilt when they do it while others are just ignorant or
work under the theme of what they can get away with is OK. Lets just
continue this line of thought, how about the rich and powerful
nations go dropping barrels of nuclear waste out of airplanes on
poor nations, this is something they could probably 'get away with'
but its not right thing to do.
A lot of people wondered how Steve Jobs could dare change over to Intel chips.
In Steve Jobs keynote speech announcing the big move Intel chips was
just about entirely stated as because of the 'performance per watt
ratio' of Intel CPUs. Check out the picture of the key note speech
and look at the bottom of the picture with Intel and IBM's PowerPC processor.
http://images.anandtech.com/reviews/tradeshows/2005/WWDC/perfperwatt.jpg
Big tech industry is trying to take some responsibility for people
and Intel and AMD are already making it easier to build desktop
systems using their mobile chips, check out more on Anandtech for that.
If Yahoo are using countless thousands of old Pentiums as stated
earlier then they should take a chunk of the countless millions of
dollars they have made over the years using FreeBSD and invest it
back into FreeBSD so they can enjoy a better 'performance per watt
ratio' as Steve Jobs calls it and condense the amount of systems
they have. Apple should be doing the same thing and giving back to
FreeBSD if its taken so much of its work, unfortunately big business
thinks exactly the same way as a guy who runs a PC as purely a low
bandwidth home gateway and thats what I can 'get away with' is OK.
The only thing that often works in these situations is discussion
and public pressure. There is selfishness in every direction but I
believe my points of view aren't selfish at all.
Someone correct me if I'm mistaken, but wasn't a good portion of the
work on gcc 4 done by folks at Apple? Not a contribution to FreeBSD
per se, but certainly a contribution to the open source community.
I am not trying to particularly push anything but I do enjoying
providing some thoughts for those who fail to think.
Who decides who has failed to think? you?
-Glenn
Mike
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