On 2011-08-03 12.00, Alex Goncharov wrote:
,--- I/Alex (Tue, 02 Aug 2011 15:33:06 -0400) ----* | | The poster says that NetBSD is faster. | | Since it was in response to my explorations: no offense to the NetBSD | users and developers, but after trying to use NetBSD for a while, I | had to turn back to FreeBSD, completely. On the topic of the "vs". A huge difference between Net* and Free* is the disk labeling and partitioning schemas: I spent innumerable hours learning the subtleties of the NetBSD partitioning and had to modify the labels by hand setting four OSes on one system: i386 and amd64 of each NetBSD and FreeBSD. NetBSD partitioning felt unbelievably complex and inflexible compared to the FreeBSD. A new install of NetBSD on a disk was practically a guaranteed way to disable or blow away an existing FreeBSD installation, wherever a FreeBSD has never done any damage to anything already on the disk in my long use of it. And on the laptop side: Nvidia builds drivers for Linux and FreeBSD. I am not sure it does that for NetBSD. Just summarizing my experience.
I understand the experience, but the reason behind it is the total opposite, I'd say. The disk labeling system in NetBSD is the more flexible of the two. But that comes with an added complexity.
However, the complexity arise from the fact that there is another partitioning scheme as well (for PC systems). The NetBSD disk partitioning is the pure, original BSD disk labels, which are machine agnostic and are designed for clean disks. The additional cruft in a PC is what creates all the confusion, with the MBR partitioning. NetBSD bascially ignores it (well, it can read this, manipulate it, and use it to help you setup a BSD partition), and only uses its own partitioning. That causes confusion unless you understand all of it.
The partitioning in other systems acts as sub-partitioning under the PC MBR partitioning scheme.
For me, that is a much more confusing thing, since I look at the BSD partitioning as the master (I'm used to non-PC systems).
The BSD partitioning, as set up on a NetBSD system is free to use all or nothing of the disk, as you want. Total freedom. Total flexibility.
Johnny