Greg Earle wrote:
> You might be surprised.  It's my impression that All-64-Bit, All-The-Time
> is *hard*.  Witness Solaris - you'd think that, by Solaris 9, with 3 OS
> releases that are 64-bit under Sun's belt, that you could just build
> everything as 64-bit and have it work, but that's still not even the case.
> 
> In the last few months I've seen my 64-bit Solaris "tcpdump" binary
> croak ("yy_flex_alloc()" returning a value outside of the 64-bit
> address space) and Berkeley DB 4.2.52 as well (svctcp_create() - a
> Sun routine!  It's inside libnsl.so - also returning a value outside of
> the 64-bit address space, because a stub RPC ".x" file provided in the
> distribution was run through an "rpcgen" in 32-bit mode, not 64-bit).
> So even with all this time to get things right, it's still clear that the
> world is not 64-bit safe/clean yet ...
> 
>> I think it would be a tremendous help if more kernel hackers 
>> contributed to NetBSD.  I know I will as soon as I learn kernel 
>> programming.
> 
> 
> If I had a ruble for how many times I've seen people post "as soon as I
> learn ..." over the last 10 years, I'd be rich ;)
> 
>    - Greg
> 
> 

I don't dispute the fact that system and kernel programming is hard. I 
think NetBSD developers do an amazing job, i.e it's the most portable 
OS. I just think that commercial OSes like Solaris have some advantage 
due to large investments made by Sun, i.e. they can hire as many 
developers as they like, provide the financial support, tools and 
hardware to develop a particular product. And as you pointed out they 
still get some things wrong.