Subject: Re: Debian runs on more archs than NetBSD?
To: Aaron J. Grier <agrier@poofygoof.com>
From: Lennart Augustsson <lennart@augustsson.net>
List: netbsd-advocacy
Date: 10/16/2001 01:36:25
"Aaron J. Grier" wrote:

> On Mon, Oct 15, 2001 at 04:22:26PM -0700, Mike Cheponis wrote:
> > I friend sent this to me:
> >
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> > Debian currently supports more architectures than any other open OS...  the
> > NetBSD *kernel* may support more, but I doubt it (other than 32532, and mine
> > has really been collecting dust!).  See
> >
> >        http://buildd.debian.org/stats/graph.png
> > -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >
> > Is this true?
>
> the graph lists the following 13 architectures:
>
> alpha
> arm
> hppa
> hurd-i386, i386
> ia64
> m68k
> mips, mipsel
> powerpc
> s390
> sh
> sparc
>
> arguably we could shrink that down to 11 distinct processor families by
> combining hurd-i386 and i386, and mips and mipsel.
>
> the NetBSD system (complete and self-hosting) runs on 11 processor
> familes:
>
> alpha
> arm
> i386
> m68k
> mips
> ns32k
> powerpc
> sh3
> sparc
> vax
> x86_64
>
> debian supports hppa and s390.
> NetBSD supports vax and ns32k.
>
> looks like a tie to me.  :)  anybody know how NetBSD/s390 and
> NetBSD/hppa are coming?

But,IMHO, counting processor families is bogus.  A new processor is not
that difficult to port to now that gcc handles "everything".  The weirdo busses
and devices on a new platform is as much of challange, I'd say.

    -- Lennart