On Thu, 20 Jan 2000 crvich@us.ibm.com wrote:
>      Having ported our project to NetBSD 1.3.3, we are obviously interested
> in porting to FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well.  A colleague claimed that BSD
> a.out objects should be usable as-is on all three OS's, but I've tried our
> exe's on OpenBSD 2.5 with no luck ("Bad system call").  And we are even
> statically linked with ALL libraries (libc, etc.), so it shouldn't be a lib
> compatibility problem.


>      Is it possible to create exe's on one of these BSDs and use them as-is
> on the others?  Any tricks, hints, or caveats to this approach?  We're not
> aversed to creating separate "native" ports for each one, but obviously
> just creating a single port would be preferable.  TIA.

we should be able to run FreeBSD binaries. 
 See, for example, http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/features.html#emulation

Don't know about OpenBSD binaries or the ability of {Open,Free}BSD to run
NetBSD binaries. 

I suspect that you'll have pretty good luck compiling on all 3 OS's.  A
disadvange of compiling on FreeBSD is you can't target some of the other
machine architectures that NetBSD supports. (powerpc, sparc, etc)

Can I ask about what the project is or is it internal only?  Just
curious...

-Dan