The State of BSD At the Start of 2013 91
An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD developer Julian Djamil Fagir provides a nice briefing on what the big three BSD projects have been working on, and explains/reminds us of their cultural differences. Stick a fork in them? Yes, Djamil Fagir mentions a couple of those, too. The recent releases from FreeBSD and NetBSD were covered by Slashdot."
Re:Dragonfly BSD ?? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:A copy of the article: (Score:5, Informative)
Where's the FreeBSD cloud servers? There ARE NONE.
You mean like RootBSD [rootbsd.net]?
BSD is pretty cool (Score:5, Informative)
What I find funny is that BSD is finally, after 10 years of ATT/UNIX trademark fearing BS, starting to not only catch up but exceed in technical developments and market growth. :( And now even Linux is stealing back clean-roomed BSD code that the BSD projects clean-roomed from GPL tools specifically to get away from GPL versions of same. How funny is that :) :)
I've used it as my main desktop for almost 15 years. Well, ok FreeBSD specifically. I run Linux, and a little windows too. All the servers are BSD.
BSD has ZFS, which is the reason Linux has ZFS, because BTRFS is still vaporware.
And because of the ultimate freedom of the BSD two/three clause license all other OS can use BSD code.
But Linux is a zealous camp and insists on infecting people
And now with CLANG/LLVM things are really moving.
No, BSD is not dying, it's building very long term openness and business friendly models, much longer term and open visioned than Linux. BSD cares about these things. One way to see that is the FreeBSD foundation's donations page, the model is working.
Linux is better than it was in the 90s and 2000s, it doesn't crash on me like it used to. They'll both still crash if you poke them in certain ways. But as a daily use, BSD hasn't ever exibited what I used to see with Linux.
Oh, there is also PC-BSD for users, which is sort of like Ubuntu to Debian.
I like not having to worry about KERNEL from Linux + GNU from third parties to make a whole OS... BSD projects provide the sum of those two IN HOUSE. You get the whole OS from one shop. So all that is left is the packages you want to install like X, Firefox, GIMP, whatever just like any other OS.
Anyways, I'm just happy with FreeBSD (and OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD, don't really use NetBSD because they're more embedded).
If you're a Linux user and haven't tried it, grab an ISO and run it in a VM. Don't freak because you might not have a sexy GUI installer with pointy clicky AJAX menus and stuff (that's coming), but take a look at the configuration mechanism after you're up and running, how you update and build the kernel and world... the overall BSD model of things.
See if you like it maybe
Some shortcomings of the article (Score:4, Informative)
I read TFA. I was rather disappointed that in the list of BSD's accomplishments, no mention was made of IPv6, where FBSD was the pioneer. It was the first to have support from the KAME project, and later, in version 9, they even had the IPv6 only mode, which users could use if they wanted to test whether applications work w/ IPv6 w/o a fallback to IPv4. They would also have done well to have described PC-BSD's EasyPBI package manager, which even FBSD seems to have adapted, as well as the Linux jails in FBSD and PC-BSD.
On the OBSD side, they could have described their routing and firewall capabilities. Also, they could have, in the FBSD part, described m0n0wall and pFsense, and compared them w/ OpenBSD
On the NBSD side, I don't see NetBSD playing much of a role. If they are targeting embedded devices, they would do better to team up w/ Minix3.2, which, as a really small microkernel would be better suited for embedded applications, and focus on the things mentioned, whether it's file systems, networking, getting non-GNU utilities (like FBSD, they too ought to endorse and adapt LLVM/Clang) and Wayland. Since Minix 3.2 is under a BSD license and has adapted the NBSD conventions, it would be a good idea simply to merge them. I mean, does the NBSD kernel have anything special about it that Minix 3.2 doesn't deliver
Re:OSX is doing great (Score:5, Informative)
OSX may have been certified as Unix, but it has been diverging from its ancestor so much that it no longer feels Unix-like in the least.
Some examples:
- no /dev (bye-bye Unix philosophy cornerstone "everything is a file");
- unusable "locate" that doesn't find all the stuff it should (because Apple wants you to use Spotlight, the command line is bad, you silly!);
- much of the userland isn't aware of the HFS+ filesystem extensions (have fun cp'ing files, discovering months later that - oops! - the stuff had a resource fork and is now unusable -- verrry dependable!);
- case insensitive filesystem by default, you could switch to case sensitive for compatibility with any other Unix in the universe (have fun reformatting and reinstalling) but - alas! - important application software won't support it (photoshop & others);
- no cron! If you want to get it to do things periodically, you either gotta write freaking XML for launchd, or run Vixie Cron in addition to launchd. No thanks!
If OSX is Unix, it's the worst Unix I've ever seen. No serious command line nerd could ever like it (OTOH, it's perfect for know-nothings who like to click on pretty pictures). Using it is a totally different (as in "worse") experience than using any BSD (or Linux!), so spare me the old "OSX is BSD" hearsay!
Re:OSX is doing great (Score:5, Informative)
iOS is doing even better.
There seem to be some uninformed posters here, so here is the OS X relationship to BSD:
The OS X/iOS kernel is based on Mach, which is a microkernel mashed together with a BSD kernel. It has a lot of BSD code in it and continues to share code with the other BSDs. It has features borrowed from BSD such as DTrace, PF firewall, file system support (including ZFS before it was removed), the networking subsystem, kqueue, jails, and others. While Mach is fundamentally different in some ways, to a POSIX binary it looks and feels just like any other BSD system.
The OS X userland is also based on BSD and was originally derived from FreeBSD. It uses the BSD libc and many of the command line tools are from the BSD world (from grep to ssh). It also includes some GNU tools, such as bash. Apple is actively working on replacing many of these, and they recently dropped GCC and GDB and replaced them with Clang and LLDB.