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The BSD family tree

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Re: The BSD family tree

#51

Post by bluejekyll »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #20
tiffanyh wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, looking at the family tree above - I can't help but think how this has fractured the BSD development community. Unlike Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base - BSD doesn't, which from a technical standpoint causes way more forking and less contributions back to a main tree.

I don't think the situation is that different. Linux being the kernel, there are lots of "Linux distros", some of which are almost as different from each other as FreeBSD and NetBSD. For example, consider the many package managers (deb, rpm, Nix, etc.), init systems (SysV, Upstart, Systemd, etc.), graphical environments, etc. The BSDs have a different philosophy where the kernel and userland go together as one packag…

It's not entirely accurate to say the Linux kernel wasn't forked. There are many distros that manage a separate kernel from the standard releases and backport individual changes, RHEL is an example of this.

Now it's not exactly accurate to call this a fork either b/c they do eventually catch up... but still, lots of non-standard kernels out there.

Re: The BSD family tree

#52

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

Esau wrote: post #50
hvs wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There really hasn't been that much forking. FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonFlyBSD and Darwin being the only existing operating systems. On top of that, they are complete operating systems with a user environment and kernel. You can't directly compare them to "Linux" which is only a kernel. You could more accurately compare them to Linux distributions (FreeBSD Ubuntu). When looked at that way, the "fractured" communi…

I don't think it is proper to consider Darwin a BSD fork. My understanding is that it is a Mack kernel with elements borrowed from BSD.

It's not a "fork" per se, but it is reasonable to describe Darwin as a member of the BSD family tree, descended largely from FreeBSD. My understanding, based on my memory and the [Wikipedia page](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU) is that the XNU kernel was built out of Mach, but then had 4.3BSD grafted on to provide a normal-looking UNIX API, which was later upgraded using FreeBSD. But it isn't a normal BSD, certainly; Darwin still shows its Mach heritage in the way it does process management and message passing.

Re: The BSD family tree

#53

Post by digi_owl »

reavon wrote: post #16
djsumdog wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was wondering about that; didn't realize it was NeXT. A friend of mine still has his original NeXT box for the short time he worked on it. I was also surprised at the origins of DarwinBSD. I never really looked up the history and didn't realize it forked some of the code off FreeBSD. It's interesting to note that the PS4 OS is also a forked FreeBSD variant as well.

Jordon Hubbard even worked at Apple for a bit.

Kinda funny watching him getting rebuffed when trying to convince FreeBSD to adopt Launchd.

Sometimes i wish the same kind of attitude towards stability would be a prevalent in the Linux world, rather than the magpie like chase of shinies.

Re: The BSD family tree

#54

Post by jle17 »

hvs wrote: post #42
ksec wrote: post #36

So what happened to NextBSD, has FreeBSD 12 essentially replaced it?

NextBSD was a fork of FreeBSD that used a microkernel and components from Darwin. It was not intended to replace FreeBSD. That said, it looks like the project died well before it was ready for production use.

> that used a microkernel

I though they just added Mach IPC ?

Re: The BSD family tree

#55

Post by kps »

drewg123 wrote: post #25

It is funny.. I was just combing through old BSDs earlier today. I'm giving an internal talk next week about some changes I've been making to mbufs, and I was trying to find out when mbufs were introduced. They've been around since before I wrote my first FreeBSD, Tru64, and BSDI drivers in the 90s. The earliest I can find is 4.1c from 1983, but that looks more fully formed that I expected. And there is a fragment in…

The Unix Heritage Society¹ has earlier: http://www.tuhs.org/

Re: The BSD family tree

#56

Post by na85 »

tedunangst wrote: post #43
kryptiskt wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would a GPL license have prevented any split between the open source variants of BSD? Why would it have made Theo happy to stay with NetBSD? Also, Linux have longstanding forks, the Android kernel and the real-time tree to take two prominent examples.

GPL, dude. It solves all the problems.

There seems to be a large(ish?) portion of the free software community that devotes a large amount of its time and energy to handwringing and general agitating about licenses.

I really don't get it: Companies are routinely shown to be ignoring GPL and other licensing with zero consequence and your average computer user probably doesn't even understand the concept of a source code license.

Does anyone really think that if OpenBSD had some GPL'ed code in there, and $company was taking that code and distributing it closed-source, that there would be any consequences whatsoever? If so, why does this never make the news? If not, then why do these people bother?

Re: The BSD family tree

#57

Post by tedunangst »

na85 wrote: post #56
tedunangst wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GPL, dude. It solves all the problems.

There seems to be a large(ish?) portion of the free software community that devotes a large amount of its time and energy to handwringing and general agitating about licenses. I really don't get it: Companies are routinely shown to be ignoring GPL and other licensing with zero consequence and your average computer user probably doesn't even understand the concept of a source code license. Does anyone really think tha…

One of the reasons I like BSD license as an author, philosophy aside, is there's simply much less policing involved.

Re: The BSD family tree

#58

Post by JdeBP »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #52
Esau wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it is proper to consider Darwin a BSD fork. My understanding is that it is a Mack kernel with elements borrowed from BSD.

It's not a "fork" per se, but it is reasonable to describe Darwin as a member of the BSD family tree, descended largely from FreeBSD. My understanding, based on my memory and the [Wikipedia page]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU ) is that the XNU kernel was built out of Mach, but then had 4.3BSD grafted on to provide a normal-looking UNIX API, which was later upgraded using FreeBSD. But it isn't a normal BSD, certa…

Consider this one case study in the similarities of XNU, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD:

* http://unix.stackexchange.com/a/350824/5132

Re: The BSD family tree

#59

Post by JdeBP »

sverige wrote: post #12

I love the BSDs. I just took a personal tour of the current state of affairs in BSD-land. I can't get WiFi to work with OpenBSD on an old Thinkpad T60 I recently got, so I've been trying all the other BSDs on it to see what works. A couple of them won't boot at all. WiFi works best with FreeBSD and HardenedBSD, which is unusual on laptops in my experience.

I've just had a similar experience with an old 32-bit CPU Acer Aspire One. I tried what modern 32-bit BSDs I had, including GhostBSD and OpenBSD. Only FreeBSD 10.3 drove the WiFi network adapter. Interestingly, FreeBSD 11 did not. So there's a regression of some sort in there, somewhere.
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