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The Unleashed Operating System

unleashed-os.org

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Re: The Unleashed Operating System

#11

Post by rwmj »

erikb wrote: post #10

These are not goals. Every OS in the world has contributions and releases. Linux has the goal to be pragmatic, BSDs have the goal to be technically perfect in a certain area, Windows had the goal to be on every desktop computer in the world and more, and OSX has the goal to be smooth and sharp. If your highest goal is that someone contributes code to your OS why would anybody use it? Think about htat question and you…

If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel.

Now I will admit this is going to be tricky. How do you dissuade junk contributions or misfeatures but at the same time encourage contributions? They may end up with an overall declining quality which kills off other goals such as user adoption.

Re: The Unleashed Operating System

#13

Post by snw »

siteshwar wrote: post #9

> Unleashed is an operating system fork of illumos, Can someone explain why it was forked ?

Probably someone from the unleashed project can give a better answer, but my understanding is mostly unhappiness about the illumos contribution process.

The illumos RTI (request to integrate) process is designed to ensure a certain quality of contributions. The downside of this is that it sometimes takes a long time to contribute a change.

For illumos there is also pretty high expectation of backwards compatibility. What unleashed now offers is a place to do more radical changes and quickly iterate on new ideas.

While the small illumos community is already pretty fragmented my personal hope is that in the future work done by both projects keeps getting merged from time to time. Maybe this also serves as a wakeup call to the illumos project to make some improvements to the contribution process itself.

Re: The Unleashed Operating System

#14

Post by linuxftw »

rwmj wrote: post #11
erikb wrote: post #10

These are not goals. Every OS in the world has contributions and releases. Linux has the goal to be pragmatic, BSDs have the goal to be technically perfect in a certain area, Windows had the goal to be on every desktop computer in the world and more, and OSX has the goal to be smooth and sharp. If your highest goal is that someone contributes code to your OS why would anybody use it? Think about htat question and you…

If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel. Now I will admit this is going to be tricky. How do you dissuade junk contributions or misfeatures but at the same time encourage contributions? They may end up with an over…

> If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel.

I have contributed a small 1-time change to the Linux kernel. It was relatively easy and straight forward; I sent my first patch to the wrong list, but the maintainers helpfully corrected me.

The difficult part is finding what to contribute, IMO.

Re: The Unleashed Operating System

#15

Post by tonysdg »

krylon wrote: post #7
cloudive wrote: post #5

i'd like an alternative to linux and BSD that has better RISC compatibility

What exactly do you mean by that? Both the Linux kernel and several of the BSD systems run on multiple RISC achitectures.

Maybe a typo for RISC-V? Still doesn't make a lot of sense though...

Re: The Unleashed Operating System

#17

Post by rwmj »

linuxftw wrote: post #14
rwmj wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel. Now I will admit this is going to be tricky. How do you dissuade junk contributions or misfeatures but at the same time encourage contributions? They may end up with an over…

> If you've ever tried to contribute something to the Linux kernel you'd know it's not an easy process. They say that they want to "encourage new contributors to repeatedly contribute". So in this respect it is very different from the Linux kernel. I have contributed a small 1-time change to the Linux kernel. It was relatively easy and straight forward; I sent my first patch to the wrong list, but the maintainers hel…

I think you're forgetting the large learning curve to get to that point. You learned how to build the kernel, git, the kernel style guide, signed-off-bys, checkpatch, get-maintainer and finally running git-email. And there's the assumption that you knew what to change and how to fix it, but most kernel error messages are opaque - it can often be impossible to find out why a system call returns -EINVAL or where an error message comes from.

And that's just for a small change. Large and/or controversial changes often involve multiple rounds of review and can take (literally) years to get upstream. I'm sometimes amazed when I read LWN about how long it has taken for features to get integrated into the kernel.

I don't know what Unleashed OS is planning but it seems obvious we could make this a whole lot simpler.

Re: The Unleashed Operating System

#18

Post by neuromantik8086 »

snw wrote: post #13
siteshwar wrote: post #9

> Unleashed is an operating system fork of illumos, Can someone explain why it was forked ?

Probably someone from the unleashed project can give a better answer, but my understanding is mostly unhappiness about the illumos contribution process. The illumos RTI (request to integrate) process is designed to ensure a certain quality of contributions. The downside of this is that it sometimes takes a long time to contribute a change. For illumos there is also pretty high expectation of backwards compatibility.…

Perhaps unleashed could be to illumos what fedora is to rhel/centos?

Re: The Unleashed Operating System

#19

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

tonysdg wrote: post #15
krylon wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What exactly do you mean by that? Both the Linux kernel and several of the BSD systems run on multiple RISC achitectures.

Maybe a typo for RISC-V? Still doesn't make a lot of sense though...

Yeah, IIRC FreeBSD supports riscv and Fedora actually ships a full image for it.
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