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John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

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Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#181

Post by int_19h »

dijit wrote: post #98
type0 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSDs are mundane and also stable, not like some rolling linux distros

The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. If you mean that they have old software (and old==stable if you think Debian) then that’s because of BSD licensing vs GPL. GPL can take from BSD but the other way around is not possible. Stability of uptime? Yeah, they’re rock solid.

I know that they change (well, reserve the right to change) syscalls with every major version. But that's not a big deal, since only the base system is supposed to be using syscalls directly; everything else goes through libc.

So, are you saying that they break libc ABI?

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#182

Post by chupasaurus »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #174
chupasaurus wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nothing drastically changed since Torvalds had sended his gratitude[0]. [0] https://youtu.be/MShbP3OpASA?t=2997 (time coded)

I concur.

Wayland support fiasco, changes in driver's EULA to deny the usage of consumer-grade GPUs in VMs are 2 things off the top of my head.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#183

Post by yjftsjthsd-h »

larrydag wrote: post #146
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Did you know: you have John Carmack to thank for first porting X11 to OSX? Thank you John!! Is there anything written about the background to this? Wikipedia doesn't talk about him ever working for Apple (although maybe that's just not mentioned).

OSX roots are in BSD https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/

Yeah, but the "normal" BSDs just ship an X server out of the box; no need to port anything. (It remains curious to me that Apple bothered writing Quartz from the ground up, actually; seems like it would've been easier to build on top of X.)

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#184

Post by mycall »

loeg wrote: post #170
erk__ wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well it is a bit of a grey zone but I have gotten Vulkan to work and I think at least NVENC works as well. The solution is rather hacky though. It extracts libraries from the Linux driver and loads them when you run programs. A look at the code make it seems like cuda is getting loaded as well so it may work. https://github.com/shkhln/nvshim

Nvshim is an amazing project, but it is a far cry from official Nvidia support for CUDA/NVENC/NVDEC. (All Nvidia would have to do is build another binary; it's still chatting with the same driver blob internally so it's not really clear to me why they don't bother compiling it for FreeBSD.)

If anyone has any clout to get this to happen, John Carmack perhaps would.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#185

Post by rjsw »

dijit wrote: post #98
type0 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

BSDs are mundane and also stable, not like some rolling linux distros

The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. If you mean that they have old software (and old==stable if you think Debian) then that’s because of BSD licensing vs GPL. GPL can take from BSD but the other way around is not possible. Stability of uptime? Yeah, they’re rock solid.

NetBSD preserves backwards compatibility for its ABI.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#186

Post by thisrod »

yuribro wrote: post #36
mikorym wrote: post #23

Is there any more context to OP's post? I guess someone just noticed in the mailing list, but it's not clear whether maybe John Carmark does this with all code everywhere in the universe. And then probably still has some interesting coffee break conversations... On a different note. I am something of a Ubuntu fan and try to be more involved there. But then again the xBSDs where x = {Free, Open, Net, ...} are one of t…

I would suggest to just install OpenBSD and try it (maybe in a VM?), one of the selling points is the simplicity of the setup process. It can be a one evening project.

> maybe in a VM?

But that's the thing. The real benefits from OpenBSD come when it's the only system you need. Who cares how simple and elegant the guest system is, if you need to maintain a linux installation to host it?

A project on the scale of OpenBSD can't possibly support all the hardware that's out there. And the system is under active development, so there are constant regressions in hardware support. That's fine for John Carmack: he can fire up ed and fix a kernel panic, that's how he winds down after work. But the vision that attracts me to OpenBSD is a box in a closet that Google doesn't have the key to, which sits there for 6 months receiving my email and serving my homepage, takes 10 minutes to update, then sits there for the next 6 months; maybe once every 5 years I'd need to read a manpage and port my smtpd.conf to a new syntax. Hardware regressions are what stop that from happening.

The OpenBSD developers are getting what they want, and good luck to them. The shame is that a little bit of coordination, where they chose one model of ThinkPad every other year and committed to supporting it for a decade, would make the system so much more useful for so many other people.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#188

Post by magic_quotes »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #65
erk__ wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recently went and installed FreeBSD on my laptop. It has until now been a pretty good experiance. The main reason I went with FreeBSD over OpenBSD at the moment was that NVIDIA only supports FreeBSD. FreeBSD is also pretty simple (at least compared to linux) so it wins there as well.

By NVIDIA supporting FreeBSD you mean that half-assed thing with binary drivers allowing you to get a picture, but no CUDA? Or is that old information which i should forget?

Unfortunately, half-assed vendor support is still quite compelling compared to no vendor support.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#189

Post by floatboth »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #183
larrydag wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OSX roots are in BSD https://www.wired.com/2013/08/jordan-hubbard/

Yeah, but the "normal" BSDs just ship an X server out of the box; no need to port anything. (It remains curious to me that Apple bothered writing Quartz from the ground up, actually; seems like it would've been easier to build on top of X.)

By writing Quartz from the ground up, Apple accomplished "every frame is perfect, by design" in the year 2000, which we in the free world are only getting now by switching to Wayland.

Re: John Carmack is reading and contributing to OpenBSD source code

#190

Post by floatboth »

LargoLasskhyfv wrote: post #177
loeg wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nvshim is an amazing project, but it is a far cry from official Nvidia support for CUDA/NVENC/NVDEC. (All Nvidia would have to do is build another binary; it's still chatting with the same driver blob internally so it's not really clear to me why they don't bother compiling it for FreeBSD.)

They could even do it with less churn, because of https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/conf/opti... FreeBSD easily achieves binary compatibility with earlier versions. So no need to mess around with DKMS or their own thing. Or at least less so.

> FreeBSD easily achieves binary compatibility with earlier versions. So no need to mess around with DKMS

Binary compatibility is for userspace programs, not kernel modules.

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