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My favorite developer contributing to my favorite operating system! This is like Christmas. I’ve been contributing $ to OpenBSD since 3.x release days, and reading John carmack’s “.plan” file since Doom 2, when they ran digital Unix! Did you know: you have John Carmack to thank for first porting X11 to OSX? Thank you John!!
https://github.com/bob-beck/foundation-web/commit/a005fbc9e4...
Even in this mail, John Carmack favors elegance.
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GP's link is to the COMPAT_FREEBSD binary compatibility for earlier versions of FreeBSD, oddly. I don't think it (or linux emulation) has anything to do with Nvidia's needs re: CUDA/NVENC.
It means you have a module from some vendor, or something similar to the NVIDIA installer for linux, which technically is nothing else than a batch compiled makefile, spitting out a kernel-module made for version 1.2.3 while you are running 2.4.5. It worked. I don't know why it shouldn't now. Edit: I'm not having any FreeBSD systems in use right now, so i don't know if they changed the defaults. What i remember is at…
I believe something similar is done in Linux. The difference in experience may come from FreeBSD maintaining a stable KBI over a release version (e.g., stable/12), while Linux aggressively does not maintain any KBI stability; hence the need for DKMS/akmods.
This is unrelated to COMPAT_FREEBSD.
As someone who is not following closely, did he ever mention why he is looking into alternative OS? And why OpenBSD instead of say NetBSD or FreeBSD? I assume he has many experience with linux already.
While I can't say for sure, during a hole-up-for-a-week-to-learn a couple of years ago, he decided on neural networks and OpenBSD. He commented favorably on its opinionatedness. I'm suppose he liked the system and decided to contribute.
"Despite not having actually used it, I have always been fond of the idea of OpenBSD — a relatively minimal and opinionated system with a cohesive vision and an emphasis on quality and craftsmanship. Linux is a lot of things, but cohesive isn’t one of them."
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> 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).
I don't think Carmack ever worked for Apple. The XQuartz release notes say Carmack ported XFree86 (X server for x86 machines) to OS X; my guess would be that he did a limited port to get what he needed to run the Doom/Quake engine?
Xorg forked from XFree86 circa 2003.
This is such a positive and wholesome example - both the mail itself (getting to know the preferences of the project), the proposed fixes (naming functions in a better way, adding explanatory comments), and on the higher level - the humility in which it was done, and the time being invested by him for a project he isn't part of.
Not every pull request needs to be introducing complex/intricate code, and yet it still has value to the project (and the community).
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My thoughts as well. Gentle suggestion, looking into other's suggestions first. Everything is there.
An interesting contrast from the Torvalds approach. I seriously think this is a huge part of why John Carmack is so popular. He's always kind to people, and very keen on sharing useful information.
Or are you just referring to his communication when defending his own codebase?
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> 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…
> box in a closet https://github.com/elad/openbsd-apu2 Mine is 4(?) years old, and has never crashed. I use it every day. If you want something newer, or have 10x the power budget: https://flak.tedunangst.com/post/ryzen-build-for-openbsd
There's very little that I can't do with it versus my Linux workstation, at least for my needs.
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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…
If only that were true. And they do releases every six months. And you are not supposed to skip one, or you’re on your own.
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The major difference being that if you have a statically compiled binary from linux 2.4 it will work on linux 5.5 The only difference will be any shared libraries and potentially the libc. But if we're speaking from a pure technical perspective, the libc is not linux.
Binaries from all the way back from FreeBSD 4.0 work on -CURRENT just fine.