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The BSD family tree

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Re: The BSD family tree

#41

Post by hvs »

tiffanyh wrote: post #18
lobster_johnson wrote: post #8

Here's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF. Edit: Updated with newest version. [1] https://www.levenez.com/unix/

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.

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" community looks less like BSD and more like Linux.

Re: The BSD family tree

#42

Post by hvs »

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.

Re: The BSD family tree

#43

Post by tedunangst »

kryptiskt wrote: post #19
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.

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.

Re: The BSD family tree

#45

Post by JoachimSchipper »

X86BSD wrote: post #32
aninteger wrote: post #26

This is missing a lot of BSDs. Now granted some of them are dead, some inactive, some just missing. The ones I can think of off the top of my head: PC-BSD/TruOS, MirBSD/MirOS, Bitrig, HardenedBSD.

Most of those are just FreeBSD. Pulling from the FreeBSD tree for their base.

MirBSD and BitRig (which looks very dead?) are OpenBSD forks.

Re: The BSD family tree

#46

Post by pjmlp »

boomboomsubban wrote: post #38
simplehuman wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Switch also forked

Still haven't seen anything showing this, including the license for the FreeBSD kernel can mean a lot of different things. Windows did/does ship with it, I wouldn't call it a fork.

If you mean the TCP/IP stack it was re-written from scratch on Vista.

Re: The BSD family tree

#47

Post by notalaser »

tiffanyh wrote: post #18
lobster_johnson wrote: post #8

Here's a much bigger one that takes lots of Unix variants into account: https://www.levenez.com/unix/unix.png (from here [1]). Also available as a big PDF. Edit: Updated with newest version. [1] https://www.levenez.com/unix/

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.

> Linux, with has a viral license which essentially forces people to work on the same code base

If this were so, my life would be so much easier. Maybe things are like this on higher-end servers, in DevOps and so on, but the other side of Linux deployment -- in embedded systems, consumer hardware, various gizmos, phones and so on -- it's very much not true.

Virtually no device that's actually being sold somewhere runs a vanilla Linux kernel when you take it off the shelf. Companies comply with GPL technically -- they publish their changes and they'll even mail you the CD if you ask nicely -- but there's no community work of any kind, really. Sometimes you'll have manufacturers working with funky hardware from obscure companies that never bothered to update their drivers past 2.6.32 (or, best case scenario, 3.2) and the forward-porting dance begins -- that is, if you're lucky and the driver isn't a binary blob. Sometimes the opposite happens -- you're working with shiny new stuff but a Really Smart Manager heard that older kernels are more stable and now the backporting from 4.10 to 3.16 dance begins. The "same codebase" thing is pretty much just a distant dream now -- and you don't want to see most of the codebases out there.

Granted, there is a common(-ish) core -- the differences are not on the magnitude of FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD (different vmm systems etc.), but IRL, there's rarely a "single" Linux.

Edit: oh, and don't even get me started on all the innuvashon that happens in the layers above the kernel.

Re: The BSD family tree

#48

Post by jvdh »

djsumdog wrote: post #15
elvinyung wrote: post #6

Heh. Between NetBSD 1.4 and Darwin/Mac OS X there's an entry that just says "(?)". It's probably pretty well-known that question mark is NeXTSTEP, which was built at NeXT, the company that Steve Jobs founded after he left Apple the first time around. NeXTSTEP was built around BSD mostly because of Avie Tevanian's involvement in CMU's Mach kernel project.

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.

`It's interesting to note that the PS4 OS is also a forked FreeBSD variant as well.`

Here's a nice talk at CCC last year which explains some bits of FreeBSD in the PS4. It's mostly about hardware and how to run Linux on it, but FreeBSD gets a nice mention there too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QMiubC6LdTA

Re: The BSD family tree

#49

Post by drewg123 »

cat199 wrote: post #34
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…

3BSD-4.2 sounds about right - My thinking w/o references (enthusiast but was not 'there' at the time) is that this was introduced with either the 32Bit VM system, FFS implementation, or BSD network starck - probably the McCusick FFS papers [ed: are worth a read]. Really it's kind of nuts how 'usable' and 'current' a load of 4.3BSD on a VM load feels out of the box.

If you ever get a chance to hear Kirk talk about the history of BSD, I highly recommend it. He tells some great stories about the TCP bakeoff, the history of the VAX context switch code, etc.

Re: The BSD family tree

#50

Post by Esau »

hvs wrote: post #41
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.

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.
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