5 ms·

FreeBSD is such a great OS and has a very powerful kernel. So much potential, it is sad to see Linux is the only unix OS that gets traction. They've had Jails i

by kdasme 6y ago

FreeBSD is such a great OS and has a very powerful kernel. So much potential, it is sad to see Linux is the only unix OS that gets traction. They've had Jails in BSD long before Docker was a thing. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD was promising but it probably just doesn't make sense to maintain that project given lack of attention. :(

danieldk 6y ago
Linux is the only unix OS that gets traction Darwin (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS)? And I guess that technically Minix is one of the most successful Unix-like systems. [1] [1] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/
- spijdar 6y ago
  Probably worth pointing out a significant portion of the BSD "personality" in the XNU kernel is just straight FreeBSD. You could kind of say XNU is a superset of the FreeBSD kernel. On top of that, the unix userland resembles FreeBSD, although it's pretty eclectic in choices, e.g. it ships with GNU grep and GNU make by default IIRC while I think FreeBSD uses BSD grep and make by default? (Darwin is pretty eclectic overall -- some portions are more NetBSDish. Kernel is mostly Free I think)
  - wahern 6y ago
    macOS grep is from FreeBSD, at least as of macOS Mojave (10.14). (Source code for 10.14 might be at https://opensource.apple.com/source/text_cmds/text_cmds-99/grep/grep.c.auto.html https://opensource.apple.com/source/text_cmds/text_cmds-99/g....) Not sure if it was ever GNU grep. Maybe before the big purge in 2011? IME, most of the basic shell commands are either directly from FreeBSD or a project in the BSD universe. For example tar is from libarchive, a distinct project (see https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive) that DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and macOS import and track. (But oddly not OpenBSD, which has evolved the 4.4BSD-Lite implementation.) According to a 2012 accounting at http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990), macOS was down to 16 GPL packages in macOS 10.12 from 47 in macOS 10.5.
    - danieldk 6y ago
      macOS grep is from FreeBSD, at least as of macOS Mojave (10.14). Yep, it still is. On Big Sur on M1: $ grep --version grep (BSD grep) 2.5.1-FreeBSD
      - spijdar 6y ago
        Yeah, I'm just an idiot. I guess I was just thinking of GNU make. On the other hand, it looks like (at least on Catalina?) it ships with GNU diffutils, so patch, cmp, diff are all GNU utilities. I'm going to sheepishly pretend like this proves my point somehow :-)
  - kevans91 6y ago
    A little late to the party, but- MacOS has actually beaten FreeBSD to the punch by shipping with bsdgrep as grep for years at this point. FreeBSD should be able to switch before 13.0, but the bsdgrep developer is a slacker. It's only missing a couple of GNU extensions that are somewhat surprisingly (to me) common.
- hollander 6y ago
  How about the biggest: Android?!
  - cferr 6y ago
    Android runs on a Linux kernel.
- wayneftw 6y ago
  > iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS Those are systems for Apple to control you and their devices that you paid for, not for you to control any device that you own. Therefore, the only traction they've really gotten is with one single user - Apple. > macOS For now. (Relax everybody, I'm at least half kidding.)
  - lrvick 6y ago
    I would say that is pretty spot on, and I would include MacOS in that list to a lesser extent too. You can't change much about how MacOS works under the hood anymore. If you don't like how it works, tough. The device and OS are not yours. Also why no one could pay me enough to rely on Apple hardware or software at this point for anything but entertainment.
erk__ 6y ago
And the traction it gets is mostly in closed source projects where the code may not be contributed back. For example Orbis OS, the OS of the Playstation 4 and quite possible 5 as well.
pjmlp 6y ago
That is the beauty of its license. If Linux never happened, we would still all be using HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, Tru64, and all the other clones that integrated some form of BSD code.
- ibiza 6y ago
  Actually, had 386BSD happened just a bit earlier, we would all be using FreeBSD. > If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
  - pjmlp 6y ago
    The difference is that with the BSDs everyone can take and don't bother to contribute upstream, e.g. Apple and Sony.
    - throw0101a 6y ago
      > The difference is that with the BSDs everyone can take and don't bother to contribute upstream, e.g. Apple and Sony. This depends on the use case of the company. A lot of companies learned that simply forking the project and not giving back is a good pathway to pain because now you have to carry your internal patches forward, as well as a larger and larger diff against the base OS itself as it changes. If you forked (e.g.) FreeBSD 9 and based your product off of it, and the project is now at version 12.x (with 13.x in 2021Q1), then that's a lot to keep up with internally. It's better to use the base OS, and the documented APIs, for one's secret sauce, and give back everything else. This is what vendors like Netflix, Dell-EMC Isilon, NetApp, etc. do. You'll also see quite a few patches from Microsoft and Amazon as they want to sell their cloud services for as many guest OSes as possible. Hardware vendors (Chelsio, Mellanox, Cavium) also throw in support so that hardware companies will use their products with-in appliances. Others, like Sony with the PS4 and PS5, mostly seem to operate in user land and so do not do much kernel-level stuff (except perhaps booting code) that would need to be back ported.
      - loeg 6y ago
musicale 6y ago
> it is sad to see Linux is the only unix OS that gets traction I would guess that there are more BSD users than there ever have been in 2020. FreeBSD (like *BSD in general) may be a niche OS, but there are probably millions of users and thousands of developers; certainly enough to keep the platform going. Not everything has to be mainstream, after all; there is probably a "medium tail" of operating systems which BSD is a solid part of.
Sigmoid 6y ago
Can you or someone explain to me or link me reasons why BSD is a preferable choice to linux? What kind of advantages and disadvantages are there to the OS?
- mchiteri 6y ago
  There is a nice write-up on FreeBSD for Linux users you can take a look at http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01

by kdasme 6y ago

danieldk 6y ago

Linux is the only unix OS that gets traction Darwin (macOS, iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS)? And I guess that technically Minix is one of the most successful Unix-like systems. [1] [1] https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/ https://www.cs.vu.nl/~ast/intel/

spijdar 6y ago
Probably worth pointing out a significant portion of the BSD "personality" in the XNU kernel is just straight FreeBSD. You could kind of say XNU is a superset of the FreeBSD kernel. On top of that, the unix userland resembles FreeBSD, although it's pretty eclectic in choices, e.g. it ships with GNU grep and GNU make by default IIRC while I think FreeBSD uses BSD grep and make by default? (Darwin is pretty eclectic overall -- some portions are more NetBSDish. Kernel is mostly Free I think)
- wahern 6y ago
  macOS grep is from FreeBSD, at least as of macOS Mojave (10.14). (Source code for 10.14 might be at https://opensource.apple.com/source/text_cmds/text_cmds-99/grep/grep.c.auto.html https://opensource.apple.com/source/text_cmds/text_cmds-99/g....) Not sure if it was ever GNU grep. Maybe before the big purge in 2011? IME, most of the basic shell commands are either directly from FreeBSD or a project in the BSD universe. For example tar is from libarchive, a distinct project (see https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive https://github.com/libarchive/libarchive) that DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and macOS import and track. (But oddly not OpenBSD, which has evolved the 4.4BSD-Lite implementation.) According to a 2012 accounting at http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ http://meta.ath0.com/2012/02/05/apples-great-gpl-purge/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3559990), macOS was down to 16 GPL packages in macOS 10.12 from 47 in macOS 10.5.
  - danieldk 6y ago
    macOS grep is from FreeBSD, at least as of macOS Mojave (10.14). Yep, it still is. On Big Sur on M1: $ grep --version grep (BSD grep) 2.5.1-FreeBSD
    - spijdar 6y ago
      Yeah, I'm just an idiot. I guess I was just thinking of GNU make. On the other hand, it looks like (at least on Catalina?) it ships with GNU diffutils, so patch, cmp, diff are all GNU utilities. I'm going to sheepishly pretend like this proves my point somehow :-)
- kevans91 6y ago
  A little late to the party, but- MacOS has actually beaten FreeBSD to the punch by shipping with bsdgrep as grep for years at this point. FreeBSD should be able to switch before 13.0, but the bsdgrep developer is a slacker. It's only missing a couple of GNU extensions that are somewhat surprisingly (to me) common.
hollander 6y ago
How about the biggest: Android?!
- cferr 6y ago
  Android runs on a Linux kernel.
wayneftw 6y ago
> iOS, iPadOS, tvOS, watchOS Those are systems for Apple to control you and their devices that you paid for, not for you to control any device that you own. Therefore, the only traction they've really gotten is with one single user - Apple. > macOS For now. (Relax everybody, I'm at least half kidding.)
- lrvick 6y ago
  I would say that is pretty spot on, and I would include MacOS in that list to a lesser extent too. You can't change much about how MacOS works under the hood anymore. If you don't like how it works, tough. The device and OS are not yours. Also why no one could pay me enough to rely on Apple hardware or software at this point for anything but entertainment.

erk__ 6y ago

And the traction it gets is mostly in closed source projects where the code may not be contributed back. For example Orbis OS, the OS of the Playstation 4 and quite possible 5 as well.

pjmlp 6y ago

That is the beauty of its license. If Linux never happened, we would still all be using HP-UX, Solaris, Aix, Tru64, and all the other clones that integrated some form of BSD code.

ibiza 6y ago
Actually, had 386BSD happened just a bit earlier, we would all be using FreeBSD. > If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened.
- pjmlp 6y ago
  The difference is that with the BSDs everyone can take and don't bother to contribute upstream, e.g. Apple and Sony.
  - throw0101a 6y ago
    > The difference is that with the BSDs everyone can take and don't bother to contribute upstream, e.g. Apple and Sony. This depends on the use case of the company. A lot of companies learned that simply forking the project and not giving back is a good pathway to pain because now you have to carry your internal patches forward, as well as a larger and larger diff against the base OS itself as it changes. If you forked (e.g.) FreeBSD 9 and based your product off of it, and the project is now at version 12.x (with 13.x in 2021Q1), then that's a lot to keep up with internally. It's better to use the base OS, and the documented APIs, for one's secret sauce, and give back everything else. This is what vendors like Netflix, Dell-EMC Isilon, NetApp, etc. do. You'll also see quite a few patches from Microsoft and Amazon as they want to sell their cloud services for as many guest OSes as possible. Hardware vendors (Chelsio, Mellanox, Cavium) also throw in support so that hardware companies will use their products with-in appliances. Others, like Sony with the PS4 and PS5, mostly seem to operate in user land and so do not do much kernel-level stuff (except perhaps booting code) that would need to be back ported.
    - loeg 6y ago

musicale 6y ago

> it is sad to see Linux is the only unix OS that gets traction I would guess that there are more BSD users than there ever have been in 2020. FreeBSD (like *BSD in general) may be a niche OS, but there are probably millions of users and thousands of developers; certainly enough to keep the platform going. Not everything has to be mainstream, after all; there is probably a "medium tail" of operating systems which BSD is a solid part of.

Sigmoid 6y ago

Can you or someone explain to me or link me reasons why BSD is a preferable choice to linux? What kind of advantages and disadvantages are there to the OS?

mchiteri 6y ago
There is a nice write-up on FreeBSD for Linux users you can take a look at http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01 http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01