Jordan Hubbard Interview Cleaned Up

Jason123 writes: "Almost twenty days ago, FreeBSD's (& also Apple's) Jordan Hubbard gave an interview via IRC to BSDVault. With permission from BSDVault, OSNews has now cleaned-up the interview, formatted it in a more readable manner and published the result. Jordan talks all sorts of interesting things, like FreeBSD 5, his job at the kernel team at Apple, the FreeBSD commmunity, XFree, Microsoft and more." (This is the interview featured in slightly rawer form here.)

Comments

sounds like it is tracking linux

[vipw]

It sounds as if they're tracking the same feature set as Linux but trying to roll it all out in a smoother transition. That's one of the strongest features of FreeBSD, I think. There's no unstable periods between libc revisions, problems going from a.out to elf, or the VM getting replaced midway through a stable branch :).

I just wish I could run it on my mac, jkh does work at Apple afterall.

Re:sounds like it is tracking linux

[edhall]

I don't think they're tracking Linux's feature set any more deliberately than Linux is tracking Solaris' feature set. For example, FreeBSD's next-generation SMP may put it roughly on the same level as Linux 2.4, but the need to improve SMP exists independent of Linux and the methods used (at least at the detailed level) are quite a bit different than Linux's. That's not to say that FreeBSD developers are ignorant of Linux; a few committers even are on the Linux Kernel Mailing List. But like any open source project, features get added to "scratch an itch," and ideas can come from anywhere. So if something like kqueue or jail seems like a good idea to someone, whether it is in Linux or not makes no difference; if code exists and core likes it, it gets added.

Just casually skimming the freebsd-arch and freebsd-current mailing lists, I'd say that features from the other BSD's, especially NetBSD, get discussed more than Linux. But the latter does get discussed, both as a source of ideas and experiences. (Unlike what some folks here claim, few FreeBSD developerss are knee-jerk Linux haters. That's not to say such folk don't exist; FreeBSD doesn't give personality tests to prospective developers or committers. As always, the code's the thing.)

-Ed

Re:*BSD is dying

[gomerbud]

Hm... I guess nobody bothered to read this article.