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FreeBSD 4.6 Release Delayed
Dan writes "Bruce A. Mah from the FreeBSD Release Engineering team announced that due to some late-breaking issues, 4.6 will be released about a week later than originally planned."
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Yes, MacOSX is based in part on BSDLite 4.4. Some libraries come from NetBSD, while most of he utilities stem from FreeBSD. BSD's contribution to MacOSX But MacOSX/Darwin is also based on Mach. Cheerfully adding to the confusion are various projects such as Fink, which aims to port a good deal of linux software to MacOSX. Occasionally, dumb flamewars will sprout up, with one side advocating FreeBSD style ports, etc., and the other advocating a more linux-like style. I guess it depends on what systems you've used before.
Well, right off the top of my head I can think of three that havn't been mentioned: Niksun NetVCR (a really sweet piece of kit), Juniper routers, and the Cybernet NetMAX. LOTS of people with embedded solutions that require a bit more oomph than your normal embedded OS can provide use FreeBSD. From a corporate point of view, the FreeBSD has a very favorable license and a conservative release schedule that helps insure a stable OS for your embedded project. Also, it doesn't hurt that the FreeBSD source tree is in CVS, and you can maintain a branch relativly painlessly without having your proprietary changes merged back in the main branch (although some companies merge their changes anyway, look at vinum).
I read the internet for the articles.
The only thing NT/2k/XP use from BSD is the TCP/IP stack [as far as we know, anyway :-)]
No, we don't "know" that at all. Here a Microsoftie explains that a BSD-derived stack may have been used for NT 3.1 and replaced almost immediately afterwards.
Besides the NT stack is multithreaded and has significantly better performanace than any *BSD on SMP hardware ("netcraft" tests that Linux 2.4 won).
Don't be daft. Actually read about the OS-X design before talking about it! The Mach microkernel is not a full kernel in the sense that Linux is. It provides a minimum of functionality. It requires external servers to provide much of the traditional functionality of a kernel. In OS-X (as in NeXT) the external server takes the form of a monolithic BSD system server. In other words, a standard BSD monolithic kernel is altered to run as a server on top of Mach. Unlike most microkernels, OS-X puts its system server in kernel space, which eliminates many benifets of the microkernel design (ie. better protection between kernel components). In OS X, the BSD system server is based on a customized 4.4BSD-lite2 kernel with many parts (like the whole networking infrastructure) thrown in from various BSD OSs, primarly FreeBSD 3.2. In OS-X 10.2, this kernel adopts a bunch of code from FreeBSD 4.4. To satisfy your curiousity, here's the dirt from Apple itself: http://developer.apple.com/darwin/history.html. Read the WHOLE thing. I'm not going to tell your where in the page it is, because reading is good for you.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
I believe the Nokia/Checkpoint platform is BSD based...
Compaq sells hardware to Yahoo, which is a
FreeBSD shop.
The Nokia Firewall-1 implementation is based on
a modified FreeBSD.
IBM's InterJet router-toaster is based on FreeBSD.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Not that this changes the argument about commercial contributions back to the OS, but to provide a non-rhetorical answer to what I presume was a rhetorical question:
The kernel support for USB is typically in sys/dev/usb in the source tree. (That's where it is on my FreeBSD 3.4 system; no, that's not a typo for "FreeBSD 4.3".) There may also be user-mode daemons or library routines there as well.
Here's a FreeBSD FireWire implementation under development; the most recent tarball came out 2002-05-30. I don't know what projects, if any, exist for NetBSD or OpenBSD.