Overview of the BSDs

zeekiorage writes "A good informative article about the various BSD OSs, their legacy, philosophy and importance on the ExtremeTech web site. Excerpt from the article: 'Nowadays, the term 'The BSDs' refers to the family of operating systems which were derived, to a greater or lesser extent, from BSD. The five best known BSDs are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, and Darwin (which serves as the foundation for Apple's MacOS X). But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.'"

Comments

BSD

[glamslam]

I've always wondered why Linux gets the mainstream press and BSD is not well known. Is it the licence???

Re:BSD

[Krow10]

Blockquoth the poster:

Linux had timing. BSD has been around much longer, and its much more mature than Linux. Linux has GREAT marketing, BSD has (basically) none.

Its not about the technology, but about the marketing, the timing, and the media's embrace.

It is true that linux had timing, but it predates the tech boom era by a few years. Back in the day (early '90s,) linux could be downloaded anonymously without making any promises to anyone. There were still concerns regarding AT&T code in BSD at that time. Linux was just the easiest to get (from my perspective) in those days, and it was clearly and unambiguously free (beer.) This meant that it had a larger hobbyist install base than BSD, and that is why it is more popular now, IMO. All the stuff you talk about is true. But it wouldn't have happened if BSD had been as readily available as linux. BSD had the reputation of being a "real" Unix, and I would have chosen it over linux if I had been able to easily get my hands on it in '92. I suspect other early adopters would have as well.

-Craig

Re:BSD

[SN74S181]

I guess the short answer is that I use Linux because I just don't want to spend the time after installing *BSD to make it work and act like... Linux!


What a ridiculous tautology.

I use BSD because I don't want to have to spend the time after letting some Linux distro spew candy and BS onto my hard drive to make it work and act like UNIX.

The base NetBSD download is about 60 megs compressed. I download and install that and I've got a working base system to adapt to my needs. Plus, there's one distribution of NetBSD, I can install it on my Intel boxes, my Sparc boxes, on about any odd hardware I find, and the .dotfiles and config is virtually identical. Compare that to the 5-35 different 'distributions' of Linux available for each architecture.

Part of the beauty of the BSDs is they follow the bloody standards that have evolved over the last 30 years of UNIX. I can pick up any good Administration book and find the info I need to get the features I am concerned with up and running.

Re:BSD

[sydb]

The base NetBSD download is about 60 megs compressed. I download and install that and I've got a working base system to adapt to my needs. Plus, there's one distribution of NetBSD, I can install it on my Intel boxes, my Sparc boxes, on about any odd hardware I find, and the .dotfiles and config is virtually identical. Compare that to the 5-35 different 'distributions' of Linux available for each architecture.

This is why Linux has Debian

Actually Net and Free BSD have (are getting) Debian too.

Which highlights that this whole fucking linux vs BSD argument is misnamed. Linux is a kernel. The userland is substantially GNU, with a plethora of third-party contributions and appropriations.

So everyone start comparing kernel features and lay off userland.

Re:BSD

[JoeBuck]

This is a personal perspective, others' opinions will probably differ. The lawsuit mattered, but it wasn't the only factor.

The explosive growth of Linux in the early days had more to do with personal dynamics than with much else. In the early days, Linus welcomed contributors and worked well with them, but no one could work with the Jolitzes, and the other early BSD projects were similarly elite, with a lot of backbiting going on between the various groups even in the early days. I am a UC Berkeley alum (EECS PhD) and certainly take a great deal of pride in all the contributions that came out of Berkeley, but I was also present at a number of Usenix BOFs where members of one or another of the BSD factions would bitterly denounce someone from another faction, all the while with the AT&T/UCB/BSDI lawsuit hanging over everyone's heads. In addition to the legal cloud, there were the personal relationship clouds, and in the end, free software is a highly social activity, one that the BSD people were never as good at as the Linux people.

When I saw the early Linux kernels I thought that the quality was way inferior to what the BSD folks had at the time, and I was probably right, but the Linux folks had an attractive spirit, they were getting better by leaps and bounds, and the BSD folks thought they knew better than anyone else and those outside the club weren't welcome. Linux had drivers for just about every cheap card around, and many of them were buggy but at least they were usable, and in many cases people reporting bugs got a usable patch within days. BSD had well-written drivers, but for far fewer devices, and usually only the kinds of expensive devices that sysadmins at universities (but not home users) had access to. Now I'm talking about the 1992-1995 time period here; since then things have shifted around considerably and all the competitors have drivers for just about everything. But it was the initial momentum that set the stage for what followed.

One place where the non-copylefted nature of BSD did seem to have an effect was in the suspicion that a lot of the Berkeley CS grad students had about the schemes (their version) of the BSDI folk, and the FUD that got spread around about what was being given back and what wasn't, especially given that a couple of folks were working for CSRG and BSDI at the same time. Between this rather unattractive clique-ridden gang of exclusive gurus, and the bunch of wild and wooly Linux folks who were just whacking away and learning as they went, the Linux folks just looked much more attractive to a lot of people.

Re:BSD

[LunaticLeo]

What an ingnorant and rediculous answer. I swear slashdot needs a high-user-id-filter.

I can give a much better and factually based argument for all all those dumb slashdoters who moded this junk up.

In the very early 1990s, AT&T and BSDi were just finishing up their copyright dispute (btw, AT&T was in the right on some things and BSDi on others).

The two people maintaining 386BSD were not accepting desperate pleas by BSDers to indegrate some IDE patches. FreeBSD started largely because of the 386BSD maintainers recalcitrance.

On the other hand, Linux was quickly gaining steam and it was a wild and woolly time. IDE support was in Linux 12 to 18 months prior to FreeBSD (at least in what each camp claimed was the "stable" version).

Developers with cheap PCs with IDE controllers flocked to Linux. Lots of newbies, and I was one of them, bought ISA IDE cards and new drives to replace their RLL drives, just to run Linux.

BSD was clearly more mature compared to Linux in the early days. I believe Linux started winning the Linux vs. FreeBSD debate around Linux 2.2. Both NetBSD and OpenBSD have less sofisticated features for very good reasons. NetBSD is port-anywhere, and OpenBSD is run by a paranoid schizophrenic (sometimes that is a good thing:). And while I said Linux wins (in my mind) vs. FreeBSD (scalabilty, features, drivers, speed, etc.); FreeBSD is still an excellent kernel and has a few very cool features that I wish Linux had. FreeBSD as a distribution is a very compelling product. Ports rule.

If the "Tech Boom Era" was a factor in the FreeBSD vs. Linux on cheep PCs competition, FreeBSD would win. During the "Tech Boom Era", most of the biggest Porn sites (porn is the biggest money maker, and driver of bandwidth), have traditionally run on FreeBSD because of its consistant stability under extreme load, and efficient TCP/IP stack. Yahoo was built on FreeBSD. UUNet was a MAJOR FreeBSD user. If the "Tech Boom Era" is anything to go by, FreeBSD should have "won".

Bottom line, both kernels (linux and freebsd) were/are on a geometric growth curve, Linux had 12-18 month lead time with IDE, that is why Linux "won".

Oh! and Linus Torvalds is a fucking genius. I am not sure what he is a genius at, but as an all around Project Maintainer he is a fucking genius.

an OK article, but a bit biased in favor of fbsd

[MobyTurbo]

This article seems to give the impression that FreeBSD is the only one that's not a niche product. Nothing could be further from the truth. NetBSD's attention to portability and "correctness" means that it often has the best-written drivers and is even more stable than FreeBSD, and as of 1.6 it now has a new init system that FreeBSD is going to copy for 5.0. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, lots of things get copied from NetBSD because in line with Berkeley Unix's past it's a research and development oriented operating system.)

OpenBSD's attention to code audits also bodes well for overall lack of bugs; and its ability to have security features such as encryption of even the swap space makes it useful for paranoid executives or the government; and it's, as the article admits, great for firewalls because of that.

This article was good for bringing *BSD onto the radar screen of people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it, but if you read it you give the impression that nobody runs the other BSDs; something that the infamous AC BSD trolls try to accuse, albeit more crudely, all of the BSDs of being.

Not an accurate comparison to Linux

[Burdell]

But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.

Linux does not "rely on crucial BSD code to run." The Linux IP stack was a clean re-write (in part because at the time, the "free" BSD license was incompatible with the GNU GPL). There are some drivers that are developed cooperatively with FreeBSD and Linux (typically dual licensed under the BSD license and the GPL). AFAIK, the only code in Linux that originated in classic BSD is in a couple of the PPP compression modules, but that's hardly crucial code that is relied upon for operation.

Unlike most other operating systems (including most distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly via an Internet connection. No CD-ROM is required, though one must download two 1.4 MB floppy disk image files and use them to create bootstrap floppies.

I only have to download one 1.4 MB floppy disk image file to install Red Hat Linux from the Internet. Does that mean RHL is twice as good? Not really (although it is ;-) ).