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Overview of the BSDs

Posted by michael on from the don't-want-to-go-on-the-cart dept.

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.'"

11 of 399 comments (clear)

  1. BSD by glamslam · · Score: 5, Interesting

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

    1. Re:BSD by coene · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I think (the 1 paragraph answer), Linux is popular because of the "Tech Boom Era", where companies could get millions in funding for having a business plan written on a napkin. Linux embodied the "One Smart Guy Takes On The World", and "Everything Is Changing" ideals that drove the economy a few years back. To think that Linus, a single guy, with a rag-tag group of developers, with their sandals and freakishly stylish hair, could make an OS that would compete with the biggest and best offerings from Sun and IBM. Its a cultural thing. 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.

    2. Re:BSD by MrResistor · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The Linux community is larger. I'm guessing that this is because Linux was written for x86 origionally, and was therefore available for the platform just about everybody has before BSD was. Obviously this is not true now, but momentum is a hard thing to overcome. I'm not confident on my timeline here, so if someone could prove that BSD was available for x86 prior to 1991, I'd happily concede the point.

      The Linux community is less mature. Obviously there are some negative aspects to this, and I'm sure you could find a few BSD folks who would be happy to list them for you. However, there are positive aspects as well. The most important, I think, is that it leads to more focus on things "normal" people (meaning people who aren't sysops) care about, like games. This lures more "normal" people into the community, who lure their frinds into the community, making it larger.

      The Linux community is more vocal. I think this is largely connected to the "immaturity" of the Linux community, and serves as both blessing and curse. Regardless, the world listens to those who speak out, and the fact that our culture glorifies youth almost to the point of worship goes a long way towards mitigating the negative aspects of the lack of maturity in the public eye.

      Anyway, that's my take on it. For the record, I'm a Linux guy. To my knowledge I have never used a BSD.

      --
      Under capitalism man exploits man. Under communism it's the other way around.
    3. Re:BSD by Krow10 · · Score: 5, Interesting
      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
      --
      Corollary to Clarke's Third Law: Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
    4. Re:BSD by JoeBuck · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    5. Re:BSD by LunaticLeo · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      --
      -- I am not a fanatic, I am a true believer.
  2. OpenBSD... by FuzzyMan45 · · Score: 5, Insightful

    While i use OpenBSD 3.1 on my server at home, and love their security standpoint, i couldn't help but correct the article. It mentions that there's been one hole in 6 years, what it doesn't say, is that it is only the default install that has that track record, not the ports database or any of the apps people compile themselves. It's an important distinction to make.

  3. Holy crap by theNeophile · · Score: 5, Funny
    Now i know why i don't visit ExtremeTech much.

    What is BSD? If you ask a typical computer "expert," he or she is likely to reply
    Next Page >
    (incorrectly!) that it is "an operating system." The correct answer, however, is more complex than that.
    Next Page >
    BSD is -- among other things -- a culture, a philosophy, and a growing collection of software, most (though not all) of which is available for free and with source code.
    Next Page >
    Here are the origins of BSD and the operating systems it has spawned.
    Next Page >
    BSD stands for "Berkeley Software Distribution," the name first given to the University of California at Berkeley's own toolkit of enhancements for the UNIX operating system.

  4. Why BSD over Linux and History Clarifications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    First, I've used Unix since 1977 and BSD since about 1979 (whenever V3.0 BSD came out.)

    Why is Linux more popular than BSD?

    I think mostly because a useable, free distribution of linux was available first. Although a lot of the BSD code was freely available there was no real distribution you could load and boot for a few crucial years other than BSDi which cost about $1000 (and was very good, but you had to be willing to part with $1000.)

    So, simply: A loadable, bootable, useable Linux was available for free to the general public before the same was available for BSD.

    Some might nitpick about the availability of Jolitz' 386BSD but it was at best a very limited distribution and supported only some specific cpu/bios/disk/etc setups. From almost the start Linux used the BIOS drivers (ok I'm not a x86 internals weenie so might have this worded slightly wrong) which meant you tended to just get lucky if you tried Linux on your off-beat hardware, it'd usually just work.

    Remember also that in the early/mid 90's x86's were much less standardized and you tended to do your own system integration taking a basic system with a motherboard and often adding a video card, a disk card, a disk, a sound card, etc. and all that had to be supported by OS drivers of some sort. Linux was better at that then BSD back then.

    HISTORY:

    What's seriously missing from the article are the specific reasons why BSD gained such fast popularity:

    In the 70's the most popular system for hacking around on was the DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.) PDP-11. It was relatively cheap for its day (usually under $100K!) and expandable and mostly maintainable by the sysadmins.

    Unix from Bell Labs and very early BSDs ran on the PDP-11. But it was limited to 16-bits, many systems maxed out with 64KB (yes KB) of memory! Fancier systems could extend that to 128KB, and their rolls-royce model, the PDP-11/70, could handle 2MB but anything beyond 64KB was mostly used like a fast swap disk, you'd load programs and the OS would switch which 64KB (or for some 128KB, 64KB for the program, 64KB for its data) it was running right now.

    Then, around 1978, DEC came out with the VAX (Virtual Address eXtension, of the PDP-11, tho that's more of a historical artifact of a name.)

    The VAX had 32-bits of architecture and could support, well, over 1GB of physical and 4GB of virtual memory, at least in theory tho in those days 16MB of physical was huge super-computer stuff.

    But the virtual memory system was very complicated and DEC released it only with their own proprietary VMS O/S which was kind of like CP/M on steroids (MS/DOS was based on CP/M), with a few additions like the VM support.

    There were some early releases of Unix for the Vax (e.g., System/32 from AT&T) but they didn't support the VM hardware and so were very limited. VAXes cost around $500K, you didn't really want to spend half a million and then not be able to use the main point of the hardware!

    Then Bill Joy (BSD, later one of the Sun founders) in probably one of the greatest virtuoso performances in hacking history added VM support to BSD and a VAX version was released.

    Suddenly every University and research lab had to have a Vax running BSD, particularly by their 4.1 release. 4.2bsd added full TCP/IP support and a much more robust file system written by Kirk McKusick (previously a crash would often corrupt the file system and there was no real fsck so sometimes you'd have to use a kind of interactive file system debugger to fix a partition manually,
    or just try to recreate it from backups,
    ugh, you don't know the horror.)

    DEC came out with the somewhat less expensive VAX 11/750 and even a 730 model (which really, really
    sucked, but better than nothing!) and more and more people at universities & research facilities bought them to run BSD/Unix which, particularly with ethernet and maybe even an Arpanet connection, was just grand, heaven on earth.

    DEC fought tooth and nail against BSD/Unix (any Unix) preferring to push their proprietary VMS OS even if it meant shoving down people's throats (e.g., they loved going to the suits and telling them that if their people run Unix on their $500K VAXes DEC might refuse to fix the hardware if it breaks...FUD.)

    Eventually DEC relented and came out with their own version of Unix for the Vax based mostly on BSD and called it Ultrix.

    But it was too little, too late, by then Sun was eating their lunch with much better Unix on machines that mostly cost well under $100K even in their fancy incarnations. And bitmapped workstations (Sun3/50) could be had for around $5K with disk (or you could run them diskless for less.)

    Sun ran a pretty pure BSD/Unix and then in the late 80's merged it with AT&T's System V (as in five, not vee, there was a I, III, and probably some numbers in between not publically released.)

    AT&T completely fell on its face with Unix coming out with the doomed 3B series of AT&T computers (proprietary CPU) running their SYSV Unix as well as the rebadged Convergent PC7300 which was kind of cool because to my knowledge it's the only machine that had a label on it "Unix PC".

    1. Re:Why BSD over Linux and History Clarifications by edhall · · Score: 5, Informative

      Good grief; someone got it (mostly) right! DEC's hardware was absolutely crucial to Unix's emergence, even though DEC did damn near everything to stop it. I do have a few nits to pick, though, and a bit more info on BSD's contribution (specifically the 1.x and 2.x series which ran on PDP-11 only):

      • PDP-11's supported 256KB of memory early on due to the fact that the UNIBUS had 18 address lines. The PDP-11/70 added another wider bus and so supported more memory, as you say.
      • Although the PDP-11/40 and earlier supported only a single 64KB address space, the PDP-11/45 supported separate Data and Text (executable) spaces. Most Unix installations were 11/45's or 11/70's, and so supported this feature (which lead to the introduction of "shared text" -- separate processes sharing a single copy of executable code).
      • Saying that memory outside of 64KB was used as "fast swap" is inaccurate, since it implies that processes were copied to and from it; in fact, PDP-11's (from the '40 on) had segmentation hardware which allowed that memory to be mapped in without copying.
      • One of the things that BSD added to Unix on PDP-11's was the ability to use its segmentation hardware to map in and out parts of executables. Although the granularity of 8KB segments tended to limit this feature to separate phases of a program, it helped soften the 64/64 barrier a bit on the code side.
      • Shared memory was another feature allowed by the memory hardware that BSD took advantage of.
      • BSD also added a primitive (by later standards) networking capability called, I believe, BerkNET.
      • A number of other features were added as well to PDP-11 BSD Unix along with a lot of performance tuning and enhancement. It wasn't unusual to have sixty people comfortably sharing a PDP-11/70 doing software development and word processing (and, of course, email and messaging).

      Very little of what Berkeley added to PDP-11 Unix survives. This isn't surprising given that a fair amount of it was designed specifically to confront the 16-bit address limitation in some way. It's a bit amusing to hear some similar ideas being discussed today (though more in Linux circles than BSD, I think) for overcoming the 32-bit address limit. (It's also a bit weird to think that if Moore's law continues to hold, I'll probably live to see the same thing happen at 64 bits!)

      The VAX version of BSD (which was developed pretty much separately -- the two overlapped by several years) has direct influence on all BSD's today, of course, and your post pretty covers its development from Unix V32 through Ultrix.

      -Ed
  5. Re:The article forgot to mention SunOS by durdur · · Score: 5, Informative

    SunOS version's 4.x and below were derived from BSD.
    SunOS version 5.X and Solaris are based on SVR5.