FreeBSD to Celebrate 10 Year Anniversary in SF, CA

Dan writes "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...in the early part of 1993...the last 3 coordinators of the 'Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit' would go on to start the FreeBSD project that has grown to be used by millions of websites and installations around the world. Murray Stokely is talking about Jordan Hubbard, Nate Williams, and Rod Grimes. Looking for a catchy name, David Greenman suggested FreeBSD and it stuck. With the help of Walnut Creek CDROM, the first CDROM distribution, FreeBSD 1.0, was released in December of 1993."

Comments

Any Necraft data?

[Anonymous Coward]

Any netcraft surveys on the spread of BSd available?

Re:Any Necraft data?

[Dark_Planet]

Netcraft data

Moderation

[horcy]

I think it's time that the slashdot staff has to take action against those lame BSD posts... Every single news fact about BSD gets these empty headed posts.

Re:Moderation

[Homology]

Well, yes, there are so many immature Leanux kiddoes that can't handle the fact that a *BSD is actually a mature OS, and not just another kernel+patch.

Re:Moderation

[cpeterso]

Slashdot could add a new lameness filter to prevent people from posting comments that contain the words "BSD" and "dead". How often do you really need to use the word dead in casual converstation?

I was originally going to just joke that any comment that contained the word "BSD" should be filtered, but the idea of filtering "BSD AND dead" is not that bad an idea.

Re:Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

Who's doing most fo the work on XFree86, GCC, GNOME, KDE and all sorts of other projects of which the BSD flavours make heavy use?

That's right, Linux distro vendors such as Red Hat. Next time you want to attack Linux, think that it's propping-up BSD. Or you could go back to GCC 2.7.2, XFree86 3.3.1, etc. etc. etc.

You are a cretin. Get your head in the real world?

Re:Moderation

[merdark]

Earth to Linux zealot. XFree86 is BSD software. That's right, it's under the BSD license, and has *nothing* to do with Linux! Wow.

Furthmore, you can't credit Linux with GCC either. GCC is worked on by many many people using many different systems. By your logic, you should be kissing Apple and Sun's butts since they infused quite a bit of help into GCC and GNOME. You should also kiss Troll Tech's butt for QT which let's KDE exist. And of course you should kiss SGI's butt for giving you GLX (part of XFree now) and OpenGL.
So Red Hat helps out too, so what? Linux is owed nothing and deserves nothing.

If anything, Linux has set the open source movement back a few years by having inferior technology (ya ya 2.6 fixes this) and an unstable driver API preventing the much needed vendor made drivers.

Oh, and Linux is not the real world by the way. Look up, away from your monitor and breath. Meet world.

Re:Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth to Merdark. XFree86 is _not_ BSD software -- it's not a component of any BSD project, it just happens to share the same license.

Moving on, you seem to have a hard time understanding. I didn't "credit" Linux for GCC's recent developments, just pointed out that the new optimisations, features and support are coming mostly from Linux companies. The same is true of XFree86, GNOME, KDE and others used on a BSD desktop. Do you really think, without the massive success Linux is enjoying, and all the companies and people behind it, these projects would still be progressing so well?

Exactly. Next time you're chuffed that XFree86 supports your new graphics card, or GCC has a new feature, or GNOME and KDE see new releases, thank Linux. It's nothing to do with Linux being good/bad -- you BSD zealots make it sound like Linux could just disappear tomorrow with no problems, but you'd lose so much. Linux's popularity is driving big developments. Learn to live with it.

As for "an unstable driver API preventing the much needed vendor made drivers". Ah yeah, now _that_ explains why FreeBSD has much broader hardware support, eh? Stop being a cretin.

"Oh, and Linux is not the real world by the way."

Hah. I thought you were misinformed and naive, but that's just laughable. I guess you count massive companies with thousands of computers like Shell as "not the real world" then? The German city of Munich? Hundreds of other places, corps and organisations using Linux en masse?

What's _your_ real world? Sitting on Internet forums with your l33t self-satisfaction BSD box, making mystifyingly vague claims about BSD being "more stable" than Linux or something?

When you get a proper job and a life, kiddo, you might start seeing things as how they are, rather than through rose-tinted specs. BSD is pretty good, but Linux the place to be.

Re:Moderation

[pyrrhonist]

How often do you really need to use the word dead in casual converstation?

How about:

"I can't log into the BSD box!"
"That's because it's dead."

Oh, wait, that's never going to happen in a billion years.
You're right, it won't come up in casual conversation.

Re:Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can't log into the BSD box!" "That's because it's dead." Oh, wait, that's never going to happen in a billion years.

Because BSD uptimes typically get very near to a billion years? :)

Re:Moderation

[merdark]

Yes, Linux could disappear tomrrow with no problems. Any one of the BSD kernels could take over the duties performed by the Linux kernel. All those "Linux vendors" would them immediatly be "BSD vendors".

You cannot credit Linux with the open source movements achievments. Sorry, try again.

The only reason the corporations are using Linux is because of the hype. The only reason Linux is the more popular kernel is due to the AT&T lawsuite that existed when both Linux and BSD were new.

Sure, companies make drivers for Linux, credit popularity again, not the kernel. Do you know why there are not *more* drivers for Linux? Because of the crappy ABI. And know what's more? Most of those binary only drivers are specifically for "Red Hat". Again, Linux is the problem here.

Just because the term Linux is commonly used to refer to the open source operating system technology doesn't mean you get to credit everything to Linux. Try again bud.

BSD owes Linux nothing. It may owe something to the *companies* promoting open source operating systems which *happen* to use the Linux kernel, but certainly not to the Linux kernel.

Re:Moderation

[Anonymous Coward]

No problems? The Linux kernel has a far broader range of features being put to good use, and you couldn't just switch to FreeBSD's kernel without losing a large amount of functionality and having to make many sweeping changes.

Then again, you're the guy who just said "Linux isn't in the real world", so you're clearly just a zealot who needs to get out more. Sigh!

Re:Moderation

[tarius8105]

No problems? The Linux kernel has a far broader range of features being put to good use, and you couldn't just switch to FreeBSD's kernel without losing a large amount of functionality and having to make many sweeping changes.

You are correct if you mean in for the average desktop user. However, FreeBSD has been known to blow linux out of the water with speed. Further more, try on a 2.4 kernel compiling 4 different apps at once, it slows the machine down to a crawl if not locks it up. You'll never see that happen on a BSD box.

Re:Moderation

[merdark]

Please list this "far broader range of features" that Linux has.

Journaling file system? BSD has an equivalent. ACLs? BSD has em. Sure, some drivers may be missing, but people could port those over to BSD fairly quickly if the so cared.

The only *critical* feature that you'd be missing is enterprise volume managment. Which again, is a feature born from the corporations, and just happens to have been put into Linux by those corporations. ALSA is also pretty good, but again, this could be ported to BSD as kernel modules. There is nothing special about the Linux kernel. It's a plain old monolithic kernel which is only in the near future getting features other monolithic kernels have had for a long time such as a good VM and O(1) scheduling (BSD may not have had O(1) until this year, but corporate UNIXs sure did).

And again. Linux is not the real world. If you ever actually *worked* at any decently large corporation or university, you'd know that the real world involves heterogenous environments. Linux fits in as a destop and small server piece, but is in competition with Windows and Mac mostly, sometimes BSD (especially on the server end). Linux and BSD don't even come close to big iron like Sun and AIX though. Show me hot swapable cpu support or terminal services or IBM type world class support for Linux and *then* you can maybe think about Linux for the Enterprise. And that's assuming that 2.6 is in production, which it isn't. That's the real world. In the real world, Linux is only an option. That's right, the world does *not* revolve around slashdot and open source.

Binary patches? Please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Much as I love the clean layout and careful design of FreeBSD (and in fairness the other BSD flavours), it's a lot of hassle to maintain. When a security patch appears, needing the full development toolchain, kernel and system source and time to patch and rebuild and install is tiresome. On my Debian boxes, it's one simple command.

So is any form of binary patching planned for future FreeBSD releases? I'd love this, and I'd move my Debian boxes over to FreeBSD immediately.

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[Vint Cerf]

Yes.

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[cperciva]

Or, more usefully: FreeBSD Update, which is also in the FreeBSD ports tree (security/freebsd-update).

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hrm, that's useful, but it still requires a machine for applying patches and rebuilding. Not sure if that guy offers the resulting binaries -- whatever the case, it'd be so much better to have them distributed via FreeBSD's main site and FTP mirrors.

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you have 'all these boxes' you have the money to buy your own machine for compiling the patches on.

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[cperciva]

Hrm, that's useful, but it still requires a machine for applying patches and rebuilding. Not sure if that guy offers the resulting binaries -- whatever the case, it'd be so much better to have them distributed via FreeBSD's main site and FTP mirrors.

I publish binary updates for 4.7-RELEASE and 4.8-RELEASE right now. I will be publishing updates for 4.9-RELEASE as well, and also 5.x RELEASES once I get some new hardware.

This will be integrated into FreeBSD more fully in the future (included in base, updates built and distributed by the project), but there are some improvements I want to make first.

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, that sounds superb, and good luck with it. The only problem is that not everyone will trust you -- you seem like a decent guy to me :) -- so having it rolled into the official FreeBSD Project stuff would make it perfect.

Re:Binary patches? Please?

[cperciva]

The only problem is that not everyone will trust you -- you seem like a decent guy to me :) -- so having it rolled into the official FreeBSD Project stuff would make it perfect.

That's exactly one of the reasons I don't want it as part of the project yet. Right now, quite independent of the issue of trusting the *person* building updates, people have to trust the *machine* building updates -- which isn't exactly an ideal situation. Of course, people trust the root CVS repository, but that's something which can be verified; it's hard to verify binaries.

Something I will be working on is the ability to have several machines independently building updates and verifying each other's updates; the update client would then refuse to install any updates unless they were signed by (for example) 18 out of the 20 update-building boxes.

Broken 1.0 releases?

[bovinewasteproduct]

So who else has contributed broken software to a 1.0 release?

I'm the reason why the mitsumi CD-ROM driver was broken, and of course Rod had just cut the gold master (and back then it was a major pain to make masters) and could not update the sources.

After about 20 patches, he just just gave me a commit bit...:)

BWP

Re:Broken 1.0 releases?

[scosol]

Whoa! I'm responsible for the broken mitsumi cdrom driver in the later releases- 2.2.x or so?
Circa 95-96 :)

dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

You totally missed the point. Linux vendors contribute a LOT more code to project such as XFree86 than any of you BSD fanboy's.

Re:dumbass

[Anonymous Coward]

You totally missed the point. Linux vendors contribute a LOT more code to project such as XFree86 than any of you BSD fanboy's.

Given the 200+ forks of GNU/Linux and each one wanting the programs to run, of COURSE they are submitting patches back. DUH.

But you seem to be confused that 'if it runs on Linux its called Linux'. A common problem, comes from the Microsoft 'call everything Microsoft to gain mindshare/marketshare' thinking.

Re:Did you forget?

[bsd_usr]

At least he has the balls to use his id. What's wrong, did you lose your balls, Mr. Anonymous Coward?

michael sims

[Anonymous Coward]

if this is offtopic, why isn't the parent of this post not?

Re:Did you forget?

[Anonymous Coward]

Never had balls.

Not part of my gender.

(And note how said 'user with balls' is still posting the 'BSD is dying' crap as an AC.)

Re:Troll-in-one

[Shanep]

To add to the anti Trolling...

OpenBSD 3.2, Pentium 75MHz, 32MB old 72pin EDO RAM, old narrow SCSI 520MB Seagate drive on some old Taiwanese VX motherboard I found thrown out during my local clean-up day:

Time to create 22MB file from /dev/zero: 24 seconds.
Time to copy that file to same disk: 1 min 17 seconds. (plenty of old head thrashing).

firewall# dmesg
OpenBSD 3.2 (GENERIC) #25: Thu Oct 3 19:51:53 MDT 2002
deraadt@i386.openbsd.org:/usr/src/sys/arch/i386/co mpile/GENERIC
cpu0: F00F bug workaround installed
cpu0: Intel Pentium (P54C) ("GenuineIntel" 586-class) 75 MHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,PSE,TSC,MSR,MCE,CX8
real mem = 33140736 (32364K)
avail mem = 25227264 (24636K)
using 430 buffers containing 1761280 bytes (1720K) of memory
mainbus0 (root)
bios0 at mainbus0: AT/286+(39) BIOS, date 07/10/96, BIOS32 rev. 0 @ 0xfb1e0
apm0 at bios0: Power Management spec V1.2
apm0: AC on, battery charge unknown, estimated 0:00 hours
pcibios0 at bios0: rev. 2.1 @ 0xf0000/0xb700
pcibios0: PCI BIOS has 5 Interrupt Routing table entries
pcibios0: PCI Interrupt Router at 000:07:0 ("Intel 82371SB PCI-ISA" rev 0x00)
pcibios0: PCI bus #0 is the last bus
bios0: ROM list: 0xdc000/0x4000
pci0 at mainbus0 bus 0: configuration mode 1 (bios)
pchb0 at pci0 dev 0 function 0 "Intel 82437VX" rev 0x02
pcib0 at pci0 dev 7 function 0 "Intel 82371SB PCI-ISA" rev 0x01
pciide0 at pci0 dev 7 function 1 "Intel 82371SB IDE" rev 0x00: DMA, channel 0 wired to compatibility, channel 1 wired to compatibility
pciide0: channel 0 ignored (disabled)
pciide0: channel 1 ignored (disabled)
rl0 at pci0 dev 20 function 0 "Realtek 8139" rev 0x10: irq 15 address 00:08:a1:28:72:e7
rlphy0 at rl0 phy 0: RTL internal phy
isa0 at pcib0
isadma0 at isa0
pckbc0 at isa0 port 0x60/5
pckbd0 at pckbc0 (kbd slot)
pckbc0: using irq 1 for kbd slot
wskbd0 at pckbd0: console keyboard
(bha probe): bha_cmd, cmd/data port empty 13
aha0 at isa0 port 0x330/4 irq 11 drq 5: model AHA-1542CF, firmware B.0
aha0: unlocking mailbox interface
aha0: async, parity
scsibus0 at aha0: 8 targets
sd0 at scsibus0 targ 0 lun 0: [SEAGATE, ST3655N, 9550] SCSI2 0/direct fixed
sd0: 520MB, 2493 cyl, 5 head, 85 sec, 512 bytes/sec, 1065036 sec total
pcppi0 at isa0 port 0x61
midi0 at pcppi0:
sysbeep0 at pcppi0
npx0 at isa0 port 0xf0/16: using exception 16
pccom0 at isa0 port 0x3f8/8 irq 4: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
pccom0: console
pccom1 at isa0 port 0x2f8/8 irq 3: ns16550a, 16 byte fifo
biomask 800 netmask 8800 ttymask 8802
pctr: 586-class performance counters and user-level cycle counter enabled
dkcsum: sd0 matched BIOS disk 80
root on sd0a
rootdev=0x400 rrootdev=0xd00 rawdev=0xd02
firewall# time dd bs=64k count=352 if=/dev/zero of=/22MB.bin
352+0 records in
352+0 records out
23068672 bytes transferred in 23.791 secs (969608 bytes/sec)
0.0u 2.0s 0:24.24 8.5% 0+0k 21+2490io 15pf+0w
firewall# ls -la /22MB.bin
-rw-r--r-- 1 root wheel 23068672 Oct 27 23:29 /22MB.bin
firewall# time cp /22MB.bin /home
0.0u 2.7s 1:16.37 3.5% 0+0k 379+2490io 11pf+0w
firewall#

What a useless story

[norweigiantroll]

It doesn't even contain a link to the news flash

Re:What a useless story

[scosol]

Yeah- I was just gonna say "Hey SF, Maybe I'll attend- errr where is the link to the actual story???"

Re:Troll-in-one

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok

P90 overclocked to a blazing 100MHZ. 16MB or ram and Linux Kernel 2.0.36 with a 420MB IDE drive

time to create 22MB file ~13 seconds
time to move 22MB file ~38 seconds.

I think you have a problem...

Sco's gift

[OzPhIsH]

I wonder what gift Sco will be giving the BSD team... Maybe they'll donate some code enabling FreeBSD to finally be "ready for the enterprise." That or maybe they can license "Happy Birthday" for us so we can all sing it at the party! I for one can't wait to see more wild antics of Darl the Clown! WoooHooo Birtday!!!!!

Re:*BSD is not dying

[peterpi]

heheh, that is teh 1337 troll! ;)

Rod Grimes

[Rex Code]

Or "Grimy", as he liked to be called.

Re:Troll-in-one

[Anonymous Coward]

The reason your file's transferred faster is because it's on an IDE drive set to 420.

I'll bet his setup remembers where it *put* the file :)

Re:Learning from BSD's mistakes

[John Sokol]

One word, Linux wouldn't be what it is, or even the entire internet for that matter, if it were not for BSD. BSD was until reciently been considered a research OS and the TCP/IP stack was prototyped there.
Much of early linux borrowed from Net2 and 386BSD and later replaced this code.

Linux also had similar growing pains but lack the copyright problems that held back BSD allowing Linux to capture the lions share of the market before BSD was able to be officialy free of AT&T.

Linux has also has similar infighting but is was more obscure at that time, and so most people aren't aware of that. While the BSD was very visible while its fight were occuring.

And by most accounts BSD has alway been more stable then Linux. Why Else whould Apple choose this for the base of there new OS?

Re:Learning from BSD's mistakes

[Anonymous Coward]

Why Else whould Apple choose this for the base of there new OS?

BSD license.