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A FreeBSD "Spork" With Touches of NeXT and OS X: NeXTBSD
There are a lot of open source operating systems out there; being open source, they lend themselves to forks, clones or near clones, and friendly offshoots. There are even services to let you customize, download, and (if you choose) bulk-install your own OS based on common components. Phoronix notes a new project called NeXTBSD that might turn more heads than most new open source OSes, in part because of the developers behind it, and in part because of the positive thoughts many people have toward the aesthetics of NeXTSTEP and Mac OS X. (And while it might be a fork of FreeBSD, the developers would rather call it a spork, instead.)
NeXTBSD was announced last week by Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG). NeXTBSD / FreeBSD X is based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT kernel while adding in Mach IPC, Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd, and other components derived from Apple's open-source code for OS X. The basic launchd/notifyd/asld/libdispatch stack atop their "fork" of FreeBSD is working along with other basic components of their new design.
You can watch a recording of the announcement as well as a longer introduction linked from Phoronix's story.
Kind of interesting. From what I gather it's supposed to be the unstable rolling release branch of FreeBSD (-CURRENT), which presumably some Apple enhancements? Maybe the interface? I don't know, they're rather vague with what their ultimate goal is. The progressive part sounds like they intend for this to be something like Arch for Linux, but -CURRENT is not exactly a bastion of stability. It's the beta branch. Users won't want it because it's too unstable, and all the extras are going to make it unappealing for testing, I think. A neat idea, but I think this would be much better off if pulled from -STABLE or better yet, -RELEASE. THEN we'd have something quite interesting on our hands.
"Set a man a fire, he'll be warm for the rest of the night. Set a man afire, he'll be warm for the rest of his life."
I'd love to see a desktop OS that builds on what NeXT did. I know Mac OS X is that to some degree, but I'm thinking of something more like the original NeXTstep GUI.
It's somewhat ironic that when GNUstep first started, one of the reasons why it didn't get much traction was the use of the "non-standard" Objective-C. As a result, effort was instead spent on KDE and then GNOME. If GNUstep became the standard, it could have changed Linux on the desktop as porting Mac OS X apps over would have been much easier. Of course, no-one knew that then.
Apple are no longer interested in maintaining xnu/darwin and see strategic benefits from re-basing iOS and OS/X upon FreeBSD?
NetCraft wanted to confirm a fresh, new BSD corpse.
Systemd can replace all of that.
I vote for "Backstep"
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
He obviously has no option ROMs. I have to wait through the LSI SAS controller, Chelsio NIC, Intel management engine and Broadcom network boot option ROMs booting and displaying their messages before my workstation can start loading an OS.
Um, ever heard about containers, cloud images, disposable VMs, instant-on embedded appliances, etc. ?
None of which require the full suite of services which cause boot to be so slow. None of which will boot faster with launchd because the limited set of services depend on one another and so have to be started serially anyhow. None of which we are talking about right now, since we're discussing a desktop OS. None of which is relevant right now, so why did you bother?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
systemd envy.
Watch this Heartland Institute video
If we think that way then videogames are killing millions of people every day.
Apple killed Darwin. I ran it for a little while, though I prefer NetBSD. Darwin wasn't very interesting compared to an OS that has a vibrant active user/developer community.
One time I installed NetBSD on a box and configured and used it as my desktop machine. A few weeks later I needed to reboot it and was confused why it didn't have a hostname. It turned out that it was because I had installed it, done the first boot after install, and configured everything, but had never booted it a second time and had forgotten to add a hostname in the /etc/rc.d/rc.conf file. In other words it ran for weeks as a useful desktop machine but had only been booted a single time.
NetBSD is that easy to install, configure, and use, if you understand the classic startup sequence for BSD UNIX.
No systemd - they're using Apple's launchd instead.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Mach messages are much faster than SysV but not up to the speed of Solaris doors (which have some odd security issues but drop context swtiches). The SysV streams message system is based on the SysV IPC which is based on SysV shared memory and SysV semaphores. That stuff came from the early 1980s when a 2 CPU WE32000 in a 3B20 (or 5 or 15?) was the reference design for the biggest hardware Real UNIX (TM) would run on. Since that came from AT&T who wanted to make mainframes but had to have phone switches so their semaphore system was designed to work with things like a 5ESS phone switch where doing the right thing on failing hardware was better than doing anything fast.
It isn't about saving 5 seconds at system startup. People use that as an excuse because it's user visible. People constantly complain to me about MidnightBSD boot speed though. The real reason to do launchd (or maybe the one good thing about systemd) is that it allows you to make intelligent power decisions. If you know you're running on battery, you can avoid running background tasks that take a lot of CPU or disk IO. For example, the locate database could be updated next time you're plugged in. You could turn off services that are not needed when traveling.
If you had intelligent events sent as messages throughout the system, you could change graphics modes on low battery or tweak settings on wifi. If you think about it, OS X and Windows both act differently depending on power modes. It could all be done automatically. You can't build a good desktop OS without these features. They also have some value on servers when running on UPS backup, etc.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
I remember Steve Jobs found it important to save 5 seconds on the boot of one of the first Apple machines, because you save lives.
How about a computer that doesn't need to reboot so often? I used most of the early Apple machines, Apple I and /// aside, including the ][gs, Lisa, Macintosh 512k (sorry, missed the 128k) and Plus, I think I still have a SE with an accelerator in it just for the nostalgia value, had a IIci, etc etc. And I've had a lot of free reboots, most of them from Macs, and most of those reboots occurring between the era when Macs started getting MMUs, and when they started actually using it.
The Amiga would be done booting up while the Mac was still thinking about whether the mac was happy or sad... You had to reboot it a lot, but at least it genuinely rebooted quickly. Especially if you had "a lot" of RAM, by which I mean an extra MB or so. Then you could put the whole OS (ROMs aside) into a recoverable ramdisk... talk about a quick boot.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If you watch the last 20 minutes or so of the BAFUG video, Jordan Hubbard talks about launchd. I don't believe that boot time comes up a single time as a reason for making the switch.
A different asshole wanted to be in charge.
1. Jordan Hubbard was one of the original founders of FreeBSD. He didn't need to fork to be in charge.
2. Jordan is not an asshole. He is a friendly, outgoing, and helpful person. Perhaps you have him confused with Theo de Raadt.
The reason I'm interested is we're developing an agent based modeling language which makes very heavy use of IPC messages, so low latency and low overhead is super critical. Currently on OSX, it used Mach messages which works extremely well, I'm porting the system to Windows, and I'm using Windows ALPC messaging, http://www.zezula.net/en/prog/... Which is also working very well, it's actually very similar to Mach messages. Makes sense, as both OSX and Windows are hybrid micro/monolithic kernel OSs so it makes sense to have a fast messaging system. I'm going to port the system to Linux, but still need to research what is the lowest latency IPC system to use there. From my testing, Mach messages are faster on OSX than named pipes, I'm not sure how Linux sysv messaging compares to named pipes yet.
Perhaps you don't understand what the word "harbor" means. It means to give a home or shelter to someone; in this usage, it implies doing so in secret. Allowing someone to contribute code openly (not in secret) is precisely the opposite. It keeps the person talking, thus revealing that person's location, and making it easier to bring that person to justice.
Besides, it's a bit like the ethical question of "tainted" money. If someone earns money through doing bad things, is it ethical to use that money for good? Maybe. To me, the answer comes down to whether doing so would encourage continued bad behavior. For example, it would be unethical to accept evidence obtained through an illegal search (fruit of the poisonous tree) because doing so would encourage police to ignore the legal process and get the evidence through any means necessary. But in this case, if what you described is accurate, it is one step removed from that, even. The coding wasn't gained through illegal or unethical means; accepting the code would probably not make the person more likely to do bad things in his personal life, because the two are largely unconnected aspects of the person in question.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.