Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Celebrating 20 Years of OpenBSD With Release 5.8 (openbsd.org)

Posted by timothy on from the maturity-and-innovation dept.

badger.foo writes: 20 years to the day after the OpenBSD source tree was created for the new project, the project has released OpenBSD 5.8, the 38th release on CD-ROM (and 39th via FTP/HTTP). This release comes with four release songs instead of the usual one, and a long list of improvements over the last releases. (Probably a good time to donate to the project, too, even if you don't use it directly, because of all the security improvements that OpenBSD programmers contribute to the world.)

1 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Does it have systemd? by fnj · · Score: 4, Informative

    Agreed 100% that post #50754359's AC is an uninformed blowhard ... however ...

    XNU (OSX's kernel) does have a bunch of Mach-based code running in it, and it is being "used"; in fact it is performing critical functions:

    Preemptive multitasking and multithreading
    Memory protection
    Virtual memory management
    Inter-process communication
    Interrupt management
    Real-time support
    Kernel debugging support
    Console I/O

    There is also a bunch of FreeBSD-based code running in XNU, implementing essentially all the other kernel functions, including POSIX support, filesystems

    Is XNU microkernel-based? That's one for the semanticists to debate. Arguably the Mach-based code is not performing microkernel functions. What is not debatable is that there are or have been Unix-"alike" OS'es baed on microkernels. Minix is one. Hurd is another. They are as Unix-alike as Linux is. I would say POSIX defines Unix-ness, and there is absolutely nothing to prevent a microkernel from implementing POSIX just as fully and faithfully as a monolithic kernel.