Slashdot Mirror
OpenBSD 6.2 Released (openbsd.org)
basscomm writes: OpenBSD 6.2 has now been released. Check out the release notes if you're into that kind of thing. Some of the new features and systems include improved hardware support, vmm(4)/ vmd(8) improvements, IEEE 802.11 wireless stack improvements, generic network stack improvements, installer improvements, routing daemons and other userland network improvements, security improvements and more. Here is the full list of changes.
Congregations to the team.
One thing to be aware of, OpenBSD no longer has year a 2038 issue, so if you have 32 bit hardware around you should give it a spin. Never mind the fact that if it was used on 32 bit IOT devices, we would have no worries about built in obsolescence in about ~20 years. And even security would be a bit better 'out of the box' :)
The whole structure of the OS is so vastly different. The whole base userland and kernel on a BSD OS are released as a complete source tarball on one revision tag. It all builds together. You can build an entire BSD release with two make commands, one for the kernel and one for the userland.
With Linux, the userland of each 'disto' is whatever that 'distro maintainer' decided to pull together into the dogs breakfast of a userland that Linux OSes always have. Source code for userland binaries come from all over the place. And there are so many userlands.
FreeBSD itself is -- as far as I know -- "managed" by the FreeBSD Foundation, and, in turn, that Foundation is managed by the FreeBSD developers.
Not quite. The FreeBSD Foundation is entirely separate from the FreeBSD Project. The FreeBSD Project is managed by the core team, which is a set of 9 people that are elected by 'active' contributors, defined as people who have committed something in the last year (I think - I'd have to double check the project bylaws for the exact time). The Foundation board is self-selected (i.e. board members are appointed by existing board members). There is usually at least one person who is both on the board of the Foundation and the Core team, though not always. The Foundation employs a few full time people and a lot of contractors to contribute to bits of the project that no one personally wants to work on, no single company wants to contribute, but which everyone thinks are important. This is typically guided by the Core Team. This structure protects the project's independence from the Foundation's financial weight (the Foundation's turnover is $1-2M/year). The Core Team decides who is allowed commit rights (usually in terms of granting this right, in very rare examples by taking it away), so the most the Foundation can do is pay someone to write code, they can't force the project to accept it.
The Foundation also handles a lot of vendor relations. Often, multiple vendors want the same thing, but no one wants to pay for all of it. The Foundation helps in these situations by getting different companies to pay for part of something. For example, ARM and Cavium jointly funded to the ARMv8 bring-up (ARM likes having a BSD-licensed reference implementation, because companies like Apple and Microsoft won't touch GPL'd code, Cavium wants to sell chips to companies like Juniper that use FreeBSD), but the Foundation organised the people to do the work (and others to do code review). They also do a lot of outreach. For the last few years, they've employed the release engineer, which is an incredibly annoying and high-stress job that it's hard to find volunteers for (and hard for companies to want to do, because the big downstream consumers typically use their own internal release process).
Disclaimer: I was on the Core Team for two terms, but this post contains personal opinions that may not reflect the opinions of the FreeBSD Project or the FreeBSD Foundation.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The page on how to contribute (https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/contributing/index.html) is certainly a lot more helpful than the ones for other big OS projects like KDE and Gnome.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC