10 ms·

NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X

154 points by tachion 11y ago

gjvc 11y ago
where / when was this presented?
- glitch 11y ago
  Bay Area FreeBSD User Group (BAFUG) August 2015 meeting. There's a video recording available at http://www.nextbsd.org/jordan-hubbard-visits-bafug/ http://www.nextbsd.org/jordan-hubbard-visits-bafug/
  - gjvc 11y ago
    just found it, thank you.
cpeterso 11y ago
FreeBSD + Mach kernel, libdispatch, and launchd? How does this differ from Darwin?
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  I may be misunderstanding, but as far as I know it simply layers Mach kernel services onto the FreeBSD kernel rather than actually using Mach.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    Correct. There's an OSF Mach shim running as a FreeBSD kernel module which is then used to drive XPC and everything above. That said, I feel rather uneasy about the base FreeBSD going such a verbatim OS X route. I can understand doing it for FreeNAS, PC-BSD and derivatives, but it's quite invasive for upstream. Especially considering this requires running a parallel Mach kernel in the same address space. Also, using Mach IPC deliberately in 2015 is like shooting yourself in the foot in my mind, but it's probably better than kdbus.
    - X-Istence 11y ago
      The base FreeBSD isn't going this route, this is something that is being worked on at iXsystems that may or may not eventually find it's way to FreeBSD itself. That's my understanding from the presentation!
    - erikarn 11y ago
      There's no parallel Mach kernel running. It's just Mach IPC shimmed as an FD type.
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        It's a kernel module implementation of much of OSF Mach verbatim copied and shimmed from MkLinux, not just IPC. See sys/compat/mach in the NextBSD source tree.
        erikarn 11y ago
        Yeah I looked; it's the IPC from Mach with some shimmed bits to do VM-y things for mapped message passing. Mach was mostly VM and IPC - so of course it looks like it's a lot of Mach code. But there's no separate mach kernel running - it's just the IPC instances and they only exist as FD bits. It's not a complete kernel and FreeBSD isn't running "on" mach.
        vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        I never made such a claim that FreeBSD is running on Mach. I said it integrated a Mach kernel interface as a module running in kernel space. They also ported tasks (as processes), threads (kthreads) and some clock/timer stuff, as well. No memory objects because there's no external pager they can be backed from.
- tossanextbsd 11y ago
  It's just a FreeBSD kernel. Kip's implemented Mach facilities on FreeBSD, but it's not remotely like Darwin. Darwin is a Mach (micro-)kernel that implements BSD APIs on top of Mach.
  - natermer 11y ago
    If Darwin uses a Microkernel then so does Microsoft Windows. They are very similar designs. In case you are wondering: I don't think that Microsoft Windows uses a microkernel. Some versions of Mach are micro, other versions are not. OS X doesn't use a microkernel, neither does Darwin. They use XNU kernel. XNU has code from Mach and it also uses code from FreeBSD. People call it a 'hybrid kernel', but I think that is a misnomer and only really exists through the effectiveness of Apple's marketing. XNU is a monolithic kernel with message passing capabilities inspired from microkernels. Makes it so they can isolate certain features and drivers better then, say, Linux can. Unlike Apple, Microsoft actually did release a version of NT that was a true microkernel, but they quickly realized that it is not a practical approach to creating a OS that was competitive with Unix. Regardless... This seems pretty much Darwin grafted with FreeBSD. For a commercial network appliance device it's probably a good approach. They get all the benefits from using source code from Apple, FreeBSD, and ZFS without having to actually provide much source code in the way of real improvements that could be used to enhance a competitor's product.
    - Maarten88 11y ago
      > Microsoft actually did release a version of NT that was a true microkernel, You mean Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5, right? I used those intensively, and it worked really well. > but they quickly realized that it is not a practical approach.. With Windows NT 4.0 they left the original design and moved everything including the graphics into the kernel. But that was not because the original approach was not practical or did not work. It was because Windows 95. The wanted Win32 to be API compatible with that crap (desktop 'gadgets' and such) and that's why they did it. I remember hating NT 4.0 because it was so much less stable than the original versions.
      - 11y ago
bbatha 11y ago
I wonder if you could glue microsoft's ios emulation layer on top of this and get the basis of an open source ios/os x?
- duaneb 11y ago
  I would bet the ios emulation layer isn't going to be much use off windows. In any case, there's already gnustep to get you pretty damn close.
  - kitsunesoba 11y ago
    GNUStep is a cool idea (I’d love love love to be able to develop cross-platform desktop apps with Cocoa), but its problem is that it’s lagging so far behind that it’s practically unusable. If you’re targeting Apple Cocoa/OS X too (why wouldn’t you be) you’re going to be restricted to AppKit as it was back in OS X 10.5 or 10.6, and that sucks. Unfortunately, unless the project has a sudden windfall of cash and/or developers, I doubt this will change any time soon.
- 0x0 11y ago
  No because microsoft's implementation calls to win32 and XAML for everything. Also, would you trust an implementation that thinks this is an OK implementation of arc4random()? (even if it was fixed later?) - https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/blob/59a63e42a9d10da8aadbf8d3b6c10fd02e6b40c6/Frameworks/CoreFoundation/CFMisc.mm#L28 https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/blob/59a63e42a9d10da8aa...
  - neverartful 11y ago
    But if you throw in wine... I say this in jest, but it does make me wonder.
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      First Wine needs to understand WinRT application model.
gh02t 11y ago
Any idea what the purpose is to this? I'm not putting it down, I'm just looking for context. The annotations say this work is being done at iXsystems, best known for being the stewards of FreeNAS, but this project seems to be separate.
- Sanddancer 11y ago
  This has a feeling very much of a research project to see how well an init framework like launchd would work in FreeBSD. There's been talk amongst a lot of developers that the current init needs to be replaced by /something/, but that something is still up in the air.
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    It's not just launchd, it's the entire low-level OS X userspace. Nor is it research. It very much appears to be commercial, since it's undertaken by iXsystems. They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit. End goal appears to be get upstream FreeBSD in it, too. There's nothing of research value here. It's Mach. It's practically an anachronism to do such a thing deliberately. I actually have quite a lot to say on this topic, so I think I'll write an in-depth blog post on it.
    - cmurf 11y ago
      Not necessarily anachronstic, considering the iXsysems CTO is Jordan Hubbard, who was previously at Apple as director of UNIX technology. Out with the old in with the less old?
      - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        Adopting Mach fresh in 2015 is certainly anachronistic.
        sjwright 11y ago
        It would be, except they're not adopting Mach.
kev009 11y ago
As a FreeBSD user, developer, and fan, I'm excited that they are digging into some of this stuff. My amateur question is just wonder if adding a ton of new KPIs is really necessary, or could be done in a more holistic thinking way.
ilurkedhere 11y ago
Is this similar to systemd?
- wmf 11y ago
  It's similar in the sense of throwing out the Unix philosophy and replacing it with a different one while keeping 99% of the code. It's not obvious why NeXTBSD would be better than Lennartux though. (Just to be clear, I never liked the Unix philosophy so I enjoy seeing experiments in postunixism.)
  - feld 11y ago
    Watch the video and they cover why it's not throwing out the UNIX Philosophy
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  Not an expert in either so I may be mistaken, but to the best of my knowledge launchd doesn’t have anywhere near the scope of responsibilities or functionality that systemd is capable of/given. It definitely encompasses more than a bare bones init system, but it’s not quite the beast that systemd is.
- AdieuToLogic 11y ago
  If by "similar to systemd" you are referencing launchd, not really. The intent of launchd is more along the lines of xinetd[1] than systemd. Here[2] is more info on what launchd is intended to address. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinetd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinetd 2 - http://launchd.info/ http://launchd.info/
- digi_owl 11y ago
  Only part that may be relevant to compare is launchd, and even that stops at systemd-pid1, not the wider systemd project.
webaholic 11y ago
I wish they would outline their plans to integrate these technologies with FreeBSD. It is time for Apple (by way of their innovations) to feed the base which they used to build Mac OS X. How willing is the FreeBSD upstream to integrate these?
- iheartmemcache 11y ago
  Very. The core committers have a direction in which they'll take FreeBSD, but compared to say OpenBSD, it's a very open community. Colin who posts here frequently is pretty influential in the community as I recall. I'm horribly disappointed in the way that Apple seems to give back barely anything to the community. Google and Facebook's github is populated with dozens of projects. Granted, some are in a state of disrepair, others are incredibly useful. E.g., the state of open source static analysis is on par with Coverity at this point for our 300k line C++ project. I'm a bit of a tinfoil privacy nut, but thanks Google and Facebook, you guys rule!
  - erikarn 11y ago
    Apple publish and give back heaps to the open source community. http://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10103/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10103/ .. they're just not fanboys about it.
    - dmd 11y ago
      That appears to be open source software that Apple is using (and is required to publish the source for, under that software's license) -- not software Apple has written and is releasing.
      - songgao 11y ago
        I don't think all of them have a license that requires publishing the source code of derived work.
        11y ago
felixgallo 11y ago
"launchd clubs UNIX's 'keep it simple' philosophy like a baby harp seal'...Hint: the world has changed!" Yeah -- Unix completely dominated essentially every market niche, utterly annihilating all competing philosophies so hard you'd think it was drilling for oil.
- cwyers 11y ago
  Windows says hi.
  - felixgallo 11y ago
    Every phone, tv, appliance and internet device says hi back. Also, bye.
hoistor 11y ago
Disappointing really, but I think it's unlikely to make it upstream. Perhaps I've missed some of the advantages to taking this approach though.. Or .. any of them? I'd be completely onboard with SMF replacing the init system on all my fbsd boxes though (I have many on bare metal with linux under bhyve for various things that need it). I don't think that's an easy port though with the contract system etc solaris had for process accounting. Ahhh. I miss solaris. FreeBSD is almost where we were feature wise before oracle killed it (zfs, dtrace, jails(iocage) etc).
- quesera 11y ago
  > Ahhh. I miss solaris. The illumos, SmartOS, and Joyent folks are doing a fantastic job moving Solaris forward. That's where all the action is these days. FreeBSD is doing great stuff too, with their more conservative approach, and drastically fewer resources.
  - bensummers 11y ago
    Try OmniOS for a great Solarish server OS.
    - hoistor 11y ago
      I used SXCE, OpenSolaris and finally SmartOS for a while after the death, and unfortunately the benefits just werent' really there any more. I also hit some pretty nasty performance issues storage wise on my OVH gear (some interrupt related issue, unsure if fixed, but it was well above my head to grok, and I' not terribly new to this) which were instantly solved by converting to BSD. With FreeBSD, the userland is pretty capable (I run all my DBs, some node apps, reverse proxies etc under it) so jails kinda made sense again. With SmartOS I had to run most of my stuff under KVM, so what was the point? Interesting to see what direction the linux abi stuff joyent are working on goes though.
michaelpinto 11y ago
Dumb question: Could this give me a NeXT desktop in VMware? And could it run old NeXTstep software?
- terhechte 11y ago
  You can already have that by installing a Gnustep based disto like Etoile. http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/ Or apt-get'ing Gnustep on any modern Linux. Any OpenStep compatible app should compile and run. Modern Cocoa apps won't necessarily work because Gnustep doesn't support all the new stuff that Apple developed over the years, but the basics are all there.
  - michaelpinto 11y ago
    Thank you!
fithisux 11y ago
Freebsd X will have ioKit drivers? (source compatibility)
bnastic 11y ago
Jordan Hubbard mentions some of his reasoning behind going back to what he did at Apple (among other things) in this thread: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-August/048090.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-Aug...
- laumars 11y ago
  That message was posted by Bill Sorenson, so not sure if it's the message you were intending to link to. However it's still a good read even if it wasn't the intended mail.
  - xenophonf 11y ago
    See later in the thread: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-August/048116.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-Aug...
sergiolp 11y ago
A curious (and probably unintended) side effect, is that if its implementation of the Mach API is complete enough, this should allow to run Hurd user space server/translators on FreeBSD. Not sure if useful, but would be cool (in a weird, nerdy way) anyway.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  It isn't. For one thing, it's a port of an old OSF Mach kernel. Hurd uses GNU Mach, which is descended from CMU Mach 3.0. They don't support memory objects, their threading is bare bones, they assume a bootstrap server and there would be no way to actually get glibc and Hurd RPC working.
  - sergiolp 11y ago
    The OSF vs GNU Mach thing is not a problem. It was years ago, but I managed to run a Hurd translator statically linked against a slightly modified glibc on OSF Mach (the one bundled with MkLinux, you can see its code on my repo https://github.com/slp/mkunity https://github.com/slp/mkunity). In fact, if you look at Mach support code on glibc's code, you'll see build time conditionals for supporting non-GNU Mach versions. The bootstrap server is not a problem either, but the lack of memory object would indeed break all libpager based translators, among other stuff. As a PoC, I wrote a filesystem translator (https://github.com/slp/anonfs https://github.com/slp/anonfs) which doesn't rely on memory objects, implementing conventional read/write semantics (no mmap() support, though).
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      The option of using MkLinux as a host has been raised as a hypothetical since many years ago, but was never tried. I don't have spare PPC hardware in mind, but that's interesting to hear it works. Porting the NextBSD work to the Linux kernel API is certainly something on my list in case rump integration for Hurd doesn't pan out, in any event.

154 points by tachion 11y ago

gjvc 11y ago

where / when was this presented?

glitch 11y ago
Bay Area FreeBSD User Group (BAFUG) August 2015 meeting. There's a video recording available at http://www.nextbsd.org/jordan-hubbard-visits-bafug/ http://www.nextbsd.org/jordan-hubbard-visits-bafug/
- gjvc 11y ago
  just found it, thank you.

cpeterso 11y ago

FreeBSD + Mach kernel, libdispatch, and launchd? How does this differ from Darwin?

kitsunesoba 11y ago
I may be misunderstanding, but as far as I know it simply layers Mach kernel services onto the FreeBSD kernel rather than actually using Mach.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  Correct. There's an OSF Mach shim running as a FreeBSD kernel module which is then used to drive XPC and everything above. That said, I feel rather uneasy about the base FreeBSD going such a verbatim OS X route. I can understand doing it for FreeNAS, PC-BSD and derivatives, but it's quite invasive for upstream. Especially considering this requires running a parallel Mach kernel in the same address space. Also, using Mach IPC deliberately in 2015 is like shooting yourself in the foot in my mind, but it's probably better than kdbus.
  - X-Istence 11y ago
    The base FreeBSD isn't going this route, this is something that is being worked on at iXsystems that may or may not eventually find it's way to FreeBSD itself. That's my understanding from the presentation!
  - erikarn 11y ago
    There's no parallel Mach kernel running. It's just Mach IPC shimmed as an FD type.
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      It's a kernel module implementation of much of OSF Mach verbatim copied and shimmed from MkLinux, not just IPC. See sys/compat/mach in the NextBSD source tree.
      - erikarn 11y ago
        Yeah I looked; it's the IPC from Mach with some shimmed bits to do VM-y things for mapped message passing. Mach was mostly VM and IPC - so of course it looks like it's a lot of Mach code. But there's no separate mach kernel running - it's just the IPC instances and they only exist as FD bits. It's not a complete kernel and FreeBSD isn't running "on" mach.
        vezzy-fnord 11y ago
        I never made such a claim that FreeBSD is running on Mach. I said it integrated a Mach kernel interface as a module running in kernel space. They also ported tasks (as processes), threads (kthreads) and some clock/timer stuff, as well. No memory objects because there's no external pager they can be backed from.
tossanextbsd 11y ago
It's just a FreeBSD kernel. Kip's implemented Mach facilities on FreeBSD, but it's not remotely like Darwin. Darwin is a Mach (micro-)kernel that implements BSD APIs on top of Mach.
- natermer 11y ago
  If Darwin uses a Microkernel then so does Microsoft Windows. They are very similar designs. In case you are wondering: I don't think that Microsoft Windows uses a microkernel. Some versions of Mach are micro, other versions are not. OS X doesn't use a microkernel, neither does Darwin. They use XNU kernel. XNU has code from Mach and it also uses code from FreeBSD. People call it a 'hybrid kernel', but I think that is a misnomer and only really exists through the effectiveness of Apple's marketing. XNU is a monolithic kernel with message passing capabilities inspired from microkernels. Makes it so they can isolate certain features and drivers better then, say, Linux can. Unlike Apple, Microsoft actually did release a version of NT that was a true microkernel, but they quickly realized that it is not a practical approach to creating a OS that was competitive with Unix. Regardless... This seems pretty much Darwin grafted with FreeBSD. For a commercial network appliance device it's probably a good approach. They get all the benefits from using source code from Apple, FreeBSD, and ZFS without having to actually provide much source code in the way of real improvements that could be used to enhance a competitor's product.
  - Maarten88 11y ago
    > Microsoft actually did release a version of NT that was a true microkernel, You mean Windows NT 3.1 and 3.5, right? I used those intensively, and it worked really well. > but they quickly realized that it is not a practical approach.. With Windows NT 4.0 they left the original design and moved everything including the graphics into the kernel. But that was not because the original approach was not practical or did not work. It was because Windows 95. The wanted Win32 to be API compatible with that crap (desktop 'gadgets' and such) and that's why they did it. I remember hating NT 4.0 because it was so much less stable than the original versions.
    - 11y ago

bbatha 11y ago

I wonder if you could glue microsoft's ios emulation layer on top of this and get the basis of an open source ios/os x?

duaneb 11y ago
I would bet the ios emulation layer isn't going to be much use off windows. In any case, there's already gnustep to get you pretty damn close.
- kitsunesoba 11y ago
  GNUStep is a cool idea (I’d love love love to be able to develop cross-platform desktop apps with Cocoa), but its problem is that it’s lagging so far behind that it’s practically unusable. If you’re targeting Apple Cocoa/OS X too (why wouldn’t you be) you’re going to be restricted to AppKit as it was back in OS X 10.5 or 10.6, and that sucks. Unfortunately, unless the project has a sudden windfall of cash and/or developers, I doubt this will change any time soon.
0x0 11y ago
No because microsoft's implementation calls to win32 and XAML for everything. Also, would you trust an implementation that thinks this is an OK implementation of arc4random()? (even if it was fixed later?) - https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/blob/59a63e42a9d10da8aadbf8d3b6c10fd02e6b40c6/Frameworks/CoreFoundation/CFMisc.mm#L28 https://github.com/Microsoft/WinObjC/blob/59a63e42a9d10da8aa...
- neverartful 11y ago
  But if you throw in wine... I say this in jest, but it does make me wonder.
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    First Wine needs to understand WinRT application model.

gh02t 11y ago

Any idea what the purpose is to this? I'm not putting it down, I'm just looking for context. The annotations say this work is being done at iXsystems, best known for being the stewards of FreeNAS, but this project seems to be separate.

Sanddancer 11y ago
This has a feeling very much of a research project to see how well an init framework like launchd would work in FreeBSD. There's been talk amongst a lot of developers that the current init needs to be replaced by /something/, but that something is still up in the air.
- vezzy-fnord 11y ago
  It's not just launchd, it's the entire low-level OS X userspace. Nor is it research. It very much appears to be commercial, since it's undertaken by iXsystems. They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit. End goal appears to be get upstream FreeBSD in it, too. There's nothing of research value here. It's Mach. It's practically an anachronism to do such a thing deliberately. I actually have quite a lot to say on this topic, so I think I'll write an in-depth blog post on it.
  - cmurf 11y ago
    Not necessarily anachronstic, considering the iXsysems CTO is Jordan Hubbard, who was previously at Apple as director of UNIX technology. Out with the old in with the less old?
    - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
      Adopting Mach fresh in 2015 is certainly anachronistic.
      - sjwright 11y ago
        It would be, except they're not adopting Mach.

kev009 11y ago

As a FreeBSD user, developer, and fan, I'm excited that they are digging into some of this stuff. My amateur question is just wonder if adding a ton of new KPIs is really necessary, or could be done in a more holistic thinking way.

ilurkedhere 11y ago

Is this similar to systemd?

wmf 11y ago
It's similar in the sense of throwing out the Unix philosophy and replacing it with a different one while keeping 99% of the code. It's not obvious why NeXTBSD would be better than Lennartux though. (Just to be clear, I never liked the Unix philosophy so I enjoy seeing experiments in postunixism.)
- feld 11y ago
  Watch the video and they cover why it's not throwing out the UNIX Philosophy
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
kitsunesoba 11y ago
Not an expert in either so I may be mistaken, but to the best of my knowledge launchd doesn’t have anywhere near the scope of responsibilities or functionality that systemd is capable of/given. It definitely encompasses more than a bare bones init system, but it’s not quite the beast that systemd is.
AdieuToLogic 11y ago
If by "similar to systemd" you are referencing launchd, not really. The intent of launchd is more along the lines of xinetd[1] than systemd. Here[2] is more info on what launchd is intended to address. 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinetd https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xinetd 2 - http://launchd.info/ http://launchd.info/
digi_owl 11y ago
Only part that may be relevant to compare is launchd, and even that stops at systemd-pid1, not the wider systemd project.

webaholic 11y ago

I wish they would outline their plans to integrate these technologies with FreeBSD. It is time for Apple (by way of their innovations) to feed the base which they used to build Mac OS X. How willing is the FreeBSD upstream to integrate these?

iheartmemcache 11y ago
Very. The core committers have a direction in which they'll take FreeBSD, but compared to say OpenBSD, it's a very open community. Colin who posts here frequently is pretty influential in the community as I recall. I'm horribly disappointed in the way that Apple seems to give back barely anything to the community. Google and Facebook's github is populated with dozens of projects. Granted, some are in a state of disrepair, others are incredibly useful. E.g., the state of open source static analysis is on par with Coverity at this point for our 300k line C++ project. I'm a bit of a tinfoil privacy nut, but thanks Google and Facebook, you guys rule!
- erikarn 11y ago
  Apple publish and give back heaps to the open source community. http://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10103/ http://opensource.apple.com/release/os-x-10103/ .. they're just not fanboys about it.
  - dmd 11y ago
    That appears to be open source software that Apple is using (and is required to publish the source for, under that software's license) -- not software Apple has written and is releasing.
    - songgao 11y ago
      I don't think all of them have a license that requires publishing the source code of derived work.
      - 11y ago

felixgallo 11y ago

"launchd clubs UNIX's 'keep it simple' philosophy like a baby harp seal'...Hint: the world has changed!" Yeah -- Unix completely dominated essentially every market niche, utterly annihilating all competing philosophies so hard you'd think it was drilling for oil.

cwyers 11y ago
Windows says hi.
- felixgallo 11y ago
  Every phone, tv, appliance and internet device says hi back. Also, bye.

hoistor 11y ago

Disappointing really, but I think it's unlikely to make it upstream. Perhaps I've missed some of the advantages to taking this approach though.. Or .. any of them? I'd be completely onboard with SMF replacing the init system on all my fbsd boxes though (I have many on bare metal with linux under bhyve for various things that need it). I don't think that's an easy port though with the contract system etc solaris had for process accounting. Ahhh. I miss solaris. FreeBSD is almost where we were feature wise before oracle killed it (zfs, dtrace, jails(iocage) etc).

quesera 11y ago
> Ahhh. I miss solaris. The illumos, SmartOS, and Joyent folks are doing a fantastic job moving Solaris forward. That's where all the action is these days. FreeBSD is doing great stuff too, with their more conservative approach, and drastically fewer resources.
- bensummers 11y ago
  Try OmniOS for a great Solarish server OS.
  - hoistor 11y ago
    I used SXCE, OpenSolaris and finally SmartOS for a while after the death, and unfortunately the benefits just werent' really there any more. I also hit some pretty nasty performance issues storage wise on my OVH gear (some interrupt related issue, unsure if fixed, but it was well above my head to grok, and I' not terribly new to this) which were instantly solved by converting to BSD. With FreeBSD, the userland is pretty capable (I run all my DBs, some node apps, reverse proxies etc under it) so jails kinda made sense again. With SmartOS I had to run most of my stuff under KVM, so what was the point? Interesting to see what direction the linux abi stuff joyent are working on goes though.

michaelpinto 11y ago

Dumb question: Could this give me a NeXT desktop in VMware? And could it run old NeXTstep software?

terhechte 11y ago
You can already have that by installing a Gnustep based disto like Etoile. http://etoileos.com/etoile/ http://etoileos.com/etoile/ Or apt-get'ing Gnustep on any modern Linux. Any OpenStep compatible app should compile and run. Modern Cocoa apps won't necessarily work because Gnustep doesn't support all the new stuff that Apple developed over the years, but the basics are all there.
- michaelpinto 11y ago
  Thank you!

fithisux 11y ago

Freebsd X will have ioKit drivers? (source compatibility)

bnastic 11y ago

Jordan Hubbard mentions some of his reasoning behind going back to what he did at Apple (among other things) in this thread: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-August/048090.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-Aug...

laumars 11y ago
That message was posted by Bill Sorenson, so not sure if it's the message you were intending to link to. However it's still a good read even if it wasn't the intended mail.
- xenophonf 11y ago
  See later in the thread: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-August/048116.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2015-Aug...

sergiolp 11y ago

A curious (and probably unintended) side effect, is that if its implementation of the Mach API is complete enough, this should allow to run Hurd user space server/translators on FreeBSD. Not sure if useful, but would be cool (in a weird, nerdy way) anyway.

vezzy-fnord 11y ago
It isn't. For one thing, it's a port of an old OSF Mach kernel. Hurd uses GNU Mach, which is descended from CMU Mach 3.0. They don't support memory objects, their threading is bare bones, they assume a bootstrap server and there would be no way to actually get glibc and Hurd RPC working.
- sergiolp 11y ago
  The OSF vs GNU Mach thing is not a problem. It was years ago, but I managed to run a Hurd translator statically linked against a slightly modified glibc on OSF Mach (the one bundled with MkLinux, you can see its code on my repo https://github.com/slp/mkunity https://github.com/slp/mkunity). In fact, if you look at Mach support code on glibc's code, you'll see build time conditionals for supporting non-GNU Mach versions. The bootstrap server is not a problem either, but the lack of memory object would indeed break all libpager based translators, among other stuff. As a PoC, I wrote a filesystem translator (https://github.com/slp/anonfs https://github.com/slp/anonfs) which doesn't rely on memory objects, implementing conventional read/write semantics (no mmap() support, though).
  - vezzy-fnord 11y ago
    The option of using MkLinux as a host has been raised as a hypothetical since many years ago, but was never tried. I don't have spare PPC hardware in mind, but that's interesting to hear it works. Porting the NextBSD work to the Linux kernel API is certainly something on my list in case rump integration for Hurd doesn't pan out, in any event.