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Is there any more context to OP's post? I guess someone just noticed in the mailing list, but it's not clear whether maybe John Carmark does this with all code

Is there any more context to OP's post? I guess someone just noticed in the mailing list, but it's not clear whether maybe John Carmark does this with all code everywhere in the universe. And then probably still has some interesting coffee break conversations... On a different note. I am something of a Ubuntu fan and try to be more involved there. But then again the xBSDs where x = {Free, Open, Net, ...} are one of those things that always prods the back of your mind. It's a bit like topics in mathematics that always catch my attention, only to be forsaken for more mundane tasks. Then again, mathematics is a bit like the art of making everything mundane.

yfiapo 6y ago
I don't see any additional context but this does appear to be a new thing. Two commits credited to Carmack in the OpenBSD source and they are dated 5/16/2020 and 5/17/2020.
- philosopher1234 6y ago
  where are those commits? I didn't see anything credited to carmack on those dates. Must've missed them. Would be curious to see!
  - bitofhope 6y ago
    I found these two commits to the stc/sys/dev/ic/vga.c crediting Carmack https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.70&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&sortby=date https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.70&con... https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.71&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&sortby=date https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.71&con...
deltron3030 6y ago
>Is there any more context to OP's post? I guess someone just noticed in the mailing list, but it's not clear whether maybe John Carmark does this with all code everywhere in the universe. I remember a story about Carmack going off the grid with a laptop and OpenBSD for a couple of weeks, and him being delighted about their documentation and the ability to build things without access to the web. Carmack is a hero in the C community, and OpenBSD is also all about C and classic Unix, so he might just feel at home there.
yuribro 6y ago
I would suggest to just install OpenBSD and try it (maybe in a VM?), one of the selling points is the simplicity of the setup process. It can be a one evening project.
- erk__ 6y ago
  I recently went and installed FreeBSD on my laptop. It has until now been a pretty good experiance. The main reason I went with FreeBSD over OpenBSD at the moment was that NVIDIA only supports FreeBSD. FreeBSD is also pretty simple (at least compared to linux) so it wins there as well.
  - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
    By NVIDIA supporting FreeBSD you mean that half-assed thing with binary drivers allowing you to get a picture, but no CUDA? Or is that old information which i should forget?
    - magic_quotes 6y ago
      Unfortunately, half-assed vendor support is still quite compelling compared to no vendor support.
      - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
        It depends on your use-case, i guess. If my intent would be using FreeBSD as my daily-driver "desktop/laptop-OS" i'd avoid NVIDIA like the plague, becaue without CUDA their unique selling point does not exist, but the hassle of some "switcheroo-black-magic" possibly persists. Which i wouldn't have with an intel-gpu, also less power draw. Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob.
        magic_quotes 6y ago
        > Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob. AMD binary blob? You mean that amdgpu-pro thing? That doesn't exist on FreeBSD.
rhacker 6y ago
To me this kind of stuff is fan junk news. I get that even hackers need celebrities, but front page of HN is a little extreme for a thing like this without context. If there was more context like, John C has re-written half of BSD, then we're talking - but this is very celebrity grocery list to me.
- rvz 6y ago
  I'd bet everyone on this thread will be grabbing their cheerleading squad and their pom-poms everywhere if John Carmack visited them in person. They won't be able to contain themselves and start bursting into tears of joy. 'Extreme' maybe an understatement here but it seems like HNers here love seeing the second coming of King Midas when everything he touches turns into gold.
  - jquast 6y ago
    I’m sorry you feel this way, maybe if you could try contributing more positively to FOSS in some way and receive some accolades for yourself, you would not feel so spiteful about the attention Carmack receives. I think you will find Carmack has contributed more to the hacker ecosystem than anyone else if you just take a very shallow peek. I would suggest to start by reading the source code to Doom, it is surprisingly approachable and educational in several fields of math, geometry, data structures, and computer science. There are even books to help you understand it, heck, there are a dozen or more books about Id software and John Carmack, so there are many authors and readers who feel very differently from you, maybe you could consider the reason. There are many things in our field that would have happened eventually, no matter who did it, but much of Carmack’s contributions really would not have happened without him, he really is in a league of his own. It’s really amazing to me that you feel so negatively towards people who have endearment for one of the hacker community’s greatest contributors. I can only guess that you might be very unhappy, for that I’m very sorry and I hope it turns around for you very soon.
- dkarl 6y ago
  I get what you're saying, but I think it's great for people to see that an old-school hard core programmer puts effort into improving documentation and names. I've worked with a lot of people who think programmers can and should be too good to invest time and thought into changes like that. Also to see that he would be so tactful about asking if the changes are welcome, even though he is who he is and knows it. I like to think there are people in their twenties or teens or even younger browsing HN and subconsciously absorbing the fact that this is how a programming god behaves.
nailer 6y ago
> whether maybe John Carmark does this with all code everywhere in the universe. A lot of people rename things and add comments as part of understanding a new code base. I do and I'm sure I'm not the only one on HN.
mcepl 6y ago
For me *BSD is like Plan9 or ZX Spectrum emulator … guilty pleasure with absolutely no practical use whatsoever.
- petee 6y ago
  You know, other than helping run the internet. They make great servers, so your viewpoint is a little confusing to me
- mouldysammich 6y ago
  Seems a little dismissive of BSD systems given how widely deployed the are in comparison to plan9 or zx spectrums. As far as I understand Netflix uses freebsd fairly extensively, and there are powerful tools like pfSense built on BSDs too, which are also used fairly extensively as far as i know. I would describe that as having practical use.
  - wolrah 6y ago
    I think there's a difference between using BSD to build an appliance and running BSD as a day-to-day system. pfSense is a wonderful firewall appliance. FreeNAS is a wonderful storage appliance. If you need pf or native ZFS, a BSD is probably your best way to get it. If you want to run a random headless server to mess around with, you are probably going to have a harder time with any of the BSDs than you would with even bleeding-edge Linux distros. If you want to run a graphical desktop with 3D acceleration and HD video you will almost certainly have a harder time than any Linux user. --- There are, of course, people who are happily using BSD-based desktops right now and I am certainly not denying them anything, but even they'd have to admit they would have been able to get most of the same experience with a lot less effort on a modern Linux.
    - unfunco 6y ago
      > If you want to run a graphical desktop with 3D acceleration and HD video you will almost certainly have a harder time than any Linux user. With the exception of MacOS? Darwin is BSD.
type0 6y ago
BSDs are mundane and also stable, not like some rolling linux distros
- dijit 6y ago
  The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. If you mean that they have old software (and old==stable if you think Debian) then that’s because of BSD licensing vs GPL. GPL can take from BSD but the other way around is not possible. Stability of uptime? Yeah, they’re rock solid.
  - snazz 6y ago
    For me, stability means uptime and infrequency of application crashes. Unfortunately, OpenBSD didn't meet that requirement on my (standard desktop) machine--it would frequently kernel panic on resume. On the other hand, I found that OpenBSD has absolutely outstanding reliability and stability on hardware like my ThinkPad X220.
  - justin66 6y ago
    > The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. > Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. Every major version, right? From becoming -Stable to ending its support lifecycle, I'd think a FreeBSD version and its ABIs are supported as long as many Linux distro LTS releases.
    - dijit 6y ago
      The major difference being that if you have a statically compiled binary from linux 2.4 it will work on linux 5.5 The only difference will be any shared libraries and potentially the libc. But if we're speaking from a pure technical perspective, the libc is not linux.
      - floatboth 6y ago
        Binaries from all the way back from FreeBSD 4.0 work on -CURRENT just fine.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

yfiapo 6y ago

I don't see any additional context but this does appear to be a new thing. Two commits credited to Carmack in the OpenBSD source and they are dated 5/16/2020 and 5/17/2020.

philosopher1234 6y ago
where are those commits? I didn't see anything credited to carmack on those dates. Must've missed them. Would be curious to see!
- bitofhope 6y ago
  I found these two commits to the stc/sys/dev/ic/vga.c crediting Carmack https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.70&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&sortby=date https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.70&con... https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.71&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&sortby=date https://cvsweb.openbsd.org/src/sys/dev/ic/vga.c?rev=1.71&con...

deltron3030 6y ago

>Is there any more context to OP's post? I guess someone just noticed in the mailing list, but it's not clear whether maybe John Carmark does this with all code everywhere in the universe. I remember a story about Carmack going off the grid with a laptop and OpenBSD for a couple of weeks, and him being delighted about their documentation and the ability to build things without access to the web. Carmack is a hero in the C community, and OpenBSD is also all about C and classic Unix, so he might just feel at home there.

yuribro 6y ago

I would suggest to just install OpenBSD and try it (maybe in a VM?), one of the selling points is the simplicity of the setup process. It can be a one evening project.

erk__ 6y ago
I recently went and installed FreeBSD on my laptop. It has until now been a pretty good experiance. The main reason I went with FreeBSD over OpenBSD at the moment was that NVIDIA only supports FreeBSD. FreeBSD is also pretty simple (at least compared to linux) so it wins there as well.
- LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
  By NVIDIA supporting FreeBSD you mean that half-assed thing with binary drivers allowing you to get a picture, but no CUDA? Or is that old information which i should forget?
  - magic_quotes 6y ago
    Unfortunately, half-assed vendor support is still quite compelling compared to no vendor support.
    - LargoLasskhyfv 6y ago
      It depends on your use-case, i guess. If my intent would be using FreeBSD as my daily-driver "desktop/laptop-OS" i'd avoid NVIDIA like the plague, becaue without CUDA their unique selling point does not exist, but the hassle of some "switcheroo-black-magic" possibly persists. Which i wouldn't have with an intel-gpu, also less power draw. Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob.
      - magic_quotes 6y ago
        > Even AMD is often supported in a better way, be it opensourced, or relying on their binary blob. AMD binary blob? You mean that amdgpu-pro thing? That doesn't exist on FreeBSD.

rhacker 6y ago

To me this kind of stuff is fan junk news. I get that even hackers need celebrities, but front page of HN is a little extreme for a thing like this without context. If there was more context like, John C has re-written half of BSD, then we're talking - but this is very celebrity grocery list to me.

rvz 6y ago
I'd bet everyone on this thread will be grabbing their cheerleading squad and their pom-poms everywhere if John Carmack visited them in person. They won't be able to contain themselves and start bursting into tears of joy. 'Extreme' maybe an understatement here but it seems like HNers here love seeing the second coming of King Midas when everything he touches turns into gold.
- jquast 6y ago
  I’m sorry you feel this way, maybe if you could try contributing more positively to FOSS in some way and receive some accolades for yourself, you would not feel so spiteful about the attention Carmack receives. I think you will find Carmack has contributed more to the hacker ecosystem than anyone else if you just take a very shallow peek. I would suggest to start by reading the source code to Doom, it is surprisingly approachable and educational in several fields of math, geometry, data structures, and computer science. There are even books to help you understand it, heck, there are a dozen or more books about Id software and John Carmack, so there are many authors and readers who feel very differently from you, maybe you could consider the reason. There are many things in our field that would have happened eventually, no matter who did it, but much of Carmack’s contributions really would not have happened without him, he really is in a league of his own. It’s really amazing to me that you feel so negatively towards people who have endearment for one of the hacker community’s greatest contributors. I can only guess that you might be very unhappy, for that I’m very sorry and I hope it turns around for you very soon.
dkarl 6y ago
I get what you're saying, but I think it's great for people to see that an old-school hard core programmer puts effort into improving documentation and names. I've worked with a lot of people who think programmers can and should be too good to invest time and thought into changes like that. Also to see that he would be so tactful about asking if the changes are welcome, even though he is who he is and knows it. I like to think there are people in their twenties or teens or even younger browsing HN and subconsciously absorbing the fact that this is how a programming god behaves.

nailer 6y ago

> whether maybe John Carmark does this with all code everywhere in the universe. A lot of people rename things and add comments as part of understanding a new code base. I do and I'm sure I'm not the only one on HN.

mcepl 6y ago

For me *BSD is like Plan9 or ZX Spectrum emulator … guilty pleasure with absolutely no practical use whatsoever.

petee 6y ago
You know, other than helping run the internet. They make great servers, so your viewpoint is a little confusing to me
mouldysammich 6y ago
Seems a little dismissive of BSD systems given how widely deployed the are in comparison to plan9 or zx spectrums. As far as I understand Netflix uses freebsd fairly extensively, and there are powerful tools like pfSense built on BSDs too, which are also used fairly extensively as far as i know. I would describe that as having practical use.
- wolrah 6y ago
  I think there's a difference between using BSD to build an appliance and running BSD as a day-to-day system. pfSense is a wonderful firewall appliance. FreeNAS is a wonderful storage appliance. If you need pf or native ZFS, a BSD is probably your best way to get it. If you want to run a random headless server to mess around with, you are probably going to have a harder time with any of the BSDs than you would with even bleeding-edge Linux distros. If you want to run a graphical desktop with 3D acceleration and HD video you will almost certainly have a harder time than any Linux user. --- There are, of course, people who are happily using BSD-based desktops right now and I am certainly not denying them anything, but even they'd have to admit they would have been able to get most of the same experience with a lot less effort on a modern Linux.
  - unfunco 6y ago
    > If you want to run a graphical desktop with 3D acceleration and HD video you will almost certainly have a harder time than any Linux user. With the exception of MacOS? Darwin is BSD.

type0 6y ago

BSDs are mundane and also stable, not like some rolling linux distros

dijit 6y ago
The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. If you mean that they have old software (and old==stable if you think Debian) then that’s because of BSD licensing vs GPL. GPL can take from BSD but the other way around is not possible. Stability of uptime? Yeah, they’re rock solid.
- snazz 6y ago
  For me, stability means uptime and infrequency of application crashes. Unfortunately, OpenBSD didn't meet that requirement on my (standard desktop) machine--it would frequently kernel panic on resume. On the other hand, I found that OpenBSD has absolutely outstanding reliability and stability on hardware like my ThinkPad X220.
- justin66 6y ago
  > The bsds are actually less stable than Linux. > Stable meaning changes, in this context, right? freeBSD changes ABI compatibility with every version. Every major version, right? From becoming -Stable to ending its support lifecycle, I'd think a FreeBSD version and its ABIs are supported as long as many Linux distro LTS releases.
  - dijit 6y ago
    The major difference being that if you have a statically compiled binary from linux 2.4 it will work on linux 5.5 The only difference will be any shared libraries and potentially the libc. But if we're speaking from a pure technical perspective, the libc is not linux.
    - floatboth 6y ago
      Binaries from all the way back from FreeBSD 4.0 work on -CURRENT just fine.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]