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{Free/Net/Open}BSD DOCUMENTATION Rocks! Not just the online documentation, but there are really good offline (books) documenting the BSD stack. Back in 1998 I

by eb0la 5y ago

{Free/Net/Open}BSD DOCUMENTATION Rocks! Not just the online documentation, but there are really good offline (books) documenting the BSD stack. Back in 1998 I chosed BSD (openBSD) for my thesis just because there was _a lot_ of reliable information about internals, how to develop, etc. For Linux the documentation wasn't as good, and had to search too much online for internals, also and it was a moving target and I was afraid of working on top of something that might change while I was working on my project. Now you can get a lot of information about linux just googling; but if you're offline you can get great *BSD documentation.

Dowwie 5y ago
Marshall McKusick produced a 10-hour video course for LiveLessons in 2015: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/introduction-to-the/9780134306049/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/introduction-to-the/978...
- eb0la 5y ago
  Thanks for the link :-) My first Unix book was from McKusick ( https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7407817M/The_Design_and_Implementation_of_the_4.4_BSD_Operating_System_%28Unix_and_Open_Systems_Series.%29 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7407817M/The_Design_and_Impl... ). I bouth it after some years playing with wirh DEC OSF1, SunOS, Linux, and Irix :-)
DyslexicAtheist 5y ago
imo Linux is suffering from its won success. the Linux community grew so big that it had no choice than allow certain actors to hi-jack and divide its members: E.g. Poettering (pid_eins) would have never been able to force their ideas onto the BSD community as he was able to do in Linux. While it's great to have friction in order to continuously question the status quo it has huge downsides when you need to focus on the long-term goals and ensure consistency across the stack. (echoes from mythical man month or too many chefs in the kitchen spoiling the broth etc). Linus has done a good job for as long as he could (and still does) but there are limits to what one can achieve as things grow. Theo de Raadt seems a very similar character (like Poettering and Linus strongly opinionated which isn't a flaw but job-requirement). Theo had an easier time ensuring continuity & consistency because there aren't 25 distributions of OpenBSD under 1 "OpenBSD Foundation" umbrella. The problem was that Poettering (who despite my dislike for how he treats anyone who questions his approach, I still think is a genius) didn't create his own OS from scratch (perhaps something based on his own distro, or genode or whatevs) but hi-jacked Linux for his purpose. Then there is the problem with Docker/isolation that, as others above have pointed out, is not new in the BSD world and is actually a poor product that constantly breaks things on every update. The BSD world would have laughed docker out of the door and down the street yet on Linux we pretend it's "genius" and we accept it comes not from the community but some outside vendor with terrible record in its own security posture. Pipe shit straight to | sudo bash was the docker way for a long time until they got called out for it and then pretended it never happened. But you can still see their incompetence also in other places such as dockerhub which remains the petri dish of choice for malware, or their latest stunt of forcing people to upgrade. Compared to BSD's, in Linux we practice a lot of "hype driven software engineering" and the result is abstraction hell, and insecurity. This is visible especially if you just compare apples with apples, e.g. a Linux vs BSD on a server (ignoring all aspects where BSD's are hardly present but Linux is). Poettering has also pushed for unifying isolation options within systemd to help orchestrate the mess, but it still feels like a lot of duct tape when comparing how all of this is done in BSD. there are many other topics like eBPF, and how much we're now able to move into the kernel for performance / observability etc ... but I'll stop. The Linux Standards Base (LSB) perhaps lacked teeth and never fulfilled the potential it could have, but a democracy (or federation of interests) is harder.
- jart 5y ago
  It's called GNU/Systemd. Poettering is certainly master of userspace but I think it was Karen Sandler who really pulled the strings. She was executive directory of GNOME and she went to the distros and was like, look, GNOME is going to make Systemd a hard requirement so you can either use it, or not have a desktop anymore. And that's why every Linux distro abandoned System 5 for System 500, with the exception of ones intended to run inside Docker containers like Alpine.
  - versteegen 5y ago
    But not everyone uses GNOME and therefore not every distro uses systemd. Slackware still doesn't, and it's not some kind of minimal-for-Docker distro. Edit: Actually I see that GNOME doesn't require (since 3.30?) systemd: it can be used with just elogind. (Slackware actually recently adopted elogind for KDE and Xfce). Gentoo is another distro that doesn't require systemd (it's actually optional).
  - zxzax 5y ago
    >it was Karen Sandler who really pulled the strings I would be interested to hear a source for that because I never heard of such a thing. I heard the exact opposite, that GNOME is still open to keeping things working on BSD. The latest version in FreeBSD is GNOME 3.36.

by eb0la 5y ago

Dowwie 5y ago

Marshall McKusick produced a 10-hour video course for LiveLessons in 2015: https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/introduction-to-the/9780134306049/ https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/introduction-to-the/978...

eb0la 5y ago
Thanks for the link :-) My first Unix book was from McKusick ( https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7407817M/The_Design_and_Implementation_of_the_4.4_BSD_Operating_System_%28Unix_and_Open_Systems_Series.%29 https://openlibrary.org/books/OL7407817M/The_Design_and_Impl... ). I bouth it after some years playing with wirh DEC OSF1, SunOS, Linux, and Irix :-)

DyslexicAtheist 5y ago

imo Linux is suffering from its won success. the Linux community grew so big that it had no choice than allow certain actors to hi-jack and divide its members: E.g. Poettering (pid_eins) would have never been able to force their ideas onto the BSD community as he was able to do in Linux. While it's great to have friction in order to continuously question the status quo it has huge downsides when you need to focus on the long-term goals and ensure consistency across the stack. (echoes from mythical man month or too many chefs in the kitchen spoiling the broth etc). Linus has done a good job for as long as he could (and still does) but there are limits to what one can achieve as things grow. Theo de Raadt seems a very similar character (like Poettering and Linus strongly opinionated which isn't a flaw but job-requirement). Theo had an easier time ensuring continuity & consistency because there aren't 25 distributions of OpenBSD under 1 "OpenBSD Foundation" umbrella. The problem was that Poettering (who despite my dislike for how he treats anyone who questions his approach, I still think is a genius) didn't create his own OS from scratch (perhaps something based on his own distro, or genode or whatevs) but hi-jacked Linux for his purpose. Then there is the problem with Docker/isolation that, as others above have pointed out, is not new in the BSD world and is actually a poor product that constantly breaks things on every update. The BSD world would have laughed docker out of the door and down the street yet on Linux we pretend it's "genius" and we accept it comes not from the community but some outside vendor with terrible record in its own security posture. Pipe shit straight to | sudo bash was the docker way for a long time until they got called out for it and then pretended it never happened. But you can still see their incompetence also in other places such as dockerhub which remains the petri dish of choice for malware, or their latest stunt of forcing people to upgrade. Compared to BSD's, in Linux we practice a lot of "hype driven software engineering" and the result is abstraction hell, and insecurity. This is visible especially if you just compare apples with apples, e.g. a Linux vs BSD on a server (ignoring all aspects where BSD's are hardly present but Linux is). Poettering has also pushed for unifying isolation options within systemd to help orchestrate the mess, but it still feels like a lot of duct tape when comparing how all of this is done in BSD. there are many other topics like eBPF, and how much we're now able to move into the kernel for performance / observability etc ... but I'll stop. The Linux Standards Base (LSB) perhaps lacked teeth and never fulfilled the potential it could have, but a democracy (or federation of interests) is harder.

jart 5y ago
It's called GNU/Systemd. Poettering is certainly master of userspace but I think it was Karen Sandler who really pulled the strings. She was executive directory of GNOME and she went to the distros and was like, look, GNOME is going to make Systemd a hard requirement so you can either use it, or not have a desktop anymore. And that's why every Linux distro abandoned System 5 for System 500, with the exception of ones intended to run inside Docker containers like Alpine.
- versteegen 5y ago
  But not everyone uses GNOME and therefore not every distro uses systemd. Slackware still doesn't, and it's not some kind of minimal-for-Docker distro. Edit: Actually I see that GNOME doesn't require (since 3.30?) systemd: it can be used with just elogind. (Slackware actually recently adopted elogind for KDE and Xfce). Gentoo is another distro that doesn't require systemd (it's actually optional).
- zxzax 5y ago
  >it was Karen Sandler who really pulled the strings I would be interested to hear a source for that because I never heard of such a thing. I heard the exact opposite, that GNOME is still open to keeping things working on BSD. The latest version in FreeBSD is GNOME 3.36.