4 ms·

Could someone explain the differences between FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD? (Not in detail, just so I get a general view what the different goals are.)

by klrr 14y ago

zokier 14y ago
FreeBSD = includes kitchen sink NetBSD = run on a toaster OpenBSD = "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"
- darkandbrooding 14y ago
  This HN link( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791 ) introduced me to the knowledge that OpenBSD is commonly installed on networking gear, instead of (for example) Cisco IOS. So you could say "freebsd on your desktop and/or server, and openbsd on your router." I confess that I don't know enough about NetBSD to offer an optimal use case.
  - Cowen 14y ago
    NetBSD on your toaster is the canonical example.
  - zokier 14y ago
    oh yeah, openbsd has tons of great networking stuff. pf, carp, openssh all have originated from openbsd.
  - ams6110 14y ago
    I use openbsd on the desktop. It's great. Just works, and stays out of the way.
- lh7777 14y ago
  I run NetBSD as a web server, but not for any good reason -- it's just personal preference. I ended up with NetBSD rather than one of the other variants because it's easy to set up as a Xen domU (instructions at http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/NetBSD_as_a_DomU http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/NetBSD_as_a_DomU if anyone's interested).
gamache 14y ago
FreeBSD focuses primarily on flexibility, NetBSD on portability, and OpenBSD on security. Or something. There is of course much overlap in the way their goals are accomplished.
MichaelStubbs 14y ago
I feel a worthy, yet absent, *BSD would also be DragonFlyBSD. Exactly what the difference is between DragonFlyBSD and other BSDs I will leave for someone else to summarise in a more definitive way, however my take is that it is all-round more "modern".
- zokier 14y ago
  My superficial understanding is that DragonFlyBSD is more of a research platform for all sorts of fancy new stuff.
- wipt 14y ago
  Dragonfly BSD is a "logical" continuation of FreeBSD 4.x. FreeBSD changed how it handles SMP in 5.x, while Dragonfly seems to be geared towards kernel level clustering.
- ams6110 14y ago
  Exactly what the difference is between DragonFlyBSD and other BSDs I will leave for someone else to summarise It's all rather nicely explained on the front page of their website. http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/
pekk 14y ago
Since this story is the second time this month I saw prominent begging for donations on a *BSD, suggesting that one or both projects are on life support - I wonder why these projects can't be better unified (or one eat the other's lunch). Is this essential to purpose or just historical?
- cperciva 14y ago
  A lot of NetBSD code ends up being imported into FreeBSD. Same goes for OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD -- I wouldn't want to run any of them myself, but I'm glad they're out there.
- wipt 14y ago
  The projects have branched over feature politics. FreeBSD is by far the most popular and advanced, NetBSD is very clean and easily ported. OpenBSD was a later fork that emphasises security, and omits binary "blobs". Generally code is exchanged between the projects. Dragonfly BSD is probably the smallest notable fork (there are more). It's relatively recent and is a "logical continuation of FreeBSD 4.x". FreeBSD moved towards a new system for SMP in 5.x.
  - flomo 14y ago
    My understanding is the BSD projects originally forked over personality/political issues with the defunct 386BSD project, and only later did they begin to focus on certain feature sets.
    - tptacek 14y ago
      NetBSD forked from 386BSD, which is the PC port of the Net/2 4.3BSD source code release. FreeBSD is, in some vague sense, the continuation of the 386BSD project. It's a fork, but a fork in which the parent died out. OpenBSD is Theo de Raadt's fork of NetBSD. Theo was one of the NetBSD founders and had a falling out with the NetBSD core team. The origins of all three projects are basically accidents of fate, but FreeBSD has taken up a role as the "optimized for x86/x64 servers" BSD, OpenBSD (obviously) as the "secure" BSD, and NetBSD is the "portable" BSD. In practice, NetBSD sees some use in embedded/appliance scenarios, although Linux has pretty much taken over the world there.
fusiongyro 14y ago
The impression I got from "Code Reading" by Diomidis Spinellis is that NetBSD is fantastic for learning the internals of a real UNIX. The emphasis has always been on correctness and clarity first.
lambda 14y ago
FreeBSD is targeted at x86 running on desktops and servers, and is generally considered the most "complete" distribution for those use cases, with the most packages available for that platform, widest range of features, etc. NetBSD focuses very heavily on portability. They target lots of architectures, focus on getting cross compilation working well, and spend a lot of time worrying about doing things "right" rather than expediently (for what it's worth; this can be good or bad depending on how you look at it). Their package manager/ports system is known as "pkgsrc", and also focuses on portability, such that it also runs on other platforms like Linux, Mac OS X, and so on. If you want to try porting a BSD to your odd little MIPS-based microcontroller, NetBSD is your best bet. OpenBSD is focused extremely heavily on security. If you are paranoid, you want to run OpenBSD. If you are not paranoid, you should be. They are out to get you. Don't let them. And the other major BSDs that you didn't ask about: Dragonfly BSD is a sort of next-gen fork of FreeBSD, a bit more experimental. The biggest new feature is its HAMMER filesystem, which is in the class of modern filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS, supporting things like snapshots, checksumming of data and metadata, mirroring to backups, data deduplication, and the like. It also has other features like user-space virtual kernels, better parallelism, etc. PC-BSD is designed to be a user-friendly, desktop-oriented BSD, which manages applications as separate bundles with installers, more similar to how they work on Windows on Mac OS X, than a traditional BSD ports system or Linux package manager which tries to manage shared dependencies (a PC-BSD package comes with all of its dependencies, which are installed separately from those of other packages). OS X is a hybrid operating system, based on combining the Mach microkernel, FreeBSD, and some NetBSD tools, along with a proprietary UI layer and applications. It runs on desktops, laptops, and ARM-based smartphones. It is well known for its user-friendliness, tight integration between software and hardware, and draconian application development policies for its package management system, the App Store. Luckily, there are alternative ports systems available, such as MacPorts, Homebrew, and Cydia.

Could someone explain the differences between FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD? (Not in detail, just so I get a general view what the different goals are.)

by klrr 14y ago

Could someone explain the differences between FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD? (Not in detail, just so I get a general view what the different goals are.)

zokier 14y ago

FreeBSD = includes kitchen sink NetBSD = run on a toaster OpenBSD = "Only two remote holes in the default install, in a heck of a long time!"

darkandbrooding 14y ago
This HN link( http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4798791 ) introduced me to the knowledge that OpenBSD is commonly installed on networking gear, instead of (for example) Cisco IOS. So you could say "freebsd on your desktop and/or server, and openbsd on your router." I confess that I don't know enough about NetBSD to offer an optimal use case.
- Cowen 14y ago
  NetBSD on your toaster is the canonical example.
- zokier 14y ago
  oh yeah, openbsd has tons of great networking stuff. pf, carp, openssh all have originated from openbsd.
- ams6110 14y ago
  I use openbsd on the desktop. It's great. Just works, and stays out of the way.
lh7777 14y ago
I run NetBSD as a web server, but not for any good reason -- it's just personal preference. I ended up with NetBSD rather than one of the other variants because it's easy to set up as a Xen domU (instructions at http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/NetBSD_as_a_DomU http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/NetBSD_as_a_DomU if anyone's interested).

gamache 14y ago

FreeBSD focuses primarily on flexibility, NetBSD on portability, and OpenBSD on security. Or something. There is of course much overlap in the way their goals are accomplished.

MichaelStubbs 14y ago

I feel a worthy, yet absent, *BSD would also be DragonFlyBSD. Exactly what the difference is between DragonFlyBSD and other BSDs I will leave for someone else to summarise in a more definitive way, however my take is that it is all-round more "modern".

zokier 14y ago
My superficial understanding is that DragonFlyBSD is more of a research platform for all sorts of fancy new stuff.
wipt 14y ago
Dragonfly BSD is a "logical" continuation of FreeBSD 4.x. FreeBSD changed how it handles SMP in 5.x, while Dragonfly seems to be geared towards kernel level clustering.
ams6110 14y ago
Exactly what the difference is between DragonFlyBSD and other BSDs I will leave for someone else to summarise It's all rather nicely explained on the front page of their website. http://www.dragonflybsd.org/ http://www.dragonflybsd.org/

pekk 14y ago

Since this story is the second time this month I saw prominent begging for donations on a *BSD, suggesting that one or both projects are on life support - I wonder why these projects can't be better unified (or one eat the other's lunch). Is this essential to purpose or just historical?

cperciva 14y ago
A lot of NetBSD code ends up being imported into FreeBSD. Same goes for OpenBSD and DragonflyBSD -- I wouldn't want to run any of them myself, but I'm glad they're out there.
wipt 14y ago
The projects have branched over feature politics. FreeBSD is by far the most popular and advanced, NetBSD is very clean and easily ported. OpenBSD was a later fork that emphasises security, and omits binary "blobs". Generally code is exchanged between the projects. Dragonfly BSD is probably the smallest notable fork (there are more). It's relatively recent and is a "logical continuation of FreeBSD 4.x". FreeBSD moved towards a new system for SMP in 5.x.
- flomo 14y ago
  My understanding is the BSD projects originally forked over personality/political issues with the defunct 386BSD project, and only later did they begin to focus on certain feature sets.
  - tptacek 14y ago
    NetBSD forked from 386BSD, which is the PC port of the Net/2 4.3BSD source code release. FreeBSD is, in some vague sense, the continuation of the 386BSD project. It's a fork, but a fork in which the parent died out. OpenBSD is Theo de Raadt's fork of NetBSD. Theo was one of the NetBSD founders and had a falling out with the NetBSD core team. The origins of all three projects are basically accidents of fate, but FreeBSD has taken up a role as the "optimized for x86/x64 servers" BSD, OpenBSD (obviously) as the "secure" BSD, and NetBSD is the "portable" BSD. In practice, NetBSD sees some use in embedded/appliance scenarios, although Linux has pretty much taken over the world there.

fusiongyro 14y ago

The impression I got from "Code Reading" by Diomidis Spinellis is that NetBSD is fantastic for learning the internals of a real UNIX. The emphasis has always been on correctness and clarity first.

lambda 14y ago

FreeBSD is targeted at x86 running on desktops and servers, and is generally considered the most "complete" distribution for those use cases, with the most packages available for that platform, widest range of features, etc. NetBSD focuses very heavily on portability. They target lots of architectures, focus on getting cross compilation working well, and spend a lot of time worrying about doing things "right" rather than expediently (for what it's worth; this can be good or bad depending on how you look at it). Their package manager/ports system is known as "pkgsrc", and also focuses on portability, such that it also runs on other platforms like Linux, Mac OS X, and so on. If you want to try porting a BSD to your odd little MIPS-based microcontroller, NetBSD is your best bet. OpenBSD is focused extremely heavily on security. If you are paranoid, you want to run OpenBSD. If you are not paranoid, you should be. They are out to get you. Don't let them. And the other major BSDs that you didn't ask about: Dragonfly BSD is a sort of next-gen fork of FreeBSD, a bit more experimental. The biggest new feature is its HAMMER filesystem, which is in the class of modern filesystems like Btrfs and ZFS, supporting things like snapshots, checksumming of data and metadata, mirroring to backups, data deduplication, and the like. It also has other features like user-space virtual kernels, better parallelism, etc. PC-BSD is designed to be a user-friendly, desktop-oriented BSD, which manages applications as separate bundles with installers, more similar to how they work on Windows on Mac OS X, than a traditional BSD ports system or Linux package manager which tries to manage shared dependencies (a PC-BSD package comes with all of its dependencies, which are installed separately from those of other packages). OS X is a hybrid operating system, based on combining the Mach microkernel, FreeBSD, and some NetBSD tools, along with a proprietary UI layer and applications. It runs on desktops, laptops, and ARM-based smartphones. It is well known for its user-friendliness, tight integration between software and hardware, and draconian application development policies for its package management system, the App Store. Luckily, there are alternative ports systems available, such as MacPorts, Homebrew, and Cydia.