BSD & Darwin Archive

PC-BSD 1.4.1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-11-18 BSD & Darwin 15 Comments

PC-BSD 1.4.1 has been released. "A update to PC-BSD has been released today, version 1.4.1. This new version may be obtained from our download page, additionally users who are running version 1.4 may download a patch to upgrade." It's mostly a bugfix release.

Apple Releases Darwin 9 Source Code

Submitted by SK8T 2007-11-06 BSD & Darwin 32 Comments

Apple has released the source code to Darwin 9, the underlying open source operating system ofMac OS X 10.5 Leopard. "Darwin is the open source UNIX-based foundation of Mac OS X. Darwin integrates a number of technologies, including the Mach 3.0 microkernel, operating system services based on FreeBSD 5 UNIX, high-performance TCP/IP networking, and support for multiple integrated file systems. Because the design of Darwin is highly modular, you can dynamically add device drivers, networking extensions, and new file systems."

Ten Years of pkgsrc

Submitted by irbis 2007-10-19 BSD & Darwin 13 Comments

"10 Years ago - on October 3rd 1997 - the pkgsrc software management system was created by Alistair Crooks and Hubert Feyrer. pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection, was intended primarily as a packaging system for NetBSD. Derived from the FreeBSD Ports system, pkgsrc became a success story. Today, pkgsrc is a cross-platform framework, running on the BSDs, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, many Unix derivatives, and even on QNX and Windows. Ports- and pkgsrc-like software build frameworks are today standard on the BSDs and quite popular on some newer Linux distributions. In 2005 pkgsrc was adopted as the package management system for DragonFly BSD. Presently, pkgsrc provides more than 7300 stable packages. We continue the anniversary celebrations with a series of interviews: developers and users of pkgsrc and of related systems give insights into the history, the concepts, the problems and the future directions of packaging systems."

Introducing the HAMMER Filesystem

Submitted by Oliver 2007-10-14 BSD & Darwin 22 Comments

Matthew Dillon writes: "I am going to start committing bits and pieces of the HAMMER filesystem over the next two months. Note that the filesystem will not be operational until we get closer to the 2.0 release in December so these bits and pieces will not be tied into buildworld/buildkernel until then." Features: maximum size of half an exabyte, infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy, streaming backups, asynchronous transactional support (no long fscks to check disk state). Dillon also explains why he chose not to use Sun's ZFS.

BSD-Licensed C Compiler Added to NetBSD, OpenBSD

Submitted by deanna 2007-09-15 BSD & Darwin 103 Comments

Anders Magnusson's BSD-licensed pcc compiler has been imported into NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD's src tree. Anders wrote to NetBSD's tech-toolchain list: "It is not yet bug-free, but it can compile the i386 userspace. The big benefit of it is that it is fast, 5-10 times faster than gcc, while still producing reasonable code. The only optimization added so far is a multiple-register-class graph-coloring register allocator, which may be one of the best register allocators today. Conversion to SSA format is also implemented, but not yet the phi function. Not too difficult though, after that strength reduction is high on the list."

DragonflyBSD 1.10.1 Released

Submitted by CrAsH 2007-08-22 BSD & Darwin 15 Comments

DragonflyBSD 1.10.1 has been released. It includes several bugfixes. "DragonFly is an operating system and environment originally based on FreeBSD. DragonFly branched from FreeBSD in 2003 in order to develop a radically different approach to concurrency, SMP, and most other kernel subsystems."

MidnightBSD 0.1 Released

Submitted by Lucas Holt 2007-08-07 BSD & Darwin 23 Comments

MidnightBSD 0.1 is now available. It includes several software packages such as ksh, sudo, OpenNTPD, gcc 3.4.4, BIND 9.3.4 (plus patch), and others in the base system. "MidnightBSD is a desktop operating system for x86 compatible, and soon amd64 compatible architectures. It was originally based on FreeBSD 6.1 Beta. The goal of the project is to create a BSD with ease of use and simplicity in mind."

DragonFly BSD 1.10 Released; Interview: Matthew Dillon

Submitted by anonymous 2007-08-06 BSD & Darwin 43 Comments

The sixth major DragonFly BSD release, version 1.10, was announced today by project creator Matthew Dillon. Billed as "more stable than the 1.8 release", it includes improved virtual kernel support, a new disk management infrastructure, improvements to wireless networking, and support for the new syslink protocol. As to what all that means, KernelTrap has just posted an interview with Dillon. Going beyond today's 1.10 release, the interview explores DragonFly's new clustering high-availability filesystem which sounds superior to ZFS, the project's goals for the 2.0 release expected in six months, and a comparison of the BSD license versus the GPL.

DesktopBSD 1.6RC3 Released

Submitted by Oliver 2007-07-25 BSD & Darwin 22 Comments

"DesktopBSD 1.6 RC 3 is now available for download from our mirrors or via BitTorrent. This release candidate is considered a large step towards a final release 1.6 with major changes such as: X.Org release 7.2, improving support for modern graphics hardware; NVIDIA graphics driver, providing hardware 3D acceleration for NVIDIA video cards; latest FreeBSD 6-STABLE as base system with High Definition Audio support; support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs; more up-to-date software packages from the DesktopBSD build servers; many small bug fixes and optimizations. Upgrades from 1.0 and previous release candidates are supported. An additional language CD and 64-bit (AMD64) DVD will be released soon."

DragonFly BSD: UNIX for Clusters?

Submitted by _DoubleThink_ 2007-06-16 BSD & Darwin 16 Comments

"Matt Dillon, one of the FreeBSD kernel developers, decided that several of the approaches being used in the 5.x series were dead-ends, and in July 2003 forked the stable 4.x codebase to form DragonFly BSD. The 4.x FreeBSD Foundation meant that DragonFly has been a solid platform from the start. DragonFly, like the other BSDs, imports code from other members of the family when it makes sense, such as the malloc() security features from OpenBSD, parts of the WiFi subsystem from FreeBSD, and USB code from NetBSD. In spite of this, development has been pushed in some unique directions."

DesktopBSD 1.6-RC2 Released

Submitted by detonator 2007-04-08 BSD & Darwin 13 Comments

DesktopBSD 1.6-RC2 has been released. "Primary changes since 1.6-RC1: improved video detection; no more annoying package database messages when an installation/upgrade failed; upgrading from 1.0 should work fine now; cups problems are hopefully gone; KDE 3.5.6; K3B 1.0."

MidnightBSD Gets ProPolice

Submitted by Archite 2007-04-02 BSD & Darwin 31 Comments

MidnightBSD has integrated ProPolice into its system. "MidnightBSD is a desktop operating system for x86 compatible, and soon amd64 compatible architectures. It was originally based on FreeBSD 6.1 Beta. The goal of the project is to create a BSD with ease of use and simplicity in mind."

DragonFly BSD 1.8.1 Released

Thom Holwerda 2007-03-28 BSD & Darwin 9 Comments

Dragonfly BSD 1.8.1 has been released. "Security updates for BIND, File, libmagic, and TCPDUMP; X.Org added to various paths, including periodic directories for cron and manual paths; the dynamic loader now properly searches objects, solving problems with a number of pkgsrc applications; the fwe network interface is now properly dependant on Firewire; a bug in Vinum was fixed; update the EST module (CPU voltage/frequency reporting); the virtual kernel now properly handles spurious SIGTRAPs; MFC a bug fix for SMBFS which fixes a kernel panic."

Initial Design Synopsis for a DragonFlyBSD Filesystem

Submitted by mdoverkil 2007-02-24 BSD & Darwin 22 Comments

Apparently, Matt Dillion has decided to roll his own filesystem for DragonFly. "Here is my initial outline of the filesystem design. It is open for discussion. Please feel to ask questions for anything you do not understand. I do not intend to start coding anything for at least two weeks. There are currently two rough spots in the design. First, how to handle segment overflows in a multi-master environment. Such overflows can occur when the individual masters or slaves have different historical data retention policies. Second, where to store the regeneratable indexes."

Interview: The BSD Certification Group’s Dru Lavigne

Submitted by Valour 2007-02-20 BSD & Darwin 2 Comments

"During the Southern California Linux Exposition 5x's mini-conference on women in open source software, BSD Certification Group member Dru Lavigne put forth the idea that free/open source software provided an excellent opportunity to inexpensively change one's career path. Since this is an idea that has not been widely explored, Dru took some time to talk to me about it, as well as provide an update on the BSD system administrator certification program that is currently in development."

DragonFly 1.8.0 Released

Submitted by David Dengg 2007-01-30 BSD & Darwin 36 Comments

DragonFly 1.8.0 has been released. The biggest kernel change in this release is the addition of virtual kernel support and a virtual kernel build target. The biggest user-visible changes include updates to third party applications included in the base system, a major rewrite of NULLFS which removes all directory recursion restrictions from mount_null and removes nearly all the kernel resource overhead when using such mounts, and a multi-ip feature for jails.

BSD Goes Live with FreeSBIE 2.0

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-26 BSD & Darwin 8 Comments

"Last year the Italian FreeBSD user group, GUFI, rekindled the FreeSBIE project to develop a live CD based on the FreeBSD operating system. After more than four months of development, and an equal number of beta releases, the project released FreesBIE 2.0 this month. Codenamed Clint Eastwood, the live CD is based on the recent FreeBSD 6.2 release, and is an ideal platform to experience BSD and learn how things are done in BSD land."

FreeSBIE 2.0 Released

Submitted by Oliver 2007-01-16 BSD & Darwin 8 Comments

FreeSBIE 2.0-RELEASE has been released. "FreeSBIE 2.0-RELEASE (codename Clint Eastwood) is based on the fresh FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE, both in terms of sources and of packages. It contains more than 450 pieces and 1,3 gigabytes of software, all in a single CD-ROM of 668 megabytes."

Gentoo/FreeBSD on Hold Due to Licensing Issues

Thom Holwerda 2007-01-08 BSD & Darwin 79 Comments

"Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected. The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good news is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed. At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."

PC-BSD 1.3 Beta 2 Released

Submitted by Charles A Landemaine 2006-11-26 BSD & Darwin 38 Comments

After much hard work, the PC-BSD team is pleased to announce that version 1.3 BETA2 is now available for download. This version adds support for installing in languages other than English, and addresses many numerous bugs found in BETA1. 1.3 BETA2 can be downloaded from the beta download page. You will also need to download 1.3 CD2 if you wish to install in languages other than English. Please report any and all unreported bugs on the BugsDB or the forums.