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Episode: 3439
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Title: HPR3439: Linux Inlaws S01E40: The One with the BSDs
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3439/hpr3439.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-24 23:31:37
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---
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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 34394 Thursday, the 7th of October 2021.
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Today's show is entitled, Linux in laws S0140.
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The one with the BSDs, it is the 40th show of monochromic and is about 97 minutes long
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and carries an explicit flag.
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The summary is the other one operating system to rule them all.
|
||||
This episode of HPR is brought to you by an honesthost.com.
|
||||
Get 15% discount on all shared hosting with the offer code HPR15.
|
||||
That's HPR15.
|
||||
Better web hosting that's honest and fair at an honesthost.com.
|
||||
This is Linux in laws, a podcast on topics around free and open source software, any associated
|
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contraband, communism, the revolution in general and whatever fans is your tickle.
|
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Please note that this and other episodes may contain strong language, offensive humor
|
||||
and other certainly not politically correct language you have been warned.
|
||||
Our parents insisted on this disclaimer.
|
||||
Happy mom?
|
||||
Thus, the content is not suitable for consumption in the workplace, especially when played
|
||||
back in an open plan office or similar environments.
|
||||
Many miners under the age of 35 or any pets including fluffy little killer bunnies, you
|
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trust the guide dog unless on speed and qt rex's or other associated dinosaurs.
|
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This is Linux in laws, season 1 episode 40.
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The one with the BSDs, good evening Martin, how are things?
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Hey Chris, things are fine, it might be on the warm side for the UK.
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I hear you have some water in your direction.
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Indeed, very much so, I think yet we have a limit too much of water running around and apparently
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you still have to turn down the heating in the UK for sure.
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Excellent, but this is not a show about weather for some strange reason.
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This is a show about open source software and tonight we have a special treat because we
|
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do have a selected panel of BSD people on the show.
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So without further ado, why don't we do a short intro round then why don't you go first?
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Hi, my name is Dan Langel, I got involved with open source software in about I think it is
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1995. Someone gave me some free BSD CDs and an old computer and that got me a firewall because
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I just got an ADSL and things have just gone downhill from there. Mark, you're next.
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Hey, sorry about the accent, I'm French in case this isn't apparent.
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I'm Marcus P, so I've been working with open BSD since 1998.
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I've been doubling in open source software for a bit longer and at that point I got
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an amiga and I wanted to install something on it and the only operating system with
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the instance in selection and instruction was open BSD and with the rest is historic, as
|
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I said. Patrick. I had been using Linux for about nine years. I started using open BSD four years
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ago. I think the main reason I was ever interested in exploring other operating systems is
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just finding an interface that I was happy with. I see. It's about sums me up.
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A true defect on the show. We love this. Nia, you're next.
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Hi, my name is Nia Alari. I've been a net BSD developer for the past three years. I've
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been using net BSD for the past six years and I work on some quite strange and diverse areas of
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system, probably mostly known for my work on the audio stack and graphics related things.
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And last but not least, Martin, my co-host, how did you come to BSD? Mr. Visher?
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Sorry, I was on mute.
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Yes, BSD is obviously something for my university days, which is many, many, many years ago, but
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yeah, not forgotten. Let's put it that way. What about yourself?
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Perfect, perfect, perfect. I actually came across BSD when I was still almost
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child for wonder of a better expression. We had a BSD system running in the
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polytext where I did my first degree, but you're talking about at least 30 years back.
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I've been using free BSD as a matter of fact for about 10 years in the shape shock and
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||||
awe of an operating system called macOS, but we're going to go, but we're going to go into
|
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these details in a minute before we kind of discuss this kind of thing on a technical level.
|
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What would the current, well, maybe we should check some more light basically before we,
|
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as I said before, we go into the details, we should check some light on the history of BSD.
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||||
In terms of initially there was system five, that was the prime evil, I'm tempted to say,
|
||||
unique system back in the 60s, late 60s, I'm a rat, and then the broken software distribution came along,
|
||||
and then we arrived at open BSD, free BSD, nut BSD, dragonfly BSD, and I'm sure that I forgot
|
||||
of view of BSD flavors. So, volunteers first, who can talk about the history of BSD?
|
||||
Or wants to talk about the history of BSD? Well, I can do some parts, there is some stuff that I
|
||||
know about, but I haven't actually lived, which is the origin of BSD, which is basically,
|
||||
as far as I know, Thompson went on sabbatical from Bell Labs at the time, and he came to Berkeley,
|
||||
and he worked with people there, and they started this thing, which was BSD.
|
||||
And he became free 86 BSD a few years later, as the first try of being an open source software,
|
||||
but he didn't quite work, because there were still parts that were actually owned by Bell Labs,
|
||||
and so, lawsuit problems ensued, and this gave a little gap where a guy in Finland called
|
||||
the new StarVets managed to sneak in and create Linux, more or less. And when the lawsuit was
|
||||
resolved and the parts which were missing were actually written, I think that was when free BSD
|
||||
started, so I live people from BSD to talk about that. At the same point, some people decided to
|
||||
port it to other platforms, this was the origin of a net BSD. Among net BSD developers, this was
|
||||
this guy called Fyodorette, which had something of a temper, and it ended up in a foight between
|
||||
Theo and the other people, the other funding favors of net BSD, let's say. And Theo got
|
||||
out here from the project, and he decided to fund his own projects, which is how open BSD started.
|
||||
Interesting. All these different BSD flavors, and of course, there's also a dragonfly BSD,
|
||||
which we may go into in a minute. All these different BSD flavors, free BSD, Open BSD, and net BSD
|
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have different kind of focus areas, if memory, if my failing memory or failing memory,
|
||||
rather, is anything to go by. Maybe somebody from the panel, basically, or due to the fact that we
|
||||
have actually different panel members of the different flavors on the recording session, why don't we
|
||||
kind of shed some more light on the focus areas of these different flavors of the BSD operating system?
|
||||
I actually use some free BSD at work quite a lot, despite working on net BSD in my free time.
|
||||
From my perspective, free BSD is marketed much more towards high performance service usage,
|
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even though the other BSD is a good choice for that as well.
|
||||
At work, we actually use it for embedded devices, and net BSD is also a great choice for that,
|
||||
and it has lots of tooling for working on embedded devices, and routers, and things like that.
|
||||
I think net BSD has kind of an interesting history of being focused on supporting lots of
|
||||
platforms, but also just as a platform for research and interesting ideas, and it's achieved
|
||||
a quite good balance of performance security, as well as having some very unique and interesting
|
||||
design decisions like Rump, for example. What is Rump? Rump is a kind of model for how
|
||||
kernels can be almost dissected, I suppose. It's possible to run parts of the net BSD kernel in
|
||||
user space, or on bare metal for bare metal applications. You can use net BSD drivers, or
|
||||
I think the GNU heard people were looking into using net BSD drivers in their micro kernel,
|
||||
just by using a net BSD Rump kernel as a service, and it's quite a unique design, and I don't
|
||||
think there's anything else quite like it that exists as far as I'm aware. So it's not a true micro
|
||||
kernel, it's more like a hybrid approach. I suppose it's a monolithic kernel that's also a library
|
||||
operating system. Wow. Okay. Given the fact that library operating systems, sorry,
|
||||
I reckon not everybody in the in the in the year and and share a relationship,
|
||||
it's an operating system expert. Maybe we should explain what library operating systems are.
|
||||
Somebody volunteering from the audience, or should I basically take a shot at it?
|
||||
Okay. I'd be interested in seeing what you have to say. Okay, in that case, yeah, let me
|
||||
let me make the few mistakes, and then you can correct me in philanthropic apps.
|
||||
Library operating systems. Essentially, you take a small kernel like structure as in code base,
|
||||
and package the operating system on top of it, meaning that normally an operating system is
|
||||
divided into kernel user space, a library operating system basically has the operating system
|
||||
services co-located to the application. Library operating systems typically do not differentiate
|
||||
between the kernel and the user space, leaving the door wide open to all sorts of interesting
|
||||
and funny security challenges as well. Let's put it this way. But library operating systems do
|
||||
have a few advantages. For example, you do not have a context switch between user and kernel space.
|
||||
The packaging can be quite compact and dense because you are essentially building a full
|
||||
application stack, including the operating system just for one purpose. So, library operating
|
||||
systems have found quite a significant following, I'm tempted to say, in the area of embedded systems,
|
||||
where you typically have only one app running on your stack. Now, where did I go wrong?
|
||||
I think that's a very good explanation. I would also add that with something like Rump,
|
||||
there's the ability to use parts of the kernel as a user space application. So, for example,
|
||||
you can use the file system drivers to mount a file system without touching the kernel at all,
|
||||
really. And also, there's quite a large test suite for NetBSD that takes heavy advantage of this
|
||||
by running device drivers and so on as Rump servers in user space to test them.
|
||||
Now, in that case, I've written that this is quite significant in the embedded space because
|
||||
that is typically the area where library operating systems and unique kernels are used in
|
||||
if I'm a self-correct.
|
||||
Yeah, I suppose so, but I think the biggest use of Rump currently is a testing tool,
|
||||
just to ensure the continued stability and reliability of the operating system, I suppose.
|
||||
Okay. Now, speaking of, of embedded systems that has typically been in a domain for something
|
||||
called Linux, the Raspberry Pi's of the world and other single board computers typically run
|
||||
some sort of Linux operating system. Is there any opinion on the panel with regards to the
|
||||
BSD penetration of the sector? And I'm almost tempted to say that there is of course another
|
||||
embedded space called MOBA where, funny enough, freeBSD has gained a significant following,
|
||||
although I reckon not many people know it because if they're using something called iOS,
|
||||
essentially, they're using a small micro kernel, which with a stripped down freeBSD
|
||||
with a personality on top of it called QNX or something, not QNX, sorry, I'm lacking the
|
||||
acronym here, but it's essentially something based on something called Apple called Darwin,
|
||||
if I'm completely mistaken.
|
||||
I think parts of QNX are using the netBSD networking stack. I mean, if you look in their
|
||||
copyright statements, there's a lot of netBSD foundation copyrights. And
|
||||
yeah, I think iOS is probably mostly freeBSD, but there's bits from everywhere in there probably,
|
||||
especially if you go digging deep into where every single tool comes from.
|
||||
Same goes for I reckon generally speaking, Tim goes for Darwin generally speaking,
|
||||
or the foundation of something called OSX. And just to say this goes back to something called
|
||||
Nexus OS, Martin, we do not have cloud units on the show, do we?
|
||||
Not today, no, we don't know. Martin, you want to shed some light on Nexus and the history
|
||||
of maybe I should do this? No, no, you go for it. Yeah, excuse me, don't upload, yeah,
|
||||
you're the best second one. No, I mean, there is, of course, something called Nexus,
|
||||
that a certain guy called Steve Jobs came about, or kind of invented whatever you want to call it,
|
||||
or came up with rather, it's probably the next expression. When Steve as he left Apple or had to
|
||||
leave Apple for a wonderful better expression in the mid 80s, he set out and found the company called
|
||||
Next. The idea was to provide education systems pretty much based on an open source stack to the
|
||||
masses. Hence this next queue was born and it was running something called Nexus. So what Steve
|
||||
and the engineers did was essentially take a micro kernel in the shape of Mark 2.5 or 3, I can't
|
||||
even remember, put a free BSD personality on top of it and put on top of that stack a windowing
|
||||
system and some other components. So after a few years, Apple decided to buy Next, Next computers
|
||||
or whatever the name of the company was at the time. So Steve Jobs was reinstantiated as a CEO
|
||||
and pretty much so OSX, what we know now as Mac OS was born. And over the last 30 years,
|
||||
that hasn't really changed. I mean, you have different CPU-E architectures. I mean, the first
|
||||
of was power PC, then Apple moved to Intel and now they are back to risk architect called
|
||||
Apple Silicon, which essentially is an ARM core, heavily customized of course, but still running
|
||||
OSX as it used to be on the lower layers back then. So Apple actually has gone full circle here
|
||||
and if you take a look at as we just discussed at iOS, essentially is a stripped-on version of OSX.
|
||||
So going back to the embedded space from original question, many people actually use BSD
|
||||
without knowing it, given the fact that indeed the rest is pretty much Linux dominated.
|
||||
What is the panel's opinion about BSD in the embedded space and where do you see this going?
|
||||
I think there is something that needs to be said about licencing issues there.
|
||||
Because basically, unless I'm mistaken, I let the other people in the panel voiced their own
|
||||
opinion. One reason we stick with the BSD is not only because of technical issues,
|
||||
but because we do believe in free software where you can take your piece of software and use it
|
||||
anywhere, including commercial products. And that's a good point on some aspects and that's a
|
||||
bad point on some of OSX. The big difference between BSDS, as in permissive licensing and
|
||||
something a couple of licensing, of course, as probably the majority of all listeners do know,
|
||||
Linux's license under something called GPN public license, whereas in the BSD operating system
|
||||
family is license under either two or three clause BSD, which happens to be a permissive license.
|
||||
So without going into details, because there was a show recently on set licensing issues,
|
||||
done by us. The main difference is basically that the BSD license
|
||||
prescribes anything, and hence the term permissive license, because as Mark rightly pointed out,
|
||||
you can do pretty much whatever you want with the code, whereas in the GNU,
|
||||
public license alongside any similar copy-left license extra prescribes, a couple of things,
|
||||
namely, for example, that you have to publish any modifications that you made to the code base.
|
||||
So you are obliged to publish, to make the source code available of your code base once you've
|
||||
touched GPN license code base. That is, of course, not the case with the more permissive licenses,
|
||||
like the BSDs, because these license simply can just say you have to give the original
|
||||
author credit, you have to incorporate a copy of the license, and that's pretty much it,
|
||||
apart from that you're pretty much free to do whatever you want with the code.
|
||||
Any other opinions on the embedded space before we move on?
|
||||
I don't really like talking about licensing too much, because it's quite a controversial subject,
|
||||
and people get very upset with you, but I think in my ideal world, everything would be public domain,
|
||||
but we don't live in my ideal world. I'd also just add that if you look up the history of GPL
|
||||
enforcement, if you, in particular, a name I would look for is Robert Landley, who worked on
|
||||
busybox, his opinion was after suing lots of different companies over the GPL, he didn't get any
|
||||
useful code out of them, it was mostly just terrible stuff. I would add something on the more
|
||||
technical side of the embedded space, say in the ARM world, in Linux on ARM there's lots of
|
||||
like custom vendor kernels and things like that that a lot of people are very upset over and
|
||||
think are very buggy and bad, and I'd just say in the BSD world that kind of doesn't exist,
|
||||
everything is mainline, everything is in the mainline kernel.
|
||||
What exactly does that mean?
|
||||
I suppose that everything is developed and integrated into one tree, and the contribution
|
||||
process is generally not very difficult, like I've heard some absolute horror stories where it's
|
||||
taken years for patches to be accepted into the Linux kernel. I'd like to think that we're a bit
|
||||
better at that.
|
||||
Existing it called the loadable kernel modules is what Linux supports. I know at least one,
|
||||
I know OpenBSD doesn't support those, but I think that is what kind of makes things like you know
|
||||
approaching NVIDIA drivers possible, was you know OpenBSD, possibly the same with the other BSDs,
|
||||
but I know OpenBSD isn't really kind of this, there's no technical course facility or it's
|
||||
not engineered to kind of really allow that kind of deep system integration, you know, driver
|
||||
for body drivers like that.
|
||||
I think modules are used much more often on FreeBSD. On NetBSD they're quite well supported,
|
||||
but mostly everything is in the main kernel binary, and you only use modules for things like
|
||||
Linux compatibility would be a good example. You have to load the Linux compatibility module
|
||||
if you want to use that.
|
||||
Now that's very interesting subject, maybe you can elaborate on that because
|
||||
yes, BSD does support a little compatibility layer.
|
||||
Yeah, it's a thing that exists in FreeBSD and that BSD, although I think the implementations
|
||||
are quite different, and it's just a layer that can translate Linux schools to BSD syscalls.
|
||||
It's fairly straightforward really, I think.
|
||||
Including fancy stuff like control groups and namespaces?
|
||||
I think for my purposes when I'm using Linux compatibility, I'm using it to play games.
|
||||
I don't know too much about the more advanced side of things there.
|
||||
The reason why I'm asking because these are the two control mechanisms where they allow
|
||||
something called containers to run on Linux, because these are the kernel mechanisms you need.
|
||||
BSD systems, correct me if I'm wrong, have something to call jails?
|
||||
Yeah, jails are a FreeBSD thing. The other BSD is mostly just have virtual machines currently
|
||||
is my understanding. I hear alumos supports Linux containers.
|
||||
I can talk about FreeBSD jails for days.
|
||||
I can give us the abridged version, please.
|
||||
Basically, pardon me, FreeBSD jails have been around for about at least 10 years,
|
||||
others can correct me. They're built into FreeBSD.
|
||||
They're designed for you to be, their original purpose was to allow someone to run different
|
||||
versions of the same web server all on the same host instead of having to have 10 hosts,
|
||||
she could put them all on one host, for example, and what I do with it in one example is I run regression
|
||||
testing. So I have, I think, seven jails each one is running a different version of Postgres or
|
||||
MySQL. They could be running different versions of FreeBSD if I wanted to, but basically I run all
|
||||
that regression testing in a jail. The easy way to think of a jail is it's an elaborate CH route.
|
||||
So it's not actually true virtualization, but basically when you're in the jail,
|
||||
you can't tell you're in a jail, but you can if you look in certain spots. Basically,
|
||||
I treat a jail as a complete FreeBSD instance, and I put in that jail things that I want to run
|
||||
in there and have it completely isolated from everything else. Another interesting thing about
|
||||
jails when you're in admin is if you're the cis admin of the host, you can see everything in
|
||||
every jail. If you do PS, for example, you see all the processes running in every jail, or you can
|
||||
pick one jail and see only the processes in that jail, which means theoretically that if you
|
||||
have a break in into a jail, you can see everything they're doing in the jail, but they can't see you
|
||||
at all. They have no concept of anything outside the jail whatsoever. So think of a jail as being
|
||||
a light virtualization, but it's not virtualization. Yes, because the beauty with containers is actually,
|
||||
you can limit their resource usage. So for example, you can tell a container running on Linux,
|
||||
basically only use so many CPU slices. You can you can confine their main memory. You can
|
||||
basically control that usage and all the rest of it. So these are the main difference between
|
||||
the change route environment and true container. You can limit CPU in a jail. You can. Okay. Yes,
|
||||
you can say use this one CPU and that's it. You know, isn't any other CPU. I think there are other
|
||||
controls you can add to the jail, but I don't do it because I've never needed to. Someone else
|
||||
might be able to elaborate on that. Anybody using jails? I don't know. But you're off by about 10
|
||||
years, basically, I just looked it up and the initial paper from Pauline Camp was dirty back from 2000.
|
||||
It's been around for 20 years now. Wow. Okay.
|
||||
Interesting. To give you an idea, I've got I think eight hosts and probably 80 jails spread
|
||||
amongst those hosts. I tend to put my database servers in a jail. I tend to put
|
||||
individual websites into a jail if they're self-contained. I have one server that's running two
|
||||
web servers, each one in a different jail, because one is running engine X and the other one's
|
||||
running Apache. Right. Jails are persistent as in everything that you write to the file system
|
||||
in a jail stays where it is, whereas containers basically use something called, for example,
|
||||
a union file system, which is a definition of formal. So if you stop a container unless you
|
||||
explicitly mounted, for example, an external mount point to a container in terms of basically,
|
||||
you make a portion of your file system visible inside the container. Every other change inside
|
||||
the container is lost to you. So if you stop the container, your flow persistence enabled the
|
||||
container and its data has gone, unlike Jails, I understand. You could design a jail like that by
|
||||
having it by using ZFS. And I think many many many people are running Jails on ZFS. It's much easier.
|
||||
You just give each jail their own ZFS file system. And what you could do is when you stop the jail,
|
||||
you do a rollback on the system it was using your back to where you started.
|
||||
You can do that with a clone. And then just roll it back to where you were when you started.
|
||||
You haven't lost, you haven't lost anything. Sorry, you've lost everything that was in the jail,
|
||||
but you still had the original file system that you started from. Which NASA leads us to very
|
||||
important topics, file systems on BSD. Any takers? I just wanted to add about the running multiple
|
||||
databases thing at the same time. Well, multiple database versions I suppose. And I think that was
|
||||
originally the reason Jails were developed for free BSD. But it's kind of strange from a net BSD
|
||||
perspective because the package manager kind of allows doing that without any operating system
|
||||
level isolation. It's all done in the package manager. Sorry, I just wanted to add about that.
|
||||
I think you're talking about Postgres there. And we had that problem on free BSD for a while,
|
||||
but I think it's gotten much better. It's actually installing them into different
|
||||
directories. And I haven't tried it lately. But yeah, I do run Postgres in different Jails.
|
||||
I think that's the point to be made here. We are talking about actually different operating systems,
|
||||
but you're focusing on the kernel that all the BSD are usually a full operating system with some
|
||||
differences. Like, for instance, net BSD has got their own package manager with some kind of
|
||||
virtualization. If I remember correctly, some views that still return that you're using.
|
||||
And we have some stuff that's been developed in user and in OpenBSD like OpenSSH, for instance.
|
||||
And in most cases, if you only look at the kernel and the specificities of the kernel,
|
||||
you're going to miss quite a lot about what's going on. It's a big difference compared to
|
||||
the way Linux works. Well, usually you've got your kernel and you've got your distributions.
|
||||
The major BSD, the net BSD, free BSD, or Open, I don't know much about Dragonfly.
|
||||
Sorry, I won't talk about it all that much. But usually, you have to take the whole system.
|
||||
It's not just the kernel you have all sorts of stuff that use the basic mechanisms. Like,
|
||||
for instance, on FreeBSD, you've got their new package manager and Pudrier, which uses Jails a lot.
|
||||
Things like that, OpenBSD, and things like that on netBSD. You can't just talk about the
|
||||
kernel most of the time. All you are missing has the phone in my opinion.
|
||||
Indeed, and I do apologize for focusing way too much on my favorite obsession named
|
||||
for this girl's. Just a quick question, because when the full disclosure I'm still using
|
||||
every now and then I'm still using FreeBSD and I'm using Pods as the main package manager.
|
||||
Apparently, there's more package management in BSD than Pods.
|
||||
And Latin me, please. I use Pudrier to build my own packages and I run Pudrier in a jail.
|
||||
Basically, if you want packages that use non-default settings, basically, if you're doing
|
||||
Make Configure, Show Configure, or tweaking any of the settings, each package has its own set
|
||||
of settings, and they have a set of default values. So if you want to change that,
|
||||
you can't use the project-provided packages. So you either build your own packages
|
||||
using Pudrier or use ports. For those unfamiliar, a port is a set of files that allows you to
|
||||
create a package. It's like the set of meta instructions that say you get the source from here,
|
||||
you build it using this mechanism, you put these files there, etc. So a port allows you
|
||||
to create a package, but once you've got that package, something made from ports and something
|
||||
made from Pudrier is indistinguishable. It's the same thing. It's just two different ways of
|
||||
getting to the same goal. So both Pudrier and ports use the ports tray. If I can add a bit of
|
||||
history, that's something that we started in OpenBSD, more or less. Like around 2005 or something
|
||||
like that, you had ports on all 3BSD, and most of the time, if you wanted to have an application with
|
||||
a current stuff, you used to have to check out the port 3, compile what you wanted, and that was
|
||||
it. You had everything working when you were lucky. At that point, Tio decided that it would be
|
||||
a good idea to actually have binary packages, a bit like Reddit, RPM at that point. So we started
|
||||
working on making sure that when you compile stuff, you always got the same package. There was some
|
||||
problem compared to that, and also making sure that you could specify options in a reasonable way.
|
||||
I know that Dan has been working a lot on the infrastructure to make sure that you get all options,
|
||||
and all the tables is ready to ports correct. Then I think I was a bit early, but I started working
|
||||
on ways to build packages, industrially, on OpenBSD, and soon after that, that is Darosan,
|
||||
did something on 3BSD, we've put a year on package. So we moved more or less to having a port system,
|
||||
where you could compile everything by yourself, and you had to compile everything by yourself,
|
||||
to a binary package system, where it would be easy to build something, and you would only compile
|
||||
stuff if you really wanted to tinker with it, but you could use a binary package like Conway
|
||||
that for instance. I mean, this is the main difference, because if you take a look at your
|
||||
typical Linux distribution, apart from maybe Debian or Arch, I'm talking about the Red Hat and
|
||||
the Ubuntu software world. These are backed by companies, and for example, OpenSooza goes without
|
||||
saying, let have a corresponding build infrastructure in the background that basically do packaging,
|
||||
and that goes for CentroSN Fedora as well. I'm just kind of summarizing them under the Red Hat
|
||||
and Rada. Let's put it this way. How do the BSDs address these infrastructure issues?
|
||||
All of the BSDs have a packaging system that descends from free BSD ports, but they've all diverged
|
||||
in very different ways and have very different feature sets. And in that BSD, for example,
|
||||
well, it's the only BSD that doesn't actually use the term ports in that BSD. It's package source,
|
||||
and it produces, well, packages. And I think the infrastructure is very different across
|
||||
BSDs because the different packaging systems have different focuses. For example, package source
|
||||
works on lots of different operating systems, and free BSD ports has also retained lots of
|
||||
customization features, but I think OpenBSD is very focused on producing binaries. So they
|
||||
don't put as much focus on to customizing the build or providing lots of tools for
|
||||
building from source because that's not true at all. We provide all the tools that you need
|
||||
to build from source. We do have some customizations options, but usually we do some kind of,
|
||||
let's say distribution work like we have some options that you can use very easily,
|
||||
which are called flavors most of the time. And if you want to do something else, you can still
|
||||
tinker and you can still build binary packages, but you might be on your own if you run into issues.
|
||||
If you look at how free BSD and OpenBSD do stuff, we are actually very similar
|
||||
for one very simple reason, which is that the people who mostly, we did most of the work on OpenBSD
|
||||
and free BSD ports are basically me and Batista Usain. We talked a lot together. So we don't have
|
||||
the same tools that we wrote almost everything, but we share most of the concepts you will find that
|
||||
our packaging tools are rather similar and most of the changes that we did in OpenBSD
|
||||
happen in free BSD as well. Like having a staging area to build packages that's a
|
||||
one common point, trying to have really able dependencies and stuff like that. That's also
|
||||
something that we share. I know what BSD does. You didn't diverge all that much. The thing that
|
||||
maybe is the biggest difference is that it's probably easier for you to build stuff that's
|
||||
widely different from official binary packages. We've got any pointers in the resulting package
|
||||
that something strange was going on, maybe. But there are lots of common points. We all do the
|
||||
more or less the same thing. We all use a huge make file to build a port, for instance.
|
||||
And we still have more or less the same steps. You always will do make fetch,
|
||||
make patch, make configure, make build and make and style more or less. So if you want to think
|
||||
here with ports on all free BSD, you always always have the same options at this point. After that,
|
||||
what you do with your ports, there might be some differences. I know we have different bulk systems.
|
||||
But going back to Mark's point that brings up a very interesting subject. If I take a look at
|
||||
the supported architectures, I see a significant difference between the likes of free BSD,
|
||||
open BSD and that BSD. So for example, free BSD seems to concentrate mostly on
|
||||
interface architectures, whereas open BSD supports many more CPU architectures. And that brings,
|
||||
of course, up a very interesting subject, namely if you get distributed binary packages,
|
||||
who takes care of the corresponding build to chain in terms of either you do cross-compiling,
|
||||
or somebody has to provide an infrastructure where you can package as and build packages on.
|
||||
Free BSD has a package build farm. Every set of packages gets built every two days or so,
|
||||
and it takes about that long to build the entire set of ports. There's roughly 45,000 ports,
|
||||
give or take a few thousand. And those are all built. Now, it varies upon what sort of
|
||||
architecture you get. I'm just looking at a patchy here. And they build for free BSD 11 down to
|
||||
free BSD 14 on different packages such as Armed 6, Armed 7, Power PC 64, I386, MIPS,
|
||||
I may be repeating, but you can see all these packages listed. And they're all the same version.
|
||||
I see 2.446 and I see 2.448 on the newer ones. So it may take, once a new version is committed to
|
||||
the ports tree, it may take two to four days before that package is available from the free BSD
|
||||
infrastructure. But if you want to build it yourself, you just refresh your copy of the ports tree,
|
||||
CD user ports, dub dub dub Apache 2.4 make package and you can build your own package.
|
||||
In my case, I have Poudre set up to run Nightlay. I have a list of packages and a list of the
|
||||
options to use for those packages. And every night, I get about 28 different trees built.
|
||||
Wow. Basically, free BSD 11, 4, 12.2, free BSD 13 and a whole lot of different
|
||||
settings because I have different needs for different things. And that all runs over night
|
||||
every night. Interesting. Because I can record. Sorry, Chris, I need to go shortly.
|
||||
It's very fascinating so far. I have some of them. I have one question before I need to go.
|
||||
I'd like to have the panel's opinion on the single's technical reason. As in, obviously,
|
||||
clearly, not everybody is using free BSD out there. We have mentioned ports, we mentioned deals,
|
||||
but for each of the panel members would be the single technical reason to choose free BSD.
|
||||
Free BSD. Well, sorry, any BSD.
|
||||
I can't just squeeze that out. Now it's the case for the time to make the case for your
|
||||
version of BSD indeed. But all these people go ahead. Yes, thank you Martin. Sorry, all right.
|
||||
I've answered this question many times in the past and I've summarized it for myself
|
||||
in response to questions I've received. And I can't say that it's a single technical thing,
|
||||
but it's a combination of things all of which are technical, which from a cis admins point of view,
|
||||
makes my life much, much easier now that these technologies have come together.
|
||||
Number one, ZFS. I've been using it for about 10 years. Okay.
|
||||
Hopefully integrated into free BSD for that time. And it is the single best thing for me when
|
||||
it comes to using directories. I've told people that when you go to do a make-deer, consider
|
||||
ZFS create. Just it's a different way of thinking of things. Should this be a separate fall system?
|
||||
But the next thing is a PKG, the packaging system. And on top of that, it's Poudreur that allows me
|
||||
to build my own packages with my own settings, including my own private ports, all seamlessly,
|
||||
and it doesn't make any difference to the operating system that they're using my packages,
|
||||
as opposed to free BSD packages. And I keep thinking there is a third thing in there
|
||||
from memory, and I just can't remember what it was, but I'll leave it at those two.
|
||||
I can go next. I'm going to start with saying that we have more or less some of the same
|
||||
technical reasons, like our packaging system is about working well. Functionally, it's the same
|
||||
as free BSD, and we have built tools that work just as well. It's called dpb instead of Poudreur,
|
||||
but we have built about every three days, official builds, and I can rebuild my whole system
|
||||
in about two days and make a start work. I don't have that many machines,
|
||||
so it takes about that time. One very nice feature of PKBSD, which doesn't exist anywhere,
|
||||
that's for an hour, it's called pledge. This is probably something you haven't heard about.
|
||||
It is a beautiful idea for making processes, commit to not doing things they should not do.
|
||||
Like for instance, at the start of a program, you are going to say, I pledge to only do
|
||||
input output on open files, and I go with them in memory and nothing else.
|
||||
And after that, your process is going to get killed whenever it tries to open a new file,
|
||||
or do a network connection. It's very similar to stuff like GR security or
|
||||
Capsicum and free BSD. The main difference is that you don't have to specify all the system calls
|
||||
that you want to call or not call. You are just going to say, okay, I want to use this
|
||||
subsystem, or that subsystem and everything, and it's beautifully interfaced with C library.
|
||||
And also, it goes for granularity, sometimes smaller than system calls.
|
||||
Like for instance, anybody who's played with kernel knows that
|
||||
higher control is going to be a huge kernel form when you look at drivers and shit.
|
||||
And for instance, with pledge, you can say, okay, I don't want to do anything with device drivers,
|
||||
but I have to handle TTYs. I need to be able to set TTYs to blocking, non-blocking,
|
||||
echo, whatever that stuff, and nothing else. And you can do that.
|
||||
But more or less, we have about everything in the best system using pledge.
|
||||
And all important ports have been converted to use it as well. So if you have any kind of bug,
|
||||
any kind of, let's say, ruptured intrusion in your software and tries to do something
|
||||
that it shouldn't do, pledge will force it to abort in many, many, many cases.
|
||||
So as far as security goes, I think it's very beautiful features.
|
||||
And I hope that at some point, other people are going to port it to something else, maybe
|
||||
free BSD, maybe Linux, that would be a good idea. Even though I don't really see it happening,
|
||||
because Linux is a jungle, it's not really something where you can actually make something happen
|
||||
at the time, for the time being, I think. Interesting perspective. Who wants to go next?
|
||||
So I'm going for open BSD. From what I've been able to tell over the last few years,
|
||||
there's a fair number of small features in open BSD that have been clearly conceived,
|
||||
probably at least in part out of a desired desire to kind of minimise the amount of
|
||||
tech support requests that get posted to the MISK, the MISK modem list, and probably other lists
|
||||
on that site. So things like fee install are being a very step-by-step thing. I think open BSD
|
||||
is the only one that ships with window managers by default out of the BSDs. I think...
|
||||
No way. Possibly not, I might be wrong. Sorry, who is that?
|
||||
On BSD ships with a window manager too. By default. Yeah, CTWM.
|
||||
CTWM. Okay, okay. So we're doing our own window managers by default.
|
||||
We have a CWM and the old F, FVWM if I remember correctly.
|
||||
There's any web. So, I mean, yeah. So, but apart from that, the command line,
|
||||
utility is very simple. I mean, anyone who's already familiar with the typical kind of Unix-like
|
||||
commands, like the general fastest commands, will probably find open BSD very easy
|
||||
in general. So interesting. If I can add a snide remark, when you look at macOS usually,
|
||||
you are looking at the kernel and saying, blah blah, it's free BSD more or less. And when you look
|
||||
at user-run, then you try to start from the command line, you figure out that you've got something
|
||||
that is hopelessly updated. Like most commands haven't been updated for about 20 years,
|
||||
human pages are crap completely out of that and everything. The user interface, the graphical
|
||||
part is nice, but if you want to do any kind of actual administration, like not Windows and
|
||||
administration, but real stuff, in my opinion, macOS is crap. It's a very proprietary approach to
|
||||
something called a Unix-like operating system, yes, I agree. When you said, when you look at this,
|
||||
you're using that, when you look at that, you're using this. It reminded me of the Netflix story.
|
||||
When you're selecting a movie on Netflix, when you're browsing them and looking at the little
|
||||
bits and pieces that describe the movie, you're on AWS. Once you press play and you're streaming a
|
||||
movie, that's all free BSD. Yes, that's a matter of fact. I think the last remaining person without
|
||||
pointing him out is Nia. Nia, do you want to share anything?
|
||||
Yeah, I think the most standout points for NetBSD would be from my side would be
|
||||
it has excellent support for ARM as like a first class architecture. So if you have any small
|
||||
ARM devices, I would recommend trying NetBSD out on them because it's just cute and fun to use
|
||||
and it's nice to try different things. We've already discussed the big technical things like
|
||||
ZFS, but I'd also bring up things like say the different firewalls the BSDs have. I've tried
|
||||
several of them. I think NPF is quite nice. There are lots of different firewall options if you
|
||||
use the BSDs. I've already brought up all of the things like I think NetBSD has a very good balance
|
||||
of performance and security features, but also I'd just say it's a good option if you want to
|
||||
really experience like a classic Unix system. Okay, one of these different flavors and varieties
|
||||
have their pros and cons. Needless to say Linux actually over the years has brought quite a few
|
||||
concepts from the BSDs of the world. The Berkeley packet filter comes to mind. Needless to say,
|
||||
but that's another story from another episode. What I'm interested to hear is actually how
|
||||
does the community as in the panel present on this episode perceive the more and more forthcoming
|
||||
for one of our better expression integration with components. Let me shall out one example.
|
||||
If you take a look at the GNOME project, it's more and more than we're moving towards system D,
|
||||
which is one of these standards in it architectures running on Linux these days.
|
||||
So it might be very difficult in the future to part GNOME to something called BSD.
|
||||
Any takes any opinions on this? Are you saying that in order to have known we're going to have
|
||||
to have system D? Pretty much if I read the writings on the walk correctly. Speaking of writing,
|
||||
if anyone wants to become familiar with system D, they should read a book by Michael W. Lucas
|
||||
called Savage by system D. And that should give you a good introduction to system D and what
|
||||
you can be in for if you start using it. I would be more worried about things like GTK 3
|
||||
becoming dependent on system D because GTK is kind of in loads of, I mean it's in both the main
|
||||
Bra web browsers and loads of other kind of graphical apps. I wouldn't say, good
|
||||
GNOME is kind of nice to have on accessibility point of view, but it's not quite the end of the world.
|
||||
I don't see why software has to become reliant upon system D. I know system D is much bigger than
|
||||
rc.d for example, but I don't see why software should become reliant upon rc.d. rc.d is a way
|
||||
to start your damons and stop your damons and interact with them and get them the configuration
|
||||
settings they need. But you can also run those damons without rc.d. No, but that's not
|
||||
a problem at all actually. I've been talking with people who are porting GNOME and OpenBusD
|
||||
and it's indeed an issue. It has nothing to do with starting services. It has everything to do
|
||||
with stuff like looking at user configuration and shit like that. It's been traditionally very
|
||||
difficult on unique systems to do that kind of stuff portably from a graphical interface
|
||||
and it seems that apparently system D kind of makes it easier in some cases and you are starting
|
||||
to have some GNOME-based libraries which are depending on this stuff to fully work.
|
||||
And this is indeed an issue. There was some project to try to do some kind of system D
|
||||
stubble library to be able to still run all those GNOME support libraries if you are not running
|
||||
system D, but I don't know why this is going on. So good on current.
|
||||
Money we're having to patch in lots of stuff that they've removed like console kit support
|
||||
which is basically portable log-in-d really. It sounds like poor design decisions.
|
||||
Yeah, but we're talking GNOME and GTK. Have you looked at the code recently? If you're trying
|
||||
to find anything in the jlib code or game for instance, it's a complete nightmare. It's a
|
||||
direction versus a direction. Well, for starters, doing object oriented work in C, it's
|
||||
completely crazy. And the system D is a big blob of shit as well. So yeah, what do you expect?
|
||||
But more or less, it works for them at least. And you have this in my opinion, a huge
|
||||
camp of Linux people who just want to be Windows. Interesting. So you're moving to the same
|
||||
kind of interface. And instead of having a huge jungle of 5 deaths to be able to run on
|
||||
anything, which is to be the case 20 years ago, if you looked at the exam code 20 years ago, for
|
||||
instance. Now you have this huge blob system D which offers you some interface which say,
|
||||
you want to look at user, you want to look at configuration, you want to look at the
|
||||
10 time and everything. Come on, I've got the API for that. So we are going probably to need to do
|
||||
something about it at some point. On the other side, I think that when it becomes necessary,
|
||||
there's going to be some people who are going to say, okay, it's not possible to no longer have
|
||||
new non-version running on BSD. So yeah, we have to have some kind of stop library that works for us.
|
||||
And possibly we'll get something that's the best of both worlds, which means that we will still
|
||||
have somewhat secure systems. Because system day is joke. And I'm saying this seriously,
|
||||
what do you expect? You are going to learn the whole set of things that have access to the full
|
||||
system as a set of shared library under root, which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever to
|
||||
anybody who is doing any kind of secure coding. And on the other side, you want to have a
|
||||
simple interface that allows you to do modern stuff that Windows has been doing for 10 years
|
||||
with all the security rules that entails. So maybe we'll get some shims that actually provide us
|
||||
with the same interface, but with some amount of security. I don't know.
|
||||
Leonard Petring, if you're listening, don't go near the BSD people. Just might to send
|
||||
on the whole stuff, but jokes aside. Okay, just in case he doesn't know, he's very
|
||||
definitely hated by a lot of us. It's really, yeah, it's really a shit show. I still don't
|
||||
understand how the Linux people manage to get that cool going and all of the shit, come on.
|
||||
The stuff about logging, starting with numbers and you can become more than that's not his issue,
|
||||
come on. It makes absolutely no sense whatsoever. He's not a proper developer.
|
||||
I reckon this whole thing goes back to the fact that, okay, if we just go there for those people
|
||||
who don't know it, Leonard Petring is still working for Red Hat. So I think if I recall correctly,
|
||||
if Fedora was the first Linux that had system beyond board, there was quite a few.
|
||||
It turned to the time when we were talking about six, seven years back.
|
||||
Canonica had something called Upstart, the likes of Arch at the time and all the rest of the kind
|
||||
of other distributions were still relying on the system V in it. But over time, people perceived
|
||||
the advantages of system D, which has progressively becoming, I'm tempted to say, this was
|
||||
Army knife of Linux for doing all sorts of things as a main advantage with regards to packaging
|
||||
and kind of using functionality in terms of having a single API as you just pointed out a couple
|
||||
of minutes ago to avail of system services and to inquire about system states as the way forward.
|
||||
Hence, more and more distributions adopted it until such time when a few distributions
|
||||
said this is not our game enough of it and forked. And death one in the Debian world probably
|
||||
would be the best example for this. But of course, the problem is that more and more sub-systems
|
||||
I'm tempted to say for one of an expression here, like Nome and some other code basis
|
||||
rely on system D to function properly. And I'm just curious. With, I mean, in the Linux world,
|
||||
Nome has quite a steady hold with regards to desktop space. For example, Ubuntu's standard
|
||||
desktop is based on no, is based on no shell. I take it, it's quite different than the BSD world.
|
||||
Maybe somebody can, okay, handshets are more light on kind of the window management aspects of
|
||||
of BSD and if there's any staggered that the BSD people have, maybe it's that's worth discussing.
|
||||
You brought up Red Hat and I think that's a good, good thing to touch on because Red Hat
|
||||
are funding a lot of these very large open source projects now which allow to like coordinate
|
||||
changes and push things that well Red Hat employees want into the open source space.
|
||||
I think they used to probably used to be more counterbalance there. Like I think
|
||||
some micro systems used to have a lot of involvement but of course they're dead now and
|
||||
they would have of course if things have to run on Solaris, they have to be portable.
|
||||
In net BSD's case and in open BSD's case we both ship Xorg as part of the system and
|
||||
there's the question of what we're going to do in the future if say I think a big worry for me
|
||||
personally is if GTK goes ahead and says okay we've decided that X11 is deprecated and we're going
|
||||
to remove support for X11 in GTK and none of your apps work anymore. That's going to be a huge
|
||||
transition that we're going to have extreme difficulty with because well the protocol is
|
||||
a designed around Linux and it has quite a lot of assumptions about Linux's input stack,
|
||||
baked it, bright into it. By the way does well and run on BSD?
|
||||
Or on ABSD?
|
||||
Yes but with lots of like shims and compatibility layers or lots of patching.
|
||||
Interesting, okay. Because this is becoming more and more of the standard window manager on Linux systems.
|
||||
So it's implemented by so-called wayling compositors.
|
||||
Sorry, yes it's protocol rather. Sorry, not a window system. Sorry, yes I do apologize.
|
||||
I probably should be more specific. It's a window protocol, similar to X11 but without the,
|
||||
for example, network transparency that X11 brings to the table.
|
||||
Why I don't think that most people have network transparency disabled on X1s with this in
|
||||
nearly case. And hence the perceived need by the community for something called wayland because
|
||||
as you rightly pointed out most people run X11 applications on their desktop so there's no need
|
||||
for the performance impact or tiny performance impact. Let's put it this way that X11 has by using
|
||||
a full blown TCP IP stack and in terms of network transparency. So and that's exactly where
|
||||
kind of wayland comes into play. It's not network transparent. You can only run it locally
|
||||
and it has quite a few distance around which is in comparison to X11. But more and more
|
||||
districts are adopting this as their main windowing protocol is put this way plus the compositing
|
||||
managers surrounding wayland. The wayland of the world and other stuff. Sorry, go ahead.
|
||||
I'm not quite sure what problems it actually solves. There are sometimes talking about security but
|
||||
basically most security issues like with graphics card and the DRI graphics driver in a case.
|
||||
You've got this big blob of an interesting code that runs on your GPU and that has access to
|
||||
the full memory of your machine in many cases. It bypasses the enemy and everything.
|
||||
And yeah, sure, well, on this you post that each window can talk to another window unless
|
||||
this is so but frankly there are security issues. They lie much deeper on that so I'm not quite sure.
|
||||
And the other opinions on this topic before we move on.
|
||||
I've worked with wayland quite closely in the process of porting it to netBSD and I kind of
|
||||
have to agree. It's too loosely defined. There are lots of protocol incompatibility issues still
|
||||
and it's just not as powerful. It's like kind of just a downgrade in terms of its feature set.
|
||||
And X-11 is the standard for Unix and I very much hope it doesn't go away.
|
||||
Interesting perspective. Maybe the Lillian's people should take notes.
|
||||
One feature in Gennome that I'm aware of that only exists on Weyland at the moment. I think it was
|
||||
like fractional scaling where not only having the kind of the standard, I don't know if it's
|
||||
even the standard, but whenever you want to call it 960PI on x.org server you only have that
|
||||
or two times, three times, four times. But of course many laptops are probably better suited
|
||||
for like 1.5 times or something like that. And for whatever reason Gennome is able to
|
||||
scale to that sort of figure on Weyland. But I don't know why it's different like on a technical side
|
||||
that makes that possible, but I found that the only thing that I'm aware of that's different.
|
||||
For me, you say it sounds more like the people who are writing the drivers for X-11 haven't
|
||||
done the work and what's it. I see absolutely no reason why you shouldn't be able to composite
|
||||
X-11 windows to whatever ratio you want on the graphics card. You have enough memory for it.
|
||||
It's fast enough. Your GPU is going to do all of the work. They already do that for video all the time
|
||||
this day. So just implement it and it should work. I mean,
|
||||
I'll take it. I'll be accepted. Okay, that has been more than interesting. Finally,
|
||||
question from us because we're rapidly approaching the three hour mark. No, I'm joking,
|
||||
but I reckon where do you see this whole BSD thing going in terms of open BSD, free BSD,
|
||||
and FBSD. And we haven't even touched on the, for example, on the security advantage,
|
||||
so something of something called open BSD, but what we're going to leave it at that.
|
||||
So find a question to the road ahead, especially in the light of the mounting adoption that's
|
||||
put it this way over the last five to 10 years of Linux on an enterprise basis, especially if you
|
||||
take a look at something called other people's computers, also commonly known as the cloud.
|
||||
BSD is dying, netcraft confirms it. Sweet and short, okay. Maybe the additional opinions or
|
||||
maybe elaborations of that remark. I think people have been saying that BSD is dying for
|
||||
the past 30 years. It's not going anywhere anytime soon. We'll be around long into the future
|
||||
and we'll keep attracting new users and lots of interest into the future because
|
||||
people like different things. People don't like monocultures.
|
||||
Like I'd be a mainframe smaller. Now I'm joking, but you know what I mean. Sorry, go ahead.
|
||||
Mark. Yeah, but there's more or less that specific point, which is that I don't think that
|
||||
lots of people are going to use open BSD directly in the future. We're more or less an
|
||||
experimental OS. Everything works for me and I'm fine with it, but I know that we have some
|
||||
limitations. Like our symmetric multiprocessing is not quite up to pariette and sometimes we support
|
||||
hardware better than other systems at some point. We were better on Wi-Fi and Linux. Yes,
|
||||
are you sure? Ten years ago, that was more or less the case. We still do interesting developments
|
||||
and build pieces of software that you end up using, whatever you are. Like the most famous
|
||||
instance, of course, is open SSH, but you have some other pieces of open BSD on your system.
|
||||
It took a lot of time, but a sterile copy is everywhere, this is. Finally, when finally,
|
||||
a wishtraper left the Linux kernel and the Glimc, it finally invaded Linux as well.
|
||||
And some over-experiments, which are used elsewhere. On a more systematic basis between BSDs,
|
||||
even for we are different systems, we do talk to each other and we spy on whatever is going on.
|
||||
Yeah, we look at commits and it's all on the BSD license. So you just have to put your
|
||||
proper attribution and you can steal whatever you want and it's just okay. It's how it's supposed
|
||||
to be to be done. So we are still moving forward and I think that from time to time,
|
||||
Linux and other systems do steal from us. I seem to remember that at some point in the past,
|
||||
Windows, or network stack, for instance.
|
||||
And Mark, I think the word that you're looking for is collaboration, not spying.
|
||||
But that's just my personal opinion.
|
||||
Whatever, it's more or less the same. Sometimes you collaborate with, actually,
|
||||
talking to each other, you just look at the commits and say, hey, that's a good idea. I could
|
||||
probably reuse that. And when you're nice enough, you send an email to say, thank you. It was a
|
||||
really, really nice piece of code and we're going to make good users.
|
||||
I mean, you do have exchanges between the Linux world and the OpenBusy world and OpenSSH,
|
||||
probably the best example for this. OpenSSH for that matter. Any other takes on this subject?
|
||||
Kurt Sherring, as mentioned, is really the answer here. And I think in the Linux community,
|
||||
there's this real fear of forking and this kind of paranoia that as soon as a piece of software
|
||||
is forked, then the effort is going to be split and everyone's going to suffer as a result.
|
||||
But I think we kind of, with the amount that the BSD is sharing and getting from each other,
|
||||
I think that's not really true. Not everyone wants to eat the same flavor of chocolate.
|
||||
The problem with Linux is somewhat different in my opinion. I think that it has more to do with
|
||||
binary compatibility and commercial issues. Like some parts of Linux are actually completely
|
||||
still like this. As far as I know, it's impossible to add a new system code to Linux because it
|
||||
would break everything in binary ways. And you have enough compromises we've tested interest in
|
||||
keeping binaries running that some parts of Linux are getting really hard to change.
|
||||
And we are, we don't have this kind of problem most of the time.
|
||||
Well, you don't have a benevolent dictator for Liar, right? Sorry, there are, of course,
|
||||
currently there's not the Linux right, but at the end of the day, Linux is still calling the
|
||||
shots. This is not the case in the BSD ecosystem, is it? Because you, you all pretty much do your
|
||||
own thing. Oh, we have a dictator in Open BSD. Sorry. We have a dictator in Open BSD.
|
||||
You do, okay. Yeah, you're at, come on. You disagree with me. You're usually out of the project.
|
||||
If you disagree, you're not enough. I think free BSD has the reputation of being
|
||||
the longest continuously in charge. It's had the most number of teams,
|
||||
trying to think of the proper word, governance, the government, longest continuously
|
||||
government, government project, I think. It's long had a core team that was more or less in charge
|
||||
of everything. It has a very good transition, and that just keeps rolling over.
|
||||
Just some scarcity. The kernel code base between the different BSDs is the same.
|
||||
Nope. So you all have your own kernels? Okay. Oh, yes. Yes. We have some shared code,
|
||||
like you are going to find some drivers, which are mostly the same from when the BSD to the next.
|
||||
Okay. And we have the same ancestors, like, for instance, our all-file system, UFS and FFS.
|
||||
It's mostly the same code. Some of us in Open BSD are still scratching our hair, trying to figure out
|
||||
what Marshall made a sick did a long time ago. Okay. But yeah, we diverge a great deal.
|
||||
If you look at any BSD code, you will more or less recognize the same things, but there are common parts,
|
||||
there are differences, different kernels, different user-land, common ancestor.
|
||||
Just out of scarcity, because Linux has one trade, and this is the reason why
|
||||
Richard Armstrong still likes to call it new slash Linux, because the user-land, in terms of
|
||||
at least the command line, is heavily dependent on GNU software. If memory says correct,
|
||||
you are still using GCC as a standard compiler on BSD, but what about the rest? You're not.
|
||||
No, okay. No, no. We've been with WinonClin for about five years, I think.
|
||||
Right. Okay. I know that Apple made that move quite quite some time ago, but I wasn't to
|
||||
share about the rest of the BSD ecosystem. Okay. That's interesting. Okay. Because of why? Because of
|
||||
technical superiority, or why? Why did you make that move? Because of the license. Because the
|
||||
they tried to put the first one when they when we moved to GPL V3 and Open BSD got fact.
|
||||
We had to stick with GCC 0.2.1 for a very long time, because it was the last
|
||||
compiler, PCC compiler with GPL V2 license. And finally, we were able to move to C-Lung on
|
||||
most architectures. We see GCC as a backup compiler. Let's say if you want to debug stuff,
|
||||
and it works slightly differently, so that you can find some differences, but at least on
|
||||
Intel processors, everything is compiled with C-Lung Vista. And linked with LLVM linker as well.
|
||||
Interesting. And we have completely away from GCC. Wow. And what about the rest of the
|
||||
user lands, like standard utilities, like LS move or whatever? Well, there's a BSD style, of course.
|
||||
But what about you? At least on Open BSD, most everything is BSD license,
|
||||
while very spare in our best system. But we are not using it under the GPL license,
|
||||
since it's dual license. And you've got the artistic license, which is very close to
|
||||
to the BSD license. I think that from the start, when the goals of Open BSD was to have everything
|
||||
under an acceptable license. And if not possible, we would resort to GPL V2. And at some point,
|
||||
the wall running system was BSD with a compiler being GPL and stuff like that. And I think that
|
||||
these days we have managed to have more or less the best running system is more or less entirely BSD.
|
||||
I think. And what about the other BSD, same, same, same, same, same user land,
|
||||
like most like all co-paces, but essentially BSD license? Yes, essentially,
|
||||
essentially everything, but a few things. We don't have as much of a strict licensing policy
|
||||
as Open BSD. And we use GCC because some processor architectures we support
|
||||
are only supported by GCC. Okay. And but apart from the toolchain, yes,
|
||||
basically everything is the SD MIT under similar licenses. I just checked
|
||||
free BSC 13 and a free BSC 12.2 host here. And they both are running C-lang version 10 and C-lang
|
||||
I missed it. C-lang 11, 11.01 respectively.
|
||||
Yeah, sorry. No, that's a very interesting perspective because, as I said,
|
||||
Linux is pretty much dominated by the GNU review. By the GNU user land, and of course,
|
||||
the GNU co-paces are GPL licensed as is the Linux kernel, of course.
|
||||
It also means that when it comes time to make a kernel decision, you're not worried about
|
||||
breaking user land because it's your user land. You don't have to worry about all the different
|
||||
repo, repo's distros breaking because you can fix it right here and now and move on with life.
|
||||
I mean, there are no such things as open BSD distributions, right? There's not
|
||||
BSD, there's a free BSD, and there's not BSD, and that's about it.
|
||||
A little time to time. From time to time, you have people who are trying to make some
|
||||
derivative distributions. I don't know if PCBSD still exists.
|
||||
You have some, but here you might have some derivative distributions, but more or less,
|
||||
one official distribution, but it's something called HelloSystem, which I think is a free BSD base.
|
||||
And you said PCBSD, I think that's renamed. That's from my existence, isn't it? Didn't they
|
||||
rename themselves? True OS? I'm not sure. It also reminded me of Frisbee, F-R-E-S-B-I-E. I think
|
||||
max ran that and it allowed you to create your own bootable ISO of FreeBSD with other things you
|
||||
wanted in it. Interesting. Okay. The nomenclature of distributions and
|
||||
for GNU Linux naming dispute, both of them seem to be a symptom of the debate as to whether
|
||||
Linux itself should actually be called an operating system itself, because I mean,
|
||||
one could easily make the argument that, you know, Debian is an operating system for doors and
|
||||
operating system. Ubuntu is an operating system rather than distributions of the name that
|
||||
just seems to have arisen, because Linux is referred to as an operating, well, at least a family
|
||||
of operating systems, and just needed to be another term to to differentiate everything that comes
|
||||
that's, you know, based on it. I mean, that's a very interesting perspective, because
|
||||
if you take a close look at the history of Linux, I mean, it started out as a terminal emulator,
|
||||
and then Linux took a close look at many things and didn't like it, so the rest is on use net
|
||||
and the operating system was on the rest of it. Kitty, it gets the links maybe in the show notes
|
||||
depending on whether I'm up to it or not, but at some stage, basically, big enterprise moved in,
|
||||
the redheads and the other people and the canonicals of the world. And not before long, you had
|
||||
a set of standards like the file system hierarchy, the Linux database, no rest of it, that almost
|
||||
all distributions adhere to. And of course, you had big money in the shape of redhead and
|
||||
canonical moving into that market. Mark Shutterworth took a close look at Debian, liked it, and that's
|
||||
essentially the base for Ubuntu these days. Now, redheads still has this playground called
|
||||
Fedora. I won't go into the center as debacle, because that in-laws is not a center as show,
|
||||
but yes, never mind the Linux foundation. If you take a look at the sponsoring page,
|
||||
who's a member and what money flows into that organization, this is clearly big business moving
|
||||
in. And I reckon this is, at least from commercial perspective, the main difference between
|
||||
between the BSEs of the world and Linux, because Linux these days is all about enterprise
|
||||
deployments, the cloud, containers, all the rest of it, all runs Linux.
|
||||
I was to say, Android apparently isn't in the next distribution, or at least it doesn't seem to be
|
||||
like, I don't know, commonly known as one, anyway. It seems to be able to just stand on its own,
|
||||
even though, I mean, okay, it's kind of a rolling from what I'm aware of, it's kind of a rolling fork
|
||||
of its version of Linux is kind of a, it's not, it's more different than most other
|
||||
implementation of the Linux anyway. So apparently it's not generally referred to as a Linux
|
||||
distro, but then where, where is everyone's supposed to draw the line? Indeed Patrick, I was just
|
||||
going to touch upon this, because if you take a close look at the system architecture or something
|
||||
called Android, you still have a full, full-blown Linux kernel underneath it, but the rest of the
|
||||
user land, and that's exactly your main differentiator here, it's quite different. You have a different
|
||||
in the system, you have something called Zygo that is actually in charge of spinning up processes,
|
||||
I'm simplifying things, of course, and then you have this main driver called JVM.
|
||||
Sorry, it's not called JVM, it's hard, or it's nostalgic, or whatever you want to call it these days,
|
||||
it depends on your Android version, but at the end of the day, the commonalities is something
|
||||
called the AOSP, the Android open source project, because that's exactly the code base
|
||||
that Google couldn't make proprietary or Android for that matter, because it's all GPL licensed,
|
||||
and if you actually have a phone in front of you, if you managed, if you managed to connect this
|
||||
phone to a computer, if you turn on, with a USB cable, for example, if you turn on a USB debugging
|
||||
on this phone, you still have a command line in front of you once you invoke ADB shell,
|
||||
and of ADB, of course, standing for the Android debugging bridge, so at the very core, it's still
|
||||
a Linux system, GPL, mostly GPL licensed, and similar to, or I'm always trying to say similar to
|
||||
the OSX architecture, the rest is proprietary crap, namely the stuff, basically, that Google put
|
||||
on top in terms of the user interface, the virtual machine that executes Java by coding all the rest of it.
|
||||
Is it still going to be Linux in the future? It seems like Google is getting sick of Linux,
|
||||
and then you think moving towards their own thing, future. Yes, future is a different story. Google
|
||||
has copped on to the fact that AOSPS has one significant disadvantage, it's licensed because it's
|
||||
Linux at the end of the day, it's licensed under GPL, but as I said, I think it's licensed under BSD
|
||||
or IMAD license, which is much more permissive, so the smartphone manufacturers who basically take
|
||||
the OSP and the Google ecosystem run on top of it and do something themselves with it,
|
||||
like, for example, Samsung has their own user interface, I don't even call it what it's called,
|
||||
but if you take a close look at quite a few smartphone manufacturers, they all do their own thing,
|
||||
and I reckon with the dominance of Google in the end of the market,
|
||||
Tyson, thank you very much, with the dominance of a company called Google in the smartphone market,
|
||||
this is essentially the driver that made them basically do their own thing in terms of
|
||||
coming up with a much more permissive license, operating system base going forward,
|
||||
then basically the smartphone manufacturers could use not to be bound by the GPL under which
|
||||
the majority of the AOSB called basis license. It's just a matter of tamaracking before you see
|
||||
that switch happening from the AOSB, which, as I said, is mostly a little space to do something
|
||||
called FUSHIA. I would like to see Android phones get security updates faster or at all,
|
||||
there doesn't seem to be a long life for a given Android phone. It's a bit to see a market,
|
||||
I mean, you're looking at one, maybe here, maybe two years of the shelf life of a smartphone,
|
||||
because after that is being replaced by something else, so why bother? No, no, no, I disagree.
|
||||
I still have iPhone 5s and iPhone 7s that are perfectly functional, and they still receive
|
||||
updates. Yes, but that's not Google. Oh, that's not Samsung, but that's not most of all of
|
||||
something. This is why I specifically mentioned Android. Did you hear about Pegasus?
|
||||
I didn't hear you said. Pegasus? Pegasus, yes, I did. Yeah, especially iOS.
|
||||
Can you, maybe for the two people in the audience who do not know what Pegasus is, maybe you can
|
||||
elaborate, please Mark. Oh, it's a big news with this. We just found out that some Israeli people
|
||||
have been using Pegasus to spy on journalists in France in other places, among other things.
|
||||
And as far as I remember, they have been using zero days on iOS phones.
|
||||
I think both Android and iOS systems are affected.
|
||||
Yeah, but both are affected more or less because this is still stuff we've closed for software.
|
||||
I don't mean that open source is perfectly safe, but if you can't even look at the software,
|
||||
you have absolutely no reason to think that it's going to be secure, especially when you're
|
||||
looking at a state spying on each other. I mean, that's a wonderful debate, but maybe some
|
||||
just point at the show. I don't see how you can trust a phone that's manufactured by the
|
||||
United States or Korea to be perfectly safe or China forward matter.
|
||||
Buy your own kit and do your own OS running on top of that kit. Just make sure that you have
|
||||
the blobs in place for the SSE. This is not something you can do specifically because you
|
||||
have blobs. How much longer is it going to be possible to install your OS and how long will it take
|
||||
for them to decide it's too unsafe to allow users that much freedom? Good question.
|
||||
This is precisely why we should be continuing to be doing what we do and fight for it,
|
||||
so that this doesn't ever happen, but you can still tinker and do your own OS and do your own
|
||||
hardware and do your business. That's a reckon precisely the difference between something
|
||||
called the BSD software world as in these days, not back in the olden days, and something called
|
||||
Linux, apart maybe from a few corners in the Linux empire that still think along the same lines,
|
||||
how about that? To answer the question, Pegasus is a spyware that was created by an Israeli cyber
|
||||
arms firm called NSO Group and then covertly installed on mobile phones and other devices.
|
||||
Both iOS and the Wikipedia page. Both iOS ads, what is Android's first to do?
|
||||
And it was first discovered, let me see here, I had this discovered in August 2018.
|
||||
Okay guys, unfortunately we have to wrap this up because we have been recording now for almost
|
||||
one and a half hours, no worries. Any final statements before we close off the show?
|
||||
I have one, but I'll go last.
|
||||
Any prior takers?
|
||||
I would just like to say run BSD stop fascism.
|
||||
Fair enough, fair enough, fair enough. Any other things before the last statement?
|
||||
I think I've been doing enough trolling for tonight, so just try to be as video and see if you like it.
|
||||
I really haven't heard any trolling today. None. None whatsoever. Run BSD stop fascism.
|
||||
Yes, it's all free opinions and all the rest of it.
|
||||
Yes. Now for the very final remark.
|
||||
Yeah, I want to correct something in my opening statement.
|
||||
I started with open source software in 1998, 1995. If you want to have a better overview of the
|
||||
history of BSD, I suggest you look for a YouTube video called a narrative history of BSD by Dr.
|
||||
Kirk McEusek. That will get you well into the door. If you want to hear more about a BSD
|
||||
perspective on System D, look for a YouTube video by Beno Rice, sorry Beno Rice, called the
|
||||
Tragedy of System D. And if you want to look at how much BSD is evolving, go back 10 years,
|
||||
look at the size of the dev teams, go now, look at the size of the dev teams. Dev teams don't increase
|
||||
without interest. People join dev teams because they're interested in the product and they want to
|
||||
work on the product. And that's how you keep a project self-sustaining is by having a growing
|
||||
user community and development community. Strong words are softly spoken, I'm tempted to add.
|
||||
I'd just like to actually be serious for a moment. And I referenced a talk earlier called
|
||||
the Rise and Fall of Copy Left by Robert Lagley. And if the audiences particularly interested in
|
||||
history of open source and of copyrights and licenses, I'd recommend listening to it.
|
||||
Details of all of these projects and pointers, of course, will be in the show notes.
|
||||
People, first of all, a big thank you to the panel that has been more than interesting,
|
||||
especially given the fact that this is probably an outsider's take on the whole Linux ecosystem
|
||||
that has been more than refreshing. And I would like to thank each and every one of you
|
||||
for participating. And with that, I would like to close the show. Thank you very much for being on
|
||||
the panel, being part of something called Linux Enloss. And maybe we'll get another show
|
||||
on the BSD ecosystem, we'll have another show. And thank you for participating.
|
||||
This is the Linux Enloss. You come for the knowledge. But stay for the madness.
|
||||
Thank you for listening. This podcast is licensed under the latest version of the creative
|
||||
commons license. Tap Attribution Share Like. Credits for the entry music go to bluesy roosters
|
||||
for the song Salut Margot to Twin Flames for their piece called The Flow used for the second
|
||||
intros. And finally to the lesser ground for the songs we just is used by the dark side.
|
||||
You find these and other ditties licensed under creative commons at Tremendo. The website
|
||||
dedicated to liberate the music industry from choking corporate legislation and other crap
|
||||
concepts.
|
||||
What is your name? Sorry, my name is Chris. Because your app is Martian McKeezyk.
|
||||
Yes, that was a joke. Okay. Because when I first saw that, I said, okay, Kirk is here. What's
|
||||
going on? Yeah, but his name could have been Martian McKeezyk.
|
||||
So BSD, although I'm not using it on regular basis, has been with me for the last 40 years
|
||||
easily. I use some unique somewhere in university and I can't really remember much about it.
|
||||
Yeah, my first Tunics machine was in 1987 and I think the most born free that was
|
||||
born in 1988 or something like that. Interesting. That was actually in 1987, that was the first
|
||||
time when I compiled an EMAX version on something called Solaris or Sunways, it was then called.
|
||||
Sunways. And that was my still a few years in the future. Yeah, Sunways, sorry. And that was
|
||||
actually my introduction to something called free and open source software back in 1987.
|
||||
I've been using open source software ever since. The concept is great for GPL is not so great.
|
||||
You see Richard, I'm storming. May you think differently about this?
|
||||
I'm not really concerned about what that gentleman thinks.
|
||||
Gentleman?
|
||||
Gentleman?
|
||||
Gentleman might be a bit of a stretch.
|
||||
Do I know how to troll or what?
|
||||
Keep trolling, Mark. Don't stop.
|
||||
No problem.
|
||||
You've been listening to Hecker Public Radio at HeckerPublicRadio.org.
|
||||
We are a community podcast network that releases shows every weekday, Monday through Friday.
|
||||
Today's show, like all our shows, was contributed by an HBR listener like yourself.
|
||||
If you ever thought of recording a podcast, then click on our contribute link to find out
|
||||
how easy it really is. Hecker Public Radio was founded by the digital
|
||||
dog pound and the infonomicant computer club and is part of the binary revolution at binwreff.com.
|
||||
If you have comments on today's show, please email the host directly, leave a comment on the website
|
||||
or record a follow-up episode yourself. Unless otherwise stated, today's show is released on
|
||||
creative comments, attribution, share a like, 3.0 license.
|
||||
Reference in New Issue
Block a user