BSD & Darwin Archive

The MirOS BSD project has released MirOS BSD xi. "The MirOS Project proudly presents release 10 of MirOS BSD: MirOS xi. A mini-ISO for the installation can be downloaded from mirbsd.org. This image can be burned to a CD and used for installing over the network. The full CD image can be downloaded via BitTorrent. MirOS BSD is a secure operating system, originally based on OpenBSD, for i386 and sparc machines. Read more about it at the 'About MirOS' page.

DragonFlyBSD 1.12 has been released. "This release is primarily a maintainance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel. The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year. Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release."

"DesktopBSD 1.6RC3 for AMD64 is now available for download via BitTorrent and from our mirror sites. It includes several improvements made since the release of 1.6RC3 for i386, including: better performance by disabling SMP on single core/processor computers, fixed installation on disks with special partition names, inclusion of the FreeBSD ports collection on the DVD, and more."

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.

"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."

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.

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 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."

"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."

"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."

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 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."

"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 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.