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FreeBSD hackers Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy surprised an audience of Bay Area FreeBSD Users in August 2015 by laying out their version for a new architecture, based vaguely on BSD but with a microkernel and an event-driven framework consisting of something like libdispatch and launchd. Those are big changes if you are familiar with what FreeBSD has looked like for all of its life.
The good news is, this doesn't mean the destruction of the FreeBSD we all know and love. In fact, Hubbard, who is also the CTO of ixSystems (developers of FreeNAS and PCBSD, both products derived from FreeBSD) aren't aiming to impact FreeBSD but rather change the fundamental architecture of ixSystems' own products.
The slide deck walks you through the proposed, new architecture. Better still, watch the talk yourself.
As a FreeBSD fan, I'm glad they're treating this as a separate product and not hacking up the FreeBSD source tree; that gives us time to see how this shakes out.
Original Submission
(Score: 4, Informative) by RedBear on Friday August 28 2015, @09:53AM
Watching the presentation now. Sounds like an interesting project. Basically a sort of merging of things they like from OS X (like launchd for what they describe as a more dynamically responsive way of managing startup/shutdown/scheduling of things that is much more relevant in the mobile device space than the traditional BSD rc script system). There is extensive discussion of the fact the although the implementation of launchd is complex, it has been working well for years now and for various reasons was found to be absolutely necessary, especially for portables/mobile devices.
I never heard anyone say "microkernel" in the entire presentation. Maybe I missed it. It's a regular FreeBSD-current kernel with Mach IPC (apparently similar to what is still being used in OS X). There is discussion of benefits of Mach IPC vs Unix sockets, including the ability to attach an audit trail to inter-process messages that lets you verify the identity of the process you're communicating with and who is running it. According to one of the presenters (Kip) this may make it easier to bring certain things out of the kernel and still maintain security. If I was understanding things correctly.
Also noted is work from HardenedBSD will be merged in as well. I like the sound of that.
GitHub: https://github.com/NextBSD/NextBSD [github.com]
Installable ISO: http://www.optimcloud.com/disc1.iso [optimcloud.com]
This sounds like something that can only make things better and make BSD even more relevant as a general desktop OS and even something that might make the jump more easily to running on phones & tablets. I look forward to seeing benefits from this project make their way into PC-BSD and/or FreeNAS/TrueNAS.
Jordan Hubbard has been dealing with FreeBSD since before it was FreeBSD, spent 12 years with Apple advancing OS X, and is now with iXSystems developing what is already one of the best storage-appliance operating systems there is (FreeNAS/TrueNAS) and what is becoming a popular derivative of FreeBSD for general desktop use (PC-BSD). If he thinks there is good reason to spend time doing this, I think I'll give him the benefit of the doubt and see what comes of it.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ