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A comment on NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X. Parent comment

Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by Sanddancer on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @06:15PM (#10126353)
This has a feeling very much of a research project to see how well an init framework like launchd would work in FreeBSD. There's been talk amongst a lot of developers that the current init needs to be replaced by /something/, but that something is still up in the air.
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by vezzy-fnord on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @06:24PM (#10126393)
It's not just launchd, it's the entire low-level OS X userspace.

Nor is it research. It very much appears to be commercial, since it's undertaken by iXsystems. They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit. End goal appears to be get upstream FreeBSD in it, too.

There's nothing of research value here. It's Mach. It's practically an anachronism to do such a thing deliberately.

I actually have quite a lot to say on this topic, so I think I'll write an in-depth blog post on it.

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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by cmurf on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @07:17PM (#10126575)
Not necessarily anachronstic, considering the iXsysems CTO is Jordan Hubbard, who was previously at Apple as director of UNIX technology. Out with the old in with the less old?
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by vezzy-fnord on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @07:30PM (#10126618)
Adopting Mach fresh in 2015 is certainly anachronistic.
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by sjwright on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @08:02PM (#10126719)
It would be, except they're not adopting Mach.
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by gpvos on Thursday August 27, 2015 @03:19AM (#10128015)
How are you interpreting slides 5-7 then?
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by photosinensis on Thursday August 27, 2015 @12:26PM (#10130370)
They're providing enough of a Mach-style interface that would allow them to use launchd. Basically, they're creating a compatibility layer in the kernel that allows it to pretend to be Mach.
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by mitchty on Thursday August 27, 2015 @08:52PM (#10133079)
Yep, it isn't that different than the linux sys call interface for running linux binaries.
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by byuu on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @11:31PM (#10127376)
> They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit.

And this is why I won't use any of the "FreeBSD made easy!" distros: FreeNAS, PC-BSD, pfSense, etc. Better to learn how to configure the official release to your intended use case.

> CTO is Jordan Hubbard

I swear, every last OS always has to have one of those "let's replace all this stuff that's worked for 40 years and go with all this brand-new, much more complicated stuff because old = bad, new = good!" types.

People just don't like the idea of incremental improvements, nor find beauty in simplicity anymore.

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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by gonzo on Thursday August 27, 2015 @01:38AM (#10127716)
> And this is why I won't use any of the "FreeBSD made easy!" distros: FreeNAS, PC-BSD, pfSense, etc.

one of the main people behind pfSense here...

You're not the target audience.

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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by pjmlp on Thursday August 27, 2015 @03:34AM (#10128060)
I guess that is why many use their modern GNU/Linux, *BSD boxes as if they had a UNIX SYSTEM V with a VT 100 in the basement.
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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by gh02t on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @08:53PM (#10126914)
> They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit

Are they planning to rebase FreeNAS on this? Why not just stay on a normal FreeBSD base? Or will there not be much noticeable difference feature wise from the user's perspective?

I can appreciate the idea of integrating launchd as a new init system and I know people have been working on that for a while, but this seems like it's much more than just that to me. Or am I misunderstanding?

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Re:NeXTBSD aka FreeBSD X by vezzy-fnord on Wednesday August 26, 2015 @09:39PM (#10127044)
It's more than that, yes. It's the entire low-level OS X system libraries like libSystem, libasl, libdispatch, libnotify and so forth.

I'm not sure if they're going to wholly rebase FreeNAS on top of NextBSD, but the launchd integration has been there in feature branches for a while now.

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