MirOS BSD
Encyclopedia
MirOS BSD is a free and open source
operating system
, which started as a fork of OpenBSD
3.1 in August 2002. It is intended to maintain the security of OpenBSD - from which it frequently synchronises code updates - with better support for European localisation. Since then it has also incorporated code from other free BSD descendants, including NetBSD
, MicroBSD
and FreeBSD
. Code from MirOS BSD has also been incorporated into ekkoBSD
, and when ekkoBSD ceased to exist, artwork, code and developers ended up here for a while. One of the projects goals is to be able to port the MirOS userland to run on the Linux
kernel, hence the deprecation of MirBSD in favor of MirOS.
and Thorsten Glaser. Despite the forking, MirOS BSD is synchronised with the ongoing development of OpenBSD, thus inheriting most of its good security history, as well as NetBSD and other BSD flavours.
One goal to provide a faster integration cycle for new features and software than OpenBSD. According to the developers, "controversial decisions are often made differently from OpenBSD; for instance, there won't be any support for SMP in MirOS". There will also be a more tolerant software inclusion policy, and "the end result is, hopefully, a more refined BSD experience".
The most important differences to OpenBSD are:
), (more or less successful) attempts to submit patches to upstream software authors, and synergy effects with FreeWRT, there is an active cooperation with Grml both in inclusion and technical areas. Other projects, such as Debian
are also fed with MirSoftware.
, but continues to maintain the previous C
-based tools. New features are in-place package upgrades and installing MirPorts instance as a non-root user. Also, in difference to OpenBSD ports, MirPorts are not tied to specific OS versions and even on stable releases using the newest version is recommended. MirLibtool is a modified version of GNU libtool 1.5 installed by MirPorts to build shared libraries in a portable way.
Multiple platforms are supported "out of the box
":
Following the MirOS BSD policy of faster software availability to the user, many ports removed for political reasons in OpenBSD (e.g. all the DJB software or the Flash Plugin) have been kept in MirPorts and can continue to be used. MirPorts also wants to be a place for unofficial or rejected OpenBSD ports.
Free and open source software
Free and open-source software or free/libre/open-source software is software that is liberally licensed to grant users the right to use, study, change, and improve its design through the availability of its source code...
operating system
Operating system
An operating system is a set of programs that manage computer hardware resources and provide common services for application software. The operating system is the most important type of system software in a computer system...
, which started as a fork of OpenBSD
OpenBSD
OpenBSD is a Unix-like computer operating system descended from Berkeley Software Distribution , a Unix derivative developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It was forked from NetBSD by project leader Theo de Raadt in late 1995...
3.1 in August 2002. It is intended to maintain the security of OpenBSD - from which it frequently synchronises code updates - with better support for European localisation. Since then it has also incorporated code from other free BSD descendants, including NetBSD
NetBSD
NetBSD is a freely available open source version of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix operating system. It was the second open source BSD descendant to be formally released, after 386BSD, and continues to be actively developed. The NetBSD project is primarily focused on high quality design,...
, MicroBSD
MicroBSD
MicroBSD was a fork of the UNIX-like BSD operating system descendant OpenBSD 3.0, begun in July 2002. The project's objective was to produce a free and fully secure, complete system, but with a small footprint. The first phase of its development stopped in 2002...
and FreeBSD
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via BSD UNIX. Although for legal reasons FreeBSD cannot be called “UNIX”, as the direct descendant of BSD UNIX , FreeBSD’s internals and system APIs are UNIX-compliant...
. Code from MirOS BSD has also been incorporated into ekkoBSD
EkkoBSD
ekkoBSD was a Unix-like operating system based on OpenBSD 3.3, also incorporating code from other BSD-like operating systems. Its focus was on security and easy administration...
, and when ekkoBSD ceased to exist, artwork, code and developers ended up here for a while. One of the projects goals is to be able to port the MirOS userland to run on the Linux
Linux
Linux is a Unix-like computer operating system assembled under the model of free and open source software development and distribution. The defining component of any Linux system is the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released October 5, 1991 by Linus Torvalds...
kernel, hence the deprecation of MirBSD in favor of MirOS.
History
MirOS BSD originated as OpenBSD-current-mirabilos, an OpenBSD patchkit, but soon grew on its own after some differences in opinion between the OpenBSD project leader Theo de RaadtTheo de Raadt
Theo de Raadt , born May 19, 1968 in Pretoria, South Africa, is a software engineer who lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He is the founder and leader of the OpenBSD and OpenSSH projects, and was a founding member of the NetBSD project.- Childhood :...
and Thorsten Glaser. Despite the forking, MirOS BSD is synchronised with the ongoing development of OpenBSD, thus inheriting most of its good security history, as well as NetBSD and other BSD flavours.
One goal to provide a faster integration cycle for new features and software than OpenBSD. According to the developers, "controversial decisions are often made differently from OpenBSD; for instance, there won't be any support for SMP in MirOS". There will also be a more tolerant software inclusion policy, and "the end result is, hopefully, a more refined BSD experience".
Features
Goals of MirOS BSD are to create a more "modular" base BSD system, similar to Debian. While MirOS Linux (linux kernel + BSD userland) was discussed by the developers sometime in 2004, it has not materialised as yet. Another goal is to provide a faster integration cycle for new features and software than OpenBSD.- In common with the three major BSD distributions, MirOS BSD supports architectures other than x86.
- Development snapshots are liveLive CDA live CD, live DVD, or live disc is a CD or DVD containing a bootable computer operating system. Live CDs are unique in that they have the ability to run a complete, modern operating system on a computer lacking mutable secondary storage, such as a hard disk drive...
and installationEl Torito (CD-ROM standard)The El Torito Bootable CD Specification is an extension to the ISO 9660 CD-ROM specification. It is designed to allow a computer to boot from a CD-ROM...
CD for x86 and SPARCSPARCSPARC is a RISC instruction set architecture developed by Sun Microsystems and introduced in mid-1987....
architectures on one media, via the DuaLive technology. - Latest snapshots have been extended to further boot a grmlGrmlGrml is an operating system based on Debian. It is primarily designed to run from a Live CD, but can be made to run from a USB flash drive, as well. Grml aims to be well-suited for sysadmins and other users of text tools...
(a GNU/Linux based rescue system, x86 only) via the Triforce technology - mksh (MirBSD Korn shell): an actively developed flavour of Korn shell and heir of pdksh
- The base system and some MirPorts store "dotfiles" data in ~/.etc. directory in user's home to avoid cluttering the root of the home directory
The most important differences to OpenBSD are:
- Completely rewritten, GRUBGNU GRUBGNU GRUB is a boot loader package from the GNU Project. GRUB is the reference implementation of the Multiboot Specification, which provides a user the choice to boot one of multiple operating systems installed on a computer or select a specific kernel configuration available on a particular...
multi boot compatible, boot loader and boot manager without an 8 GiBGibGib may refer to:* A castrated male cat or ferret* Gibibit , measurement unit of digitally stored computer information* Gibraltar, British overseas territory* Drywall, construction material...
limit and with Soekris support - Slim base system (without NIS, Kerberos, BINDBINDBIND , or named , is the most widely used DNS software on the Internet.On Unix-like operating systems it is the de facto standard.Originally written by four graduate students at the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley , the name originates as an acronym from...
, i18n, BSD games, etc.), Bind and the BSDgames being available as a port - Binary security updates for stable releases
- ISDN support
- IPv6 support in the web server software
- wtf, a database of acronyms
- Some of the GNUtools (like gzip and *roff) were replaced by original UNIX code released by Caldera (SCO) under a BSD licence
- 64-bit time handling routines (time_t)
- Correct handling of leap seconds
- Full GCC 3.4 support: C, C++, Pascal, Objective-C
- Current versions of the GNU developer toolchain (rcs, binutils, gdb, texinfo, lynx etc.)
- GNU CVS 1.12 with custom extensions
- Improved random number generator
- Uses sv4cpio with/without CRC instead of tar archives as its package format; support for new formats in cpio
- Improved support for UTF-8UTF-8UTF-8 is a multibyte character encoding for Unicode. Like UTF-16 and UTF-32, UTF-8 can represent every character in the Unicode character set. Unlike them, it is backward-compatible with ASCII and avoids the complications of endianness and byte order marks...
and the Unicode BMPMapping of Unicode character planesIn the Unicode system, planes are groups of numerical values that point to specific characters. Unicode code points are logically divided into 17 planes, each with 65,536 code points. Planes are identified by the numbers 0 to 16decimal, which corresponds with the possible values 00-10hexadecimal...
, including wide character support for libncursesNcursesncurses is a programming library that provides an API which allows the programmer to write text user interfaces in a terminal-independent manner. It is a toolkit for developing "GUI-like" application software that runs under a terminal emulator...
("libncursesw") and friends
Cooperation
Aside from cooperating with other BSDs, whether attempted (OpenBSD – the fork was not intended, the original plan was to merely improve it; ÆrieBSD) or succeeded (ekkoBSD; MidnightBSDMidnightBSD
MidnightBSD is a free Unix-like, desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD 6.1. It borrows heavily from the NEXTSTEP graphical user interface.- History and development :...
), (more or less successful) attempts to submit patches to upstream software authors, and synergy effects with FreeWRT, there is an active cooperation with Grml both in inclusion and technical areas. Other projects, such as Debian
Debian
Debian is a computer operating system composed of software packages released as free and open source software primarily under the GNU General Public License along with other free software licenses. Debian GNU/Linux, which includes the GNU OS tools and Linux kernel, is a popular and influential...
are also fed with MirSoftware.
MirPorts
MirPorts is a derivative of OpenBSD ports tree developed by Benny Siegert. MirPorts does not use the package tools from OpenBSD written in PerlPerl
Perl is a high-level, general-purpose, interpreted, dynamic programming language. Perl was originally developed by Larry Wall in 1987 as a general-purpose Unix scripting language to make report processing easier. Since then, it has undergone many changes and revisions and become widely popular...
, but continues to maintain the previous C
C (programming language)
C is a general-purpose computer programming language developed between 1969 and 1973 by Dennis Ritchie at the Bell Telephone Laboratories for use with the Unix operating system....
-based tools. New features are in-place package upgrades and installing MirPorts instance as a non-root user. Also, in difference to OpenBSD ports, MirPorts are not tied to specific OS versions and even on stable releases using the newest version is recommended. MirLibtool is a modified version of GNU libtool 1.5 installed by MirPorts to build shared libraries in a portable way.
Multiple platforms are supported "out of the box
Out of the box
Out of the box is the term used to denote items, functionalities, or features that do not require any additional installation. In addition to being used for tangible products, the phrase is often used in a less literal sense for software, which may not be distributed in an actual box but offer...
":
- MirOS BSD (-stable and -current)
- OpenBSD (-stable and -current) and probably ÆrieBSD
- MidnightBSD
- Mac OS XMac OS XMac OS X is a series of Unix-based operating systems and graphical user interfaces developed, marketed, and sold by Apple Inc. Since 2002, has been included with all new Macintosh computer systems...
(10.4 and newer) / DarwinDarwin (operating system)Darwin is an open source POSIX-compliant computer operating system released by Apple Inc. in 2000. It is composed of code developed by Apple, as well as code derived from NeXTSTEP, BSD, and other free software projects....
Following the MirOS BSD policy of faster software availability to the user, many ports removed for political reasons in OpenBSD (e.g. all the DJB software or the Flash Plugin) have been kept in MirPorts and can continue to be used. MirPorts also wants to be a place for unofficial or rejected OpenBSD ports.