 Home • About • Donate
|
 NetBSD
|
 FreeBSD
|
||
 OpenBSD
|
 DragonFly BSD
|
OpenBSD
 |
|
OpenBSD is a free and open source Unix-like operating system based on the 4.4 BSD, and developed initially by Theo de Raadt, and currently is developed entirely by volunteers. Theo de Raadt created OpenBSD in 1995 by forking NetBSD 1.0. The OpenBSD project emphasizes portability, standardization, correctness, proactive security, and integrated cryptography. The OpenBSD project also develops the widely-used and popular OpenSSH (OpenBSD Secure Shell) software, which provides encrypted communication sessions over a computer network using the SSH protocol.
The word open in the name OpenBSD refers to the availability of the operating system source code on the Internet, although the word "open" in the name OpenSSH means "OpenBSD". It also refers to the wide range of hardware platforms the system supports. OpenBSD supports a variety of system architectures including x86-64, IA-32, ARM, PowerPC, and 64-bit RISC-V.
|
Distribution
|
OpenBSD is freely available in various ways: the source can be retrieved by anonymous CVS, and binary releases and development snapshots can be downloaded by FTP, HTTP, and rsync. Prepackaged CD-ROM sets through version 6.0 can be ordered online for a small fee, complete with an assortment of stickers and a copy of the release's theme song. These, with their artwork and other bonuses, have been one of the project's few sources of income, funding hardware, Internet service, and other expenses. Beginning with version 6.1, CD-ROM sets are no longer released. OpenBSD provides a package management system for easy installation and management of programs which are not part of the base operating system. Packages are binary files which are extracted, managed and removed using the package tools. On OpenBSD, the source of packages is the ports system, a collection of Makefiles and other infrastructure required to create packages. In OpenBSD, the ports and base operating system are developed and released together for each version: this means that the ports or packages released with, for example, 4.6 are not suitable for use with 4.5 and vice versa
|
History of OpenBSD
- See BSD Operating Systems Tree and History of BSD operating systems for additional information.
|
In December 1994, Theo de Raadt, a founding member of the NetBSD project, was asked to resign from the NetBSD core team over disagreements and conflicts with the other members of the NetBSD team. In October 1995, De Raadt founded OpenBSD, a new project forked from NetBSD 1.0. The initial release, OpenBSD 1.2, was made in July 1996, followed by OpenBSD 2.0 in October of the same year. Since then, the project has issued a release every six months, each of which is supported for one year. On 25 July 2007, OpenBSD developer Bob Beck announced the formation of the OpenBSD Foundation, a Canadian non-profit organization formed to "act as a single point of contact for persons and organizations requiring a legal entity to deal with when they wish to support OpenBSD". |
NetBSD Overview
| Items | Information & References |
|---|---|
|
|
|
| Based on | NetBSD 1.0 |
|
|
|
| Developer | Theo de Raadt & et al. |
|
|
|
| First Repository Release | 1.1, 18/10/1995 |
|
|
|
| First "Non-official Release" | 1.2, 01/07/1996 |
|
|
|
| First Official Release | 2.0, 01/10/1996 |
|
|
|
| Origin | International |
|
|
|
| Architecture | OpenBSD supports several processor architectures: Alpha, x86-64, ARMv7, ARMv8 (64-bit), PA-RISC, IA-32, LANDISK, Loongson, Omron LUNA-88K, MIPS64, macppc, PowerPC, 64-bit RISC-V and SPARC64. |
|
|
|
| Package manager | • OpenBSD package tools |
|
|
|
| License | • BSD-2-clause license ("Simplified BSD License"), ISC, other permissive licenses |
|
|
|
| Website | www.openbsd.org |
|
|
|
| Manual page server | man.openbsd.org |
OpenBSD Releases History
| Version | Release date |
|---|---|
| 1.1 | 18/10/1995 |
| 1.2 | 01/07/1996 |
| 2.0 | 01/10/1996 |
| 2.1 | 01/06/1997 |
| 2.2 | 01/12/1997 |
| 2.3 | 19/05/1998 |
| 2.4 | 01/12/1998 |
| 2.5 | 19/05/1999 |
| 2.6 | 01/12/1999 |
| 2.7 | 15/06/2000 |
| 2.8 | 01/12/2000 |
| 2.9 | 01/06/2001 |
| 3.0 | 01/12/2001 |
| 3.1 | 19/05/2002 |
| 3.2 | 01/11/2002 |
| 3.3 | 01/05/2003 |
| 3.4 | 01/11/2003 |
| 3.5 | 01/05/2004 |
| 3.6 | 01/11/2004 |
| 3.7 | 19/05/2005 |
| 3.8 | 01/11/2005 |
| 3.9 | 01/05/2006 |
| 4.0 | 01/11/2006 |
| 4.1 | 01/05/2007 |
| 4.2 | 01/11/2007 |
| 4.3 | 01/05/2008 |
| 4.4 | 01/11/2008 |
| 4.5 | 01/05/2009 |
| 4.6 | 18/10/2009 |
| 4.7 | 19/05/2010 |
| 4.8 | 01/11/2010 |
| 4.9 | 01/05/2011 |
| 5.0 | 01/11/2011 |
| 5.1 | 01/05/2012 |
| 5.2 | 01/11/2012 |
| 5.3 | 01/05/2013 |
| 5.4 | 01/11/2013 |
| 5.5 | 01/05/2014 |
| 5.6 | 01/11/2014 |
| 5.7 | 01/05/2015 |
| 5.8 | 18/10/2015 |
| 5.9 | 29/03/2016 |
| 6.0 | 01/09/2016 |
| 6.1 | 11/04/2017 |
| 6.2 | 09/10/2017 |
| 6.3 | 02/04/2018 |
| 6.4 | 18/10/2018 |
| 6.5 | 24/04/2019 |
| 6.6 | 17/10/2019 |
| 6.7 | 19/05/2020 |
| 6.8 | 18/10/2020 |
| 6.9 | 01/05/2021 |
| 7.0 | 14/10/2021 |
| 7.1 | 21/04/2022 |
| 7.2 | 20/10/2022 |
| 7.3 | 10/04/2023 |
| 7.4 | 16/10/2023 |
| 7.5 | 05/04/2024 |
Active OpenBSD derivatives
|
MirBSD
|
MirBSD is an operating system based on OpenBSD, and stared as a fork of OpenBSD 3.1 in August 2002. MirBSD is synchronized with the ongoing development of its relative. From 2008 MirBSD is a rolling release operating system. The most important differences between OpenBSD and MirOS include a completely rewritten bootloader and loader, a compact system base without NIS, Kerberos, BIND and il8n, binary security updates for stable releases and current versions of the GNU development toolkit. It was intended to maintain the security of OpenBSD 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 MirBSD was also incorporated into ekkoBSD, and when ekkoBSD ceased to exist, artwork, code and developers ended up working on MirBSD for a while. Unlike the three major BSD distributions, MirOS BSD supports only the x86 and SPARC architectures.
On 29/08/2002, Theo de Raadt, leader of the operating system project OpenBSD, co-founder of its antecessor NetBSD, dismissed the port of some NetBSD userland utility to OpenBSD, made by a person already known, loved and hated in the community: Thorsten "mirabilos" Glaser. After struggling around, he eventually decided to not only keep wtf(6) (which later became wtf(1)) in his local tree, but also to start a patch kit and upload it to his personal homepage webspace. Quickly, the first binary release was made, after various other improvements found their way into the patchkit, among the first, some code of the then, dying MicroBSD (publically released under a good licence), and the KAME patch bringing IPv6 support to the Apache HTTP dæmon. It was to be decided how to name the child. The first shot was OpenBSD-current-mirabilos, since Thorsten Glasers pseudonym has been like it since early 1993; but that was too long. Even the later OpenBSD-mirabilos was too long, and lasted not more than a few days until the next quarrel with the OpenBSD people. The patchkit was then renamed into BSD-mirabilos. The OpenBSD patchkit was renamed to MirBSD. Later, a project was born from the patchkit, and designing MirLinux was started (purely as a quick and weird idea, qua the absolute contrary of Debian GNU/NetBSD). When the first person, namely Benny Siegert (who had looked down on MirBSD before "because it lacks NLS support"), having submitted many uncommitted ports to OpenBSD in the past, joined and started to help with the MirBSD ports tree, the project was named The MirOS Project, and the former MirBSD ports tree, evolved from the OpenBSD ports tree, was separated from the MirOS base system and called MirPorts Framework when we heard that many people are using NetBSD pkgsrc (the same thing as the ports tree, called differently, on NetBSD) on their GNU/Linux boxen. One goal was 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". Another goal of MirOS BSD was 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.
The most important differences between OpenBSD and MirOS include a completely rewritten bootloader and loader, a compact system base without NIS, Kerberos, BIND and il8n, binary security updates for stable releases and current versions of the GNU development toolkit.
The most important differences to OpenBSD were:
MirPorts was a derivative of the OpenBSD ports tree and was developed by Benny Siegert. MirPorts was the MirBSD solution for installing additional software packages not contained in the base system. MirPorts does not use the package tools from OpenBSD written in Perl, but continues to maintain the previous C-based tools. New features are in-place package upgrades and installing a MirPorts instance as a non-root user. Unlike OpenBSD ports, MirPorts are not tied to specific OS versions and even on stable releases using the newest version was recommended. MirLibtool was 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 was intended to be a place for unofficial or rejected OpenBSD ports. Using MirPorts is straightforward. After the first checkout or after updates, make setup in /usr/ports automatically installs the package tools and configuration. The ports themselves are in subdirectories, sorted by category. Just executing mmake install in such a directory will download the source code, compile it, create a binary package and install it. Dependencies are automatically installed when necessary. Some ports exist in several "flavours", e.g. with or without X support. 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 being used. We also want to be a place for unofficial or rejected OpenBSD ports. MirPorts does not use the package tools from OpenBSD, which are written in Perl, but continues to maintain the previous C-based tools. New features are in-place package upgrades and installing your own MirPorts instance as a non-root user. The main maintainer of MirPorts was Benny Siegert.
GNU Libtool is used by many packages to build shared libraries in a portable way. However, there are many problems with it, for example, it breaks when no C++ compiler is installed. Therefore, MirPorts contains a modified version nicknamed MirLibtool. MirLibtool is based on GNU libtool 1.5. It is compatible with all versions of autotools. The MirPorts infrastructure installs it automatically whenever a port uses autoconf to recreate its configure script.
pkgsrc on MirOS BSD is an alternative packaging system which provides more up-to-date packages with less integration with the main BSD operating system.
In snapshots of MirBSD, the installation CD is also a LiveCD. That means that you can boot a full MirOS system (although without any ports installed) from the CD. For special cases, you can also use dd(1) to write the image (or the mini-ISO, cdrom8.iso) to your hard disk and install from there. Attention: All data on the hard disk will be lost. Releases do not contain the LiveCD as we cannot (yet) make it dual-bootable for the i386 and sparc architecture.
|
- MirBSD Releases History
| Version | Release date |
|---|---|
| #7quater (stable, sparc 32 bits) | 2003 |
| #8semel (stable, i386), MIR51223 | 23/12/2005 |
| #9semel (stable, i386), MIR60625 | 25/06/2006 |
| #10semel (stable, i386 + sparc 32 bits) (MirOS ξ (xi)), MIR80316 | 16/03/2008 |
| Rolling release, development snapshots; (current, i386 or sparc) from 2008 | |
Discontinued OpenBSD derivatives
|
References
- ↑ com/stepsofJesus/adJ stepsofJesus/adJ - GitHub
- ↑ org/en/groups/openbsd-adj-as-desktop-OS/ Challenge: adJ as desktop OS
- ↑ Announcing HyperbolaBSD Roadmap
- ↑ HyperbolaBSD is an operating-system and not a system-distribution
- ↑ com/stepsofJesus/adJ stepsofJesus/adJ - GitHub
- ↑ Challenge: adJ as desktop OS