MirOS BSD

MirOS BSD

Screenshot of MirOS #10-current/i386
Developer Thorsten Glaser, Benny Siegert, Ádám Hóka, others
OS family Unix-like, BSD
Working state Current
Source model Open source
Initial release OpenBSD-current-mirabilos #0[1] (October 11, 2002 (2002-10-11))
Latest release MirOS #10semel (March 16, 2008 (2008-03-16)) [±]
Latest preview MirBSD-current (10uB4-20160117) (January 17, 2016 (2016-01-17)) [±]
Update method Binary security updates for stable releases
Package manager MirPorts, pkgsrc
Platforms i386, SPARC
Kernel type Monolithic
Default user interface mksh, IceWM, evilwm
License Mostly BSD, GPL, MirOS Licence
Official website www.mirbsd.org

MirOS BSD (originally called MirBSD) is a free and open source operating system which started as a fork of OpenBSD 3.1 in August 2002.[2] 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 was also incorporated into ekkoBSD, and when ekkoBSD ceased to exist, artwork, code and developers ended up working on MirOS BSD for a while.

Unlike the three major BSD distributions, MirOS BSD supports only the x86 and SPARC architectures.

One of the project's goals is to be able to port the MirOS userland to run on the Linux kernel, hence the deprecation of the MirBSD name in favour of MirOS.

History

MirOS BSD originated as OpenBSD-current-mirabilos, an OpenBSD patchkit, but soon grew on its own after some differences in opinion[2][3] between the OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt 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.[4]

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".[5]

Another goal of MirOS BSD is 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,[6] it has not materialised.

Features

The most important differences to OpenBSD were:[8]

Cooperation

Aside from cooperating with other BSDs, submitting patches to upstream software authors, and synergy effects with FreeWRT, there is an active cooperation with Grml both in inclusion[9][10] and technical[11] areas. Other projects, such as Debian[12] are also fed with MirSoftware.

MirPorts

MirPorts is a derivative of the OpenBSD ports tree and was developed by Benny Siegert. 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 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 is intended to be a place for unofficial or rejected OpenBSD ports.

See also

References

  1. ↑ History of MirOS, eMail to Éric Lévénez
  2. 1 2 Birthing point for MirOS
  3. ↑ Re: Initial patch of NetBSD /usr/games/wtf + /usr/share/misc/acronyms
  4. ↑ MirOS BSD: the peaceful operating system, BSD Magazine, Issue 1/2009 (3), p. 16
  5. ↑ MirOS BSD Flyer
  6. ↑ tg@ weblog
  7. ↑ Siegert, Benny. "pkgsrc on MirBSD", FOSDEM 2012 Conference, 5 February 2012. Retrieved on 20 May 2012.
  8. ↑ Why not just use OpenBSD?
  9. ↑ Next Grml to come with bsd.rd (now called MirOS bsd4grml)
  10. ↑ MirBSD ISO contains MirGRML
  11. ↑ grml to use MirOS manifold-boot CD technology
  12. ↑ Packages overview for Thorsten Glaser
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