BSD Unix

Company/ developer:	Computer Systems Research Group, UC Berkeley
OS family:	Unix
Source model:	Open source
Latest stable release:	4.4-Lite2 / 1995
Kernel type:	Monolithic
Default user interface:	{{{ui}}}
License:	BSD
Licence:	{{{licence}}}
Working state:	Replaced by offspring (see below)
Website:	N/A

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the Unix derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. The name is also used collectively for the modern descendants of these distributions. Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name. ... The term software company could be applied to; a) a company that produces software or b) a company that distributes software from a third party or c) a company that provides services for software. ... A software developer is a programmer who concerns him/herself with one or more facets of the software development process, a somewhat broader scope of computer programming. ... Computer Systems Research Group was a research group that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. ... University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (also known as California, Cal, UCB, UC Berkeley, The University of California, or simply Berkeley) is a public coeducational university situated east of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California, overlooking the Golden Gate. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ... In computer engineering the kernel is the core of an operating system. ... The user interface is the part of a system exposed to users. ... A software license is a type of proprietary or gratuitous license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software — sometimes called an End User License Agreement (EULA) — that specifies the perimeters of the permission granted by the owner to the user. ... A software license is a type of proprietary or gratiuitious license as well as a memorandum of contract between a producer and a user of computer software — sometimes called an End User License Agreement (EULA) — that specifies the perimeters of the permission granted by the owner to the user. ... The front page of the English Wikipedia Website. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (also known as California, Cal, UCB, UC Berkeley, The University of California, or simply Berkeley) is a public coeducational university situated east of the San Francisco Bay in Berkeley, California, overlooking the Golden Gate. ... The 1970s in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1970 and 1979. ...

BSD was widely identified with the versions of Unix available for workstation-class systems. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed and the familiarity it found among the founders of many technology companies during the 1980s. This familarity often came from using similar systems - notably DEC's Ultrix and Sun's SunOS - during their education. While BSD itself was largely superseded by the System V Release 4.x and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s, in recent years modified open source versions of the codebase have seen increasing use and development. Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ... Ultrix was the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporations (DEC) native Unix systems. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... SunOS was the version of the UNIX operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstations and server systems until the early 1990s. ... AT&T UNIX System V was one of the versions of the UNIX operating system. ... Open source refers to projects that are open to the public and which draw on other projects that are freely available to the general public. ...

History

Unix, filiation on Unix systems.

Image File history File links Download high resolution version (656x1359, 20 KB) PNG version of Image:UnixHistory. ... Image File history File links Download high resolution version (656x1359, 20 KB) PNG version of Image:UnixHistory. ... Wikibooks has more about this subject: Guide to UNIX Unix or UNIX is a computer operating system originally developed in the 1960s and 1970s by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ...

PDP-11 beginnings

The earliest distributions of Unix from Bell Labs in the 1970s included the source code to the operating system, allowing researchers at universities to modify and extend Unix. The first Unix system at Berkeley was a PDP-11 installed in 1974, and the computer science department used it for extensive research thereafter. This article needs to be cleaned up to conform to a higher standard of quality. ... The 1970s in its most obvious sense refers to the decade between 1970 and 1979. ... Source code (commonly just source or code) is any series of statements written in some human-readable computer programming language. ... // History Because of the above definition, the oldest universities in the world were all European, as the awarding of academic degrees was not a custom of older institutions of learning in Asia and Africa. ... Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson at a PDP-11 The PDP-11 was a 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corp. ... 1974 (MCMLXXIV) is a common year starting on Tuesday (click on link for calendar). ... Wikibooks Wikiversity has more about this subject: School of Computer Science Open Directory Project: Computer Science Downloadable Science and Computer Science books Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies Belief that title science in computer science is inappropriate Categories: | ...

Other universities became interested in the software at Berkeley, and so in 1977 Bill Joy, then a graduate student at Berkeley, assembled and sent out tapes of the first Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD). 1BSD was an add-on to Sixth Edition Unix rather than a complete operating system in its own right; its main components were a Pascal compiler and Joy's ex line editor. For the album by Ash, see 1977 (album). ... William Nelson Joy (born 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. ... Sixth Edition Unix (also known as V6 Unix) was the first version of Unix to see wide release outside Bell Labs. ... Pascal is an imperative computer programming language, developed in 1970 by Niklaus Wirth as a language particularly suitable for structured programming. ... A diagram of the operation of a typical multi-language compiler. ... Ex (disambiguation) ex, short for EXtended, was a line editor for UNIX. It was an advanced version of the standard UNIX editor ed, included in the Berkeley Software Distribution. ... A line editor is a text editor computer program that is oriented around lines. ...

The Second Berkeley Software Distribution (2BSD), released in 1978, included updated versions of the 1BSD software as well as two new programs by Joy that persist on Unix systems to this day: the vi text editor (a visual version of ex) and the C shell. 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... The correct title of this article is vi. ... Visual editors are editors which display the text being edited on the screen as it is being edited, as opposed to line-oriented editors (such as ed, ex and edlin). ... The C shell (csh) is a Unix shell developed by Bill Joy for the BSD Unix system. ...

Later releases of 2BSD contained ports of changes to the VAX-based releases of BSD back to the PDP-11 architecture. 2.9BSD from 1983 included code from 4.1cBSD, and was the first release that was a full OS (a modified Version 7 Unix) rather than a set of applications and patches. The most recent release, 2.11BSD, was first released in 1992, with maintenance updates from volunteers continuing until 2003. VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ... 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Version 7 Unix, the Seventh Edition Unix, was an important early release of the Unix operating system. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... 2003 (MMIII) was a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

VAX versions

A VAX computer was installed at Berkeley in 1978, but the port of Unix to the VAX architecture, UNIX/32V, did not take advantage of the VAX's virtual memory capabilities. The kernel of 32V was largely rewritten by Berkeley students to include a virtual memory implementation, and a complete operating system including the new kernel, ports of the 2BSD utilities to the VAX, and the utilities from 32V was released as 3BSD at the end of 1979. 3BSD was also alternatively called Virtual VAX/UNIX or VMUNIX (for Virtual Memory Unix), and BSD kernel images were normally called /vmunix until 4.4BSD. VAX is a 32-bit computing architecture that supports an orthogonal instruction set (machine language) and virtual addressing (i. ... 1978 (MCMLXXVIII) was a common year starting on Sunday (the link is to a full 1978 calendar). ... In computer science, porting is the adaptation of a piece of software so that it will function in a different computing environment to that for which it was originally written. ... UNIX/32V was an early version of the Unix operating system from Bell Laboratories, released late in 1978. ... The memory pages of the virtual address space seen by the process, may reside non-contiguously in primary, or even secondary storage. ... In computer engineering the kernel is the core of an operating system. ... This page refers to the year 1979. ...

The success of 3BSD was a major factor in the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) decision to fund Berkeley's Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG), which would develop a standard Unix platform for future DARPA research in the VLSI Project. CSRG released 4BSD, containing numerous improvements to the 3BSD system, in October 1980. The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is an agency of the United States Department of Defense responsible for the development of new technology for use by the military. ... Computer Systems Research Group was a research group that was dedicated to enhancing AT&T Unix operating system and funded by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. ... Look up October in Wiktionary, the free dictionary October is the tenth month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar and one of seven Gregorian months with the length of 31 days. ... 1980 (MCMLXXX) was a leap year starting on Tuesday. ...

4.1BSD (June 1981) was a response to criticisms of BSD's performance relative to the dominant VAX operating system, VMS. The 4.1BSD kernel was systematically tuned up by Bill Joy until it could perform as well as VMS on several benchmarks. (The release would have been called 5BSD, but the name was changed to avoid confusion with AT&T's UNIX System V release. One early, never-released test version was in fact called 4.5BSD.) June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with a length of 30 days The month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter and equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera. ... 1981 (MCMLXXXI) is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... VMS is a three-letter abbreviation that can mean: Variable message sign, an electronic traffic sign often used on highways Virtual Memory System (another name for OpenVMS), an operating system Visual Memory System (better known as Visual Memory Unit), a storage device for the Sega Dreamcast console Volcanogenic Massive Sulfide... AT&T Inc. ... The many divergents of System V System V, previously known as AT&T System V, was one of the versions of the Unix computer operating system. ...

4.2BSD would take over two years to implement and contained several major overhauls. Before its official release came three intermediate versions: 4.1a incorporated a modified version of BBN's preliminary TCP/IP implementation; 4.1b included the new Berkeley Fast File System, implemented by Marshall Kirk McKusick; and 4.1c was an interim release during the last few months of 4.2BSD's development. Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now called BBN Technologies) is a high technology company that provides research and development services. ... The Internet protocol suite is the set of communications protocols that implement the protocol stack on which the Internet runs. ... In computing, the Berkeley Fast File System (or FFS) is a file system used mostly by BSD-derivative Unix variants. ... Marshall Kirk McKusick (b. ...

The official 4.2BSD release came in August 1983. It was notable as the first version released after the 1982 departure of Bill Joy to co-found Sun Microsystems; Mike Karels and Marshall Kirk McKusick took on leadership roles within the project from that point forward. On a lighter note, it also marked the debut of BSD's daemon mascot in a drawing by McKusick that appeared on the cover of the printed manuals distributed by USENIX. Note: as an adjective (stressed on the second syllable instead of the first), august means honorable. ... 1983 (MCMLXXXIII) is a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... 1982 (MCMLXXXII) is a common year starting on Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... Marshall Kirk McKusick (b. ... BSD Daemon is the BSD operating systems mascot. ... The USENIX Association is the Advanced Computing Technical Association. ...

4.3BSD

4.3BSD was released in June 1986. Its main changes were to improve the performance of many of the new contributions of 4.2BSD that had not been as heavily tuned as the 4.1BSD code. Prior to the release, BSD's implementation of TCP/IP had diverged considerably from BBN's official implementation. After several months of testing, DARPA determined that the 4.2BSD version was superior and would remain in 4.3BSD. (See also History of the Internet.) June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with a length of 30 days The month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter and equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera. ... 1986 (MCMLXXXVI) is a common year starting on Wednesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... As the Internet grew through the 1980s and early 1990s, many people realized the growing need to be able to find and organize files and information. ...

After 4.3BSD, it was determined that BSD would move away from the aging VAX platform. The Power 6/32 platform (codenamed "Tahoe") developed by Computer Consoles, Incorporated seemed promising at the time, but was abandoned by its developers shortly thereafter. Nonetheless, the 4.3BSD-Tahoe port (June 1988) proved valuable as it led to a separation of machine-dependent and machine-independent code in BSD which would improve the system's future portability. June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with a length of 30 days The month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter and equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera. ... 1988 (MCMLXXXVIII) was a leap year starting on a Friday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Until this point, all versions of BSD had incorporated proprietary AT&T Unix code and therefore required licenses from AT&T for their use. Source code licenses had become very expensive by this point, and several outside parties had expressed interest in a separate release of the networking code, which had been developed entirely outside AT&T and would not be subject to the licensing requirement. This led to Networking Tape 1 (Net/1), which was made available to non-licensees of AT&T code and was freely redistributable under the terms of the permissive BSD license. It was released in June 1989. Free software, as defined by the Free Software Foundation, is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed without restriction. ... The BSD license is an acronym for the Berkeley Software Distribution license agreement, and is one of the most widely used licences for free software (a subset of open source software). ... June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with a length of 30 days The month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter and equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera. ... 1989 (MCMLXXXIX) is a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

4.3BSD-Reno came in early 1990. It was an interim release during the early development of 4.4BSD, and its use was considered a "gamble", hence the naming after the gambling center of Reno, Nevada. This release was clearly moving towards POSIX compliance, and, according to some, away from the BSD philosophy (as POSIX is very much based on System V, and Reno was quite bloated compared to previous releases). This article is about the year. ... Gambling has had many different meanings depending on the cultural and historical context in which it is used. ... City nickname: The Biggest Little City in the World Founded May 13, 1868 County Washoe County Mayor Bob Cashell Area  - Total  - Land  - Water 179. ... POSIX is the collective name of a family of related standards specified by the IEEE to define the application program interface (API) for software designed to run on variants of the Unix OS. They are formally designated as IEEE 1003 and the international standard name is ISO/IEC 9945. ...

Net/2 and legal troubles

After Net/1, BSD developer Keith Bostic proposed that more non-AT&T sections of the BSD system be released under the same license as Net/1. To this extent, he started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using the AT&T code. For example, vi, which had been based on the original Unix version of ed, was rewritten as nvi (new vi). Within eighteen months, all the AT&T utilities had been replaced, and it was determined that only a few AT&T files remained in the kernel. These files were removed, and the result was the June 1991 release of Net/2, a nearly complete operating system that was freely redistributable. Member of the UCB Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, who created BSD. Worked at Berkeley Software Design, who produced BSD/OS (also known as BSDi), a commercial version of BSD. Now works at Sleepycat Software, who produce Berkeley DB. Author of nvi. ... The correct title of this article is vi. ... The correct title of this article is ed. ... nvi (new vi) is a re-implementation of the classic Berkeley editor, ex/vi, traditionally distributed with BSD, and later, Unix systems. ... June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with a length of 30 days The month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter and equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera. ... 1991 (MCMXCI) is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

Net/2 was the basis for two separate ports of BSD to the Intel 80386 architecture: the free 386BSD by William Jolitz and the proprietary BSD/386 (later renamed BSD/OS) by Berkeley Software Design (BSDi). 386BSD itself was short-lived, but became the initial code base of the NetBSD and FreeBSD projects that were started shortly thereafter. An Intel 80386 Microprocessor The 386DX architecture. ... 386BSD, also known as JOLIX, is a free operating system produced from the BSD derived UNIX operating systems for the Intel 80386. ... William Frederick(Bill) Jolitz (born 1957), commonly known as Bill Jolitz, co-wrote 386BSD in 1989 along with Lynne Jolitz. ... It has been suggested that closed source be merged into this article or section. ... BSD/OS (also known as BSDi and BSD/386) was a commercial version of the Berkeley Software Distribution operating system that had been developed by the University of California, Berkeleys Computer Science Research Group in the 1970s and 1980s. ... Berkely Software Design Inc. ... NetBSD was the second freely redistributable, open source version of the BSD Unix-like computer operating systems to produce a formal release (after 386BSD) and continues to be actively developed. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free software operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4. ...

BSDi soon found itself in legal trouble with AT&T's UNIX Systems Laboratories subsidiary, then the owners of the System V copyright and the Unix trademark. The USL v. BSDi lawsuit was filed in 1992 and led to an injunction on the distribution of Net/2 until the validity of USL's copyright claims on the source could be determined. UNIX Systems Laboratories or USL was originally organized as part of Bell Labs in 1989. ... Copyright symbol. ... A trademark (Commonwealth English: trade mark) is a distinctive sign of some kind which is used by a business to uniquely identify itself and its products and services to consumers, and to distinguish the business and its products or services from those of other businesses. ... This article is in need of attention. ... 1992 (MCMXCII) was a leap year starting on Wednesday. ... An injunction is an equitable remedy in the form of a court order that either prohibits or compels (restrains or enjoins) a party from continuing a particular activity. ...

The lawsuit slowed development of the free-software descendants of BSD for nearly two years while their legal status was in question, and as a result systems based on the Linux kernel, which did not have such legal ambiguity, gained greater support. Linux and 386BSD began development at about the same time, and Linus Torvalds has said that if there had been a free Unix-like operating system on the 386 at the time, he likely would not have created Linux. Although it is debatable exactly what effect that would have had on the software landscape since, there is little doubt that it would have been substantial. The Linux mascot Tux created by Larry Ewing The Linux kernel is a free software Unix-like operating system kernel that was begun by Linus Torvalds in 1991 and subsequently improved with the assistance of developers around the world. ... Tux is the official Linux mascot. ... 386BSD, also known as JOLIX, is a free operating system produced from the BSD derived UNIX operating systems for the Intel 80386. ... Linus Torvalds Linus Benedict Torvalds (born December 28, 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer best known for initiating the development of Linux. ... A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ...

4.4BSD and descendants

The lawsuit was settled in January 1994, largely in Berkeley's favor. Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only 3 had to be removed and 70 modified to show USL copyright notices. A further condition of the settlement was that USL would not file further lawsuits against users and distributors of the Berkeley-owned code in the upcoming 4.4BSD release. 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ...

In June 1994, 4.4BSD was released in two forms: the freely redistributable 4.4BSD-Lite contained no AT&T source, whereas 4.4BSD-Encumbered was available, as earlier releases had been, only to AT&T licensees. June is the sixth month of the year in the Gregorian Calendar, with a length of 30 days The month is named after the Roman goddess Juno, wife of Jupiter and equivalent to the Greek goddess Hera. ... 1994 (MCMXCIV) was a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar, and was designated the International year of the Family. ...

The final release from Berkeley was 1995's 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2, after which the CSRG was dissolved and development of BSD at Berkeley ceased. Since then, several distributions based on 4.4BSD (such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD) have been maintained. 1995 (MCMXCV) was a common year starting on Sunday of the Gregorian calendar. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free software operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4. ... OpenBSD is a freely available, BSD-based Unix-like operating system. ... NetBSD was the second freely redistributable, open source version of the BSD Unix-like computer operating systems to produce a formal release (after 386BSD) and continues to be actively developed. ...

In addition, the permissive nature of the BSD license has allowed many other operating systems, both free and proprietary, to incorporate BSD code. For example, Microsoft Windows has used BSD-derived code in its implementation of TCP/IP and bundles recompiled versions of BSD's command line networking tools with its current releases. Microsoft Windows is a series of operating environments and operating systems created by Microsoft for use on personal computers and servers. ... A command line interface or CLI is a method of interacting with a computer by giving it lines of textual commands (that is, a sequence of characters) either from keyboard input or from a script. ...

Technology

BSD pioneered many of the advances of modern computing. Berkeley's Unix was the first to include libraries supporting the Internet Protocol stacks: Berkeley sockets. By integrating sockets with the Unix operating system's file descriptors, it became almost as easy to read and write data across a network as it was to access a disk. The AT&T laboratory eventually released their own STREAMS library, which incorporated much of the same functionality in a software stack with a better architecture, but the wide distribution of the existing sockets library, together with the unfortunate omission of a function call for polling a set of open sockets equivalent to the select call in the Berkeley library, reduced the impact of the new API. The Internet Protocol (IP) is a data-oriented protocol used by source and destination hosts for communicating data across a packet-switched internetwork. ... The Berkeley sockets application programming interface (API) comprises a library for developing applications written in the C programming language that access a computer network. ... The term file descriptor is generally used in POSIX operating systems. ... A computer network is a system for communication between computers. ... STREAMS is the Unix System V networking architecture. ... API with 3 clients, using the Unified Modeling Language notation An application programming interface (API) is the interface that a computer system or application provides in order to allow requests for service to be made of it by other computer programs, and/or to allow data to be exchanged between...

Today, BSD continues to be used as a testbed for technology by academic organizations, as well as finding uses in a lot of commercial and free products and, increasingly, in embedded devices. The general quality of its source code, as well as its documentation (especially reference manual pages, commonly referred to as man pages), make it well-suited for many purposes. An embedded system is a special-purpose computer system, which is completely encapsulated by the device it controls. ... Almost all substantial UNIX and Unix-like operating systems (*nix) have extensive documentation known as man pages (short for manual pages). The Unix command used to display them is man. ...

Because of the permissive nature of the BSD license, many corporations use BSD derived code in order to maintain their intellectual property. This means that it often appears in unexpected places. Searching for strings containing "University of California, Berkeley" in the documentation of products, in the static data sections of binaries and ROMs, or as part of other information about a software program, will often show BSD code has been used. Intellectual property or IP refers to a legal entitlement which sometimes attaches to the expressed form of an idea, or to some other intangible subject matter. ... An executable or executable file, in computer science, is a file whose contents are meant to be interpreted as a program by a computer. ... ROM, Rom, or rom may refer to: Roma (people), whose members are called Rom (or Gypsy) Romany language (ISO 639 alpha-2, rom) Royal Ontario Museum Rom (Star Trek), the name of a Ferengi from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. ...

It is an interesting fact that BSD operating systems can run much native software of several other operating systems on the same architecture, using a binary compatibility layer. Much simpler and faster than emulation, this allows, for instance, applications intended for Linux to be run at effectively full speed. This makes BSDs not only suitable for server environments, but also for workstation ones, given the increasing availability of commercial or closed-source software for Linux only. This also allows administrators to migrate legacy commercial applications, which may have only supported commercial Unix variants, to a more modern operating system, retaining the functionality of such applications until they can be replaced by a better alternative. Computer architecture is the theory behind the design of a computer. ... In software engineering, a compatibility layer allows binaries for an emulated system to run on a host system. ... This article is about emulation in computer science. ... Tux is the official Linux mascot. ...

Finally, current BSD operating system variants support many of the common IEEE, ANSI, ISO, and POSIX standards, while retaining most of the traditional BSD behavior.

Open source BSD derivatives

The different open source BSD operating systems are targeted at an array of systems for different purposes and uses. BSD installations are common in government facilities. Though all of the following BSDs have features found in other systems, each has developed a reputation for its focus and suitability for particular areas.

• DragonFly BSD is the newest of the BSDs and a fork from FreeBSD. Its goals include producing a better SMP system and making the kernel capable of natively supporting SSI clustering for high performance computing, although the project is still some years away from completely achieveing these aims.

• FreeBSD is known for its user friendliness and excellent performance, due to specialising on only a few architectures and its strong focus on SMP.

• NetBSD is known for its portability. It runs on as many as 54 different platforms from small embedded and handheld devices up to large server farms. NetBSD is used in the International Space Station.

• OpenBSD is known for cryptography and security, as well as portability, if to a lesser extent than NetBSD. Security features such as OpenSSH and systrace were developed as part of OpenBSD.

• Darwin is the operating system underlying Mac OS X. It is built on the Mach microkernel with the user environment derived from FreeBSD. Darwin is available under the Apple Public Source License, a license which differs significantly from the traditional BSD license.

It should be noted that the above is a brief outline of popular perception and development focus, not a set of hard and fast rules. In practice, each BSD incarnation can fulfill many roles. In computing, the DragonFly BSD operating system is a fork of FreeBSD. Matt Dillon, a long-time FreeBSD and Amiga developer, started work on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on 16 July 2003 [1]. Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the... Symmetric Multiprocessing, or SMP, is a multiprocessor computer architecture where two or more identical processors are connected to a single shared main memory. ... Single-system image or SSI is a form of distributed computing in which by using a common interface multiple networks, distributed databases or servers appear to the user as one system. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free software operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4. ... User-friendly is a term often used to describe software and other technologies. ... Computer architecture is the theory behind the design of a computer. ... NetBSD was the second freely redistributable, open source version of the BSD Unix-like computer operating systems to produce a formal release (after 386BSD) and continues to be actively developed. ... In computer science, porting is the adaptation of a piece of software so that it will function in a different computing environment to that for which it was originally written. ... ISS Statistics Crew: 2 As of August 21, 2005 Perigee: 352. ... OpenBSD is a freely available, BSD-based Unix-like operating system. ... Cryptography has had a long and colourful history. ... Security is being free from danger. ... OpenSSH (Open Secure Shell), a set of computer programs providing encrypted communication sessions over a computer network, was created as an open alternative to Secure Shell (SSH). ... Systrace is a computer security utility which monitors and limits an applications access to the system by enforcing access policies for system calls under various Unix-like operating systems. ... Hexley, the mascot of Darwin Darwin is a free, open source, Unix-like operating system first released by Apple Computer in 2000. ... Mac OS X is the operating system which is included with all shipping Apple Macintosh computers in the consumer and professional markets. ... Mach is an operating system kernel developed at Carnegie-Mellon University to support operating system research, primarily distributed and parallel computation. ... The Apple Public Source License is the open source license under which Apple Computers Darwin Project was released. ...

Structure

Like AT&T Unix, the BSD kernel is monolithic, meaning that device drivers in the kernel run in privileged mode, as part of the core of the operating system. Early versions of BSD were used to form Sun Microsystems' SunOS, founding the first wave of popular Unix workstations. UNIX® (or Unix) is a portable, multi-task and multi-user computer operating system originally developed by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and Douglas McIlroy. ... It has been suggested that Kernel and its variants be merged into this article or section. ... In processors with memory protection, privileged mode (as opposed to user mode) is the mode in which the operating system kernel runs. ... Sun Microsystems, Inc. ... SunOS was the version of the UNIX operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstations and server systems until the early 1990s. ...

BSD descendants

Unix versions and Unix-like operating systems that descend from BSD include: A Unix-like operating system is one that behaves in a manner similar to a Unix system, while not necessarily conforming to or being certified to any version of the Single UNIX Specification. ...

• BSD/OS (defunct)
• 386BSD (superseded by FreeBSD)
• FreeBSD
  • DragonFly BSD
    • FireFlyBSD
  • Freesbie (live CD version)
  • DesktopBSD (Userland/Kernel synchronized with FreeBSD)
  • PC-BSD (Userland/Kernel synchronized with FreeBSD)
  • PicoBSD
  • TrustedBSD (not an OS, but a project to build trusted extensions for FreeBSD and Darwin)
  • ClosedBSD
  • pfSense
  • m0n0wall
  • Gentoo/FreeBSD
  • Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
  • MidnightBSD (FreeBSD 6 offshoot, focused on the Desktop)
• NetBSD
  • OpenBSD
    • ekkoBSD (defunct)
    • MicroBSD (defunct)
    • MirOS BSD
• NeXTSTEP
  • OpenStep (superseded by Mac OS X and Mac OS X Server)
• Darwin (Core of Mac OS X; Hybrid derivative of FreeBSD 4.5 and NeXTSTEP)
  • Mac OS X
  • OpenDarwin
• HPBSD (defunct)
• Ultrix (defunct)
• SunOS (superseded by Solaris)
  • OpenSolaris
• AOS (defunct)
• more/BSD (defunct)
• MachTen
• Research Unix V8, V9 and V10
  • IX

BSD/OS (also known as BSDi and BSD/386) was a commercial version of the Berkeley Software Distribution operating system that had been developed by the University of California, Berkeleys Computer Science Research Group in the 1970s and 1980s. ... 386BSD, also known as JOLIX, is a free operating system produced from the BSD derived UNIX operating systems for the Intel 80386. ... FreeBSD is a Unix-like free software operating system descended from AT&T UNIX via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4. ... In computing, the DragonFly BSD operating system is a fork of FreeBSD. Matt Dillon, a long-time FreeBSD and Amiga developer, started work on DragonFly BSD in June 2003 and announced it on the FreeBSD mailing lists on 16 July 2003 [1]. Dillon started DragonFly in the belief that the... Categories: Computer stubs ... FreeSBIE FreeSBIE is a LiveCD—an operating system that is able to load directly from a bootable CD without any installation process and without any hard disk. ... DesktopBSD is a UNIX-like, desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD. Its goal is to combine the stability of FreeBSD with the ease-of-use of KDE, which is the default graphical user interface. ... PC-BSD is a Unix-like, desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD. It aims to be easy to install by using a graphical installation program, and easy- and ready-to-use immediately by providing KDE as the default, pre-installed graphical user interface. ... PicoBSD is a single-floppy disk version of FreeBSD, one of the BSD operating system descendants. ... The TrustedBSD project provides a set of trusted operating system extensions to the FreeBSD operating system, targeting the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation (see also Orange Book). ... ClosedBSD is a derivative of FreeBSD aimed at providing firewall and Network Address Translation services. ... Gentoo/FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system created by Gentoo Linux developers in order to bring Gentoo Linux design principles such as Portage to the FreeBSD operating system. ... Debian GNU/kFreeBSD is GNU/kFreeBSD operating system made by Debian for i486-compatible computer architectures. ... NetBSD was the second freely redistributable, open source version of the BSD Unix-like computer operating systems to produce a formal release (after 386BSD) and continues to be actively developed. ... OpenBSD is a freely available, BSD-based Unix-like operating system. ... ekkoBSD is a UNIX-like operating system based on OpenBSD 3. ... MicroBSD is a fork of the UNIX-like BSD operating system descendant OpenBSD 3. ... MirOS BSD (the original name MirBSD is deprecated) is a free operating system, which started as a fork of OpenBSD 3. ... NeXTSTEP Desktop NEXTSTEP is the original object-oriented, multitasking operating system that NeXT Computer, Inc. ... OpenStep is an open object-oriented API specification for an object-oriented operating system that uses any modern operating system as its core, principally developed by NeXT. It is important to recognize that while OpenStep is an API specification, OPENSTEP (all capitalized) is a specific implementation of this OpenStep developed... Mac OS X Server is the server edition of the Mac OS. It is based on the BSD-Unix-based operating system that Apple Computer acquired from NeXT Computer and which formed the basis of the current Mac OS X. Prior to Mac OS X, Apples AppleShare services provided... Hexley, the mascot of Darwin Darwin is a free, open source, Unix-like operating system first released by Apple Computer in 2000. ... Mac OS X is the operating system which is included with all shipping Apple Macintosh computers in the consumer and professional markets. ... Hexley, the mascot of OpenDarwin OpenDarwin is a freely available, multi-platform BSD / Mach 3. ... Ultrix was the brand name of Digital Equipment Corporations (DEC) native Unix systems. ... SunOS was the version of the UNIX operating system developed by Sun Microsystems for their workstations and server systems until the early 1990s. ... This article contains information that has not been verified and thus might not be reliable. ... OpenSolaris is an open source project created by Sun Microsystems to build an open source community development effort around the Solaris Operating Environment technology. ... Academic Operating System (AOS) was IBMs version of 4. ... Mt. ... MachTen is a Unix-like operating system from Tenon Intersystems that runs as an application program (in a virtual machine) on Apple Macintosh computers running Mac OS. MachTen is based on 4. ... Research Unix is a term commonly used to refer to versions of the Unix operating system for DEC PDP-7, PDP-9 PDP-11 and VAX and Interdata 7/32 and 8/32 computers, developed in the Bell Labs Computing Science Research Center. ... Eight Edition Unix, also known as Version 8 Unix or V8, was a version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at Bell Labs. ... Ninth Edition Unix, also known as Version 9 Unix or V9, was a version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at the Bell Labs Information Sciences Research Division, released in September 1986. ... Tenth Edition Unix, also known as Version 10 Unix or V10, was the last version of the Research Unix operating system developed and used internally at Bell Labs. ... IX was a security focused variant of the Tenth Edition Research Unix operating system, developed by Douglas McIlroy and Jonathan Reeds at Bell Labs in 1992. ...

See also

• Bill Joy
• Marshall Kirk McKusick
• Keith Bostic
• 386BSD

William Nelson Joy (born 1954), commonly known as Bill Joy, co-founded Sun Microsystems in 1982 along with Vinod Khosla, Scott McNealy and Andy Bechtolsheim, and served as chief scientist at the company until 2003. ... Marshall Kirk McKusick (b. ... Member of the UCB Computer Science Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berkeley, who created BSD. Worked at Berkeley Software Design, who produced BSD/OS (also known as BSDi), a commercial version of BSD. Now works at Sleepycat Software, who produce Berkeley DB. Author of nvi. ... 386BSD, also known as JOLIX, is a free operating system produced from the BSD derived UNIX operating systems for the Intel 80386. ...

External links

• FreeBSD.org
• NetBSD.org
• OpenBSD.org
• DragonFlyBSD.org
• A timeline of BSD and Research UNIX (FreeBSD website)
• BSD.org
• BSDWiki - A Wiki dedicated to the BSD operating systems
• UNIX History History of UNIX and BSD using detailed diagrams
• VLE - Forums for BSD and other Unix support
• Google Special Search: BSD Unix - "Search web pages about the BSD operating system"
• The BSD Certification Group

Further reading

• Chris Dibona, Mark Stone, Sam Ockman, Open Source (Organization), Brian Behlendorf and J. Scott Bradner. Open Sources: Voices from the Open Source Revolution. O'Reilly & Associates, 1999. Trade paperback, 272 pages. ISBN 156592582. Online at http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/opensources/book/toc.html; Chapter on BSD - "Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix - From AT&T-Owned to Freely Redistributable"