What is FreeBSD?
FreeBSD is a free Unix-like operating system descended from Research Unix via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), also known as “Berkeley Unix.”
Who is Using FreeBSD?
Probably a lot more people than you think. FreeBSD is everywhere. In fact, there’s a good chance you’re using at least some code derived from FreeBSD in your everyday life. If you stream movies via Netflix, chat with friends on WhatsApp, or play the latest PlayStation 4 game sensation, you’re already using FreeBSD. That’s only the beginning though, take a look at just some of the companies and applications using FreeBSD.
- Apple
- Cisco
- Dell/Compellent
- EMC/Isilon
- Intel/McAfee
- iXsystems
- Juniper
- Microsoft Azure
- NetApp
- Netgate
- Netflix
- NYI
- Quest KACE
- Sony
- Stormshield
- Verisign
- VMware
- Yahoo!
FREEBSD HISTORY
FreeBSD is an operating system used to power modern servers, desktops, and embedded platforms. A large community has continually developed it for more than thirty years. Its advanced networking, security, and storage features have made FreeBSD the platform of choice for many of the busiest web sites and most pervasive embedded networking and storage devices.
TIMESHARE OS
Timesharing systems started appearing in the early 1960's, with one of the first being the Atlas supervisor (designed by the Manchester Project in England) for the Atlas brand computer. A timeshared system in that era meant that two people would be sharing the same system, many times setting up a hourly schedule for when they could take over the computer.
MULTICS
Initial planning and development for Multics started in 1964 in Cambridge Massachusetts. Originally it was a cooperative project led by MIT (Project MAC with Fernando Corbató) along with General Electric and Bell Labs. It was developed on the GE 645 computer, which was specially designed for the operating system; the first full system was delivered to MIT in January, 1967.
UNIX
Before Bell Labs left the Multics project, Dennis Ritchie and Ken Thompson got a taste of what Multics could be capable of. They secured funding from the Bell Labs Legal department to purchase a more powerful PDP-11/20 machine. In 1969 Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie and others started working on a new program that utilized the full capabilities of the more powerful computer. This program was called Unics (Uniplexed Information and Computing Service).
1972 UNIX CODE MIGRATES TO C
Dennis Ritchie decided they needed a high-level assembler for UNIX, one with statements that would translate to two or three instructions. This led to his development of the C programming language. The fourth research edition of UNIX was rewritten in C. This made it portable and changed the history of OS's forever.
UNIX BROUGHT TO UC BERKELEY
In 1974, Professor Bob Fabry of the University of California, Berkeley, acquired a UNIX source license from AT&T. Bob Fabry had previously seen UNIX 4 at the ACM Symposium (Association for Computing Machinery) on Operating System Principles in 1973 and was interested in bringing it to the University. The Computer Systems Research Group started to modify and improve AT&T Research Unix. They called this modified version "Berkeley Unix" or "BSD".
1978 1BSD RELEASE
Berkeley Software Distribution (1BSD) created based off of UNIX. 1BSD was an add-on to Version 6 Unix rather than a complete operating system in its own right. About 30 copies of this release were distributed.
2BSD RELEASE
The Second Berkeley Software Distribution (2BSD), released in May 1979, included updated versions of the 1BSD software as well as two new programs by Bill Joy that persist on Unix systems to this day: the vi text editor (a visual version of ex) and the C shell. This was the last version of BSD that Bill Joy worked on for the PDP-11. About 75 copies were shipped.
DARPA FUNDING
In early 1980, DARPA was looking for an operating system that could help with current military projects. A paper by Bill Joy about the capabilities of UNIX systems (specifically BSD) caught their attention. They started funding work at Berkeley in June 1980.
4.2BSD RELEASE
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. It also marked the debut of BSD's daemon mascot in a drawing by John Lasseter that appeared on the cover of the printed manuals distributed by USENIX. This release led to over 1,000 distributions representing a huge number of computers.
4.3BSD-TAHOE
As developers moved away from the aging VAX platform, 4.3BSD-Tahoe was released for the Power 6/32 platform (TAHOE). This release 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.
1991 386BSD AND NET/2
Keith Bostic started a project to reimplement most of the standard Unix utilities without using the AT&T code. The result was the release of Networking Release 2 (Net/2), a nearly complete operating system that was freely distributable. 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.
USL LAWSUIT
BSDi soon found itself in legal trouble with AT&T's Unix System Laboratories (USL) 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. The lawsuit was settled in January 1994, largely in Berkeley's favor. Of the 18,000 files in the Berkeley distribution, only three 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.
FREEBSD CREATED
The development flow of 386BSD was slow and after a period of neglect, a group of 386BSD users decided to branch out on their own and create FreeBSD so that they could keep the operating system up to date. On 19 June 1993, the name FreeBSD was chosen for the project. The first version of FreeBSD was released on November 1993.
FREEBSD PORTS
The FreeBSD Ports and Packages Collection offers a simple way for users and administrators to install applications. The ports collection now offers over 34,000 ports, they started appearing in 1994 after Jordan Hubbard committed "port make macros" to the FreeBSD CVS repository to compliment his package install suite "Makefile".
FREEBSD 2.1.5
FreeBSD 2.1.5 was released in August 1996 and quickly became popular with both internet service providers (ISP) and commercial communities. This release was a significant success for FreeBSD.
FREEBSD JAILS
FreeBSD Jails were released with FreeBSD 4.X in early 2000. The jail mechanism is an implementation of operating system-level virtualizaton which allows system administrators to partition a FreeBSD system into several independent mini-systems or "Jails". This gave sys admins much more power to secure and optimize their FreeBSD systems.
FREEBSD FOUNDATION FOUNDED
The FreeBSD Foundation is a United States-based 501(c)(3) registered non-profit organization dedicated to supporting the FreeBSD project, its development and its community. Funding comes from individual and corporate donations, and is used to sponsor developers for specific activities, purchase hardware and network infrastructure and provide travel grants to developer summits. It was created by Justin Gibbs on March 15, 2000.
LIBARCHIVE
Libarchive was originally developed for FreeBSD 5.3 which was released in late 2004. It is a C programming library that provides streaming access to a variety of different archive formats.
JEMALLOC
Jason Evans developed jemalloc, a memory allocator, in 2005. Around the same time, FreeBSD was in need of a SMP-scalable allocator so Evans integrated jemalloc into FreeBSD's libc and then improved both its scalability and fragmentation behavior.
NEW EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR
Deb Goodkin joined the foundation as the new Executive Director in 2005. She had previously spent 20+ years working in marketing, sales, and development of data storage devices.
PF PORTED
In 2006, Packet Filter, which was originally designed for OpenBSD was ported to FreeBSD
DTRACE
Sun Microsystems, headed by BSD creator Bill Joy, created Dtrace for troubleshooting kernel and application problems on production systems in real time. While the pogram was originally developed for Solaris, it became a standard part of FreeBSD which provides full support for DTrace.
ZFS
In 2005 Sun Microsystems was also working on a new file system, the resulting ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager. The system is scalable and includes extensive protection against data corruption and efficient data compression. ZFS was added to the FreeBSD tree in early 2008.
CAPSICUM
Capsicum is a lightweight OS capability and sandbox framework. It can be used for application compartmentalization, the decomposition of larger bodies of software into isolated components, and limit the impact of software vulnerabilities. Developed at the University of Cambridge, it was first shipped as an optional feature in FreeBSD 9.0 and became a default feature in FreeBSD 10.0
CHERI
In 2012, the University of Cambridge started developing Capability Hardware Enhanced RISC Instructions (CHERI), an outgrowth based off of the earlier Capsicum project. CHERI transposes the Capsicum hybrid capability model into the CPU architecture space, allowing fine-grained compartmentalisation within process address spaces – while continuing to support current software designs.
