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 TEST CENTER BSD's strength lies in devilish details By Tom Yager November 2, 2001 WITH ALL THE PLAY Linux has been getting in the news lately, you'd think no one else thought of gathering brilliant developers, working them to distraction for no pay, and binding their product into a commercial-grade operating system. But before Linux earned its enterprise stripes, BSD Unix was humming away at such high-traffic Internet sites as Yahoo, Hotmail, and Walnut Creek.
BSD is recognized for its stability, security, small footprint (the standard distribution runs in 5MB of RAM), and ease of installation. BSD is an excellent performer, too; although in recent months, Linux has narrowly bested BSD in published performance tests. Those who favor BSD wouldn't switch to Linux if it were twice as fast. Yet their devotion isn't nostalgic. BSD has plenty of technical prowess, with recent releases adding features such as gigabit Ethernet and a performance-tweaked VM (virtual memory) subsystem. BSD's release schedule is not as aggressive as Linux's, but BSD manages to keep up with its users' needs through interim releases. The BSD operating system traces its roots back to projects started at the University of California at Berkeley in the mid-1970s. Today, four variants of BSD Unix -- FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and BSD/OS -- continue BSD's tradition of robust, completely open, standards-based server software. Each flavor of BSD has its strengths and followers. NetBSD's forte is its multiplatform support, running on everything from PCs and Macintoshes to Sony's PlayStation 2. NetBSD's continuing support of legacy hardware makes it popular among the teachers, students, and hobbyists who use discarded and donated computers as educational tools. NetBSD porting projects are an important training ground for system-level developers. If NetBSD is the academician in this group, OpenBSD is the cop. OpenBSD's founders picked through every line of the BSD code base looking for security holes and other exploitable errors. The OpenBSD team brags that its operating system's default security has never been breached to allow remote privileged access to an OpenBSD server. The most popular BSD variant is FreeBSD, which was upgraded to Version 4.4 in mid-September. Alameda, Calif.-based Wind River Systems owns the FreeBSD trademark and also markets BSD/OS, the commercial version of BSD. In October Wind River pulled the plug on its financial support for FreeBSD after an unsuccessful search for a funding partner. The FreeBSD developers employed by Wind River have been released, leaving the future of the project somewhat in doubt. Packaged versions of FreeBSD 4.4 will hit store shelves as scheduled, but Wind River will no longer offer technical support. Wind River's involvement aside, FreeBSD is a community project, as are NetBSD and OpenBSD. A core team of FreeBSD developers manages a larger team of elite volunteer coders called "committers." The committers, who number approximately 200, are authorized to make direct changes to portions of the FreeBSD source tree. Each committer is hand-picked for his or her specific expertise. Thanks to this structure, FreeBSD manages to be responsive to changing requirements while maintaining a high degree of quality. BSD/OS Internet Server 4.2 is a commercial, supported edition of BSD. BSD/OS includes everything from other BSD releases, plus Java 1.2 and IPv6. Community support for BSD is strong, but BSD/OS offers companies the advantage of Wind River's professional support for critical issues. BSD can't match Linux's massive catalog of compatible commercial and open-source software, but BSD's library of applications is impressive nonetheless. All of the BSD varieties share with Linux such standard features and facilities as the X Window System GUI and the BSD Sockets TCP/IP network library. Most open-source developers make their programs compatible with both Linux and BSD, but apps written solely for Linux still have two ways to run on BSD: the Linux emulator and the ports collection. BSD's Linux emulator executes Linux applications directly and works well enough to handle huge commercial apps such as Oracle. The ports collection may be BSD's most unique and worthwhile feature. The centrally managed library contains nearly 6,000 open-source ports, including many mature enterprise applications and services that have been written for or patched to run on BSD. When you install BSD, you have the option of installing a local copy of the collection. When you need to install a ported application, you locate it in your local ports collection and type a simple command to retrieve it. This single step downloads the application from a free, public server, downloads all of the software on which it depends, patches BSD if necessary, compiles the software and installs it on your system. The same mechanism can be used to pick up the latest updates to BSD. BSD's reputation for stability and security makes it a popular choice for network services, especially for companies that find what they need within the BSD discs (or downloads) and the rich ports collection. FreeBSD faces some challenges, but it and other BSD variants will continue to thrive. Technical Director Tom Yager (tom_yager@infoworld.com) is the author of Unix Program Development for IBM PCs.
 The four flavors of BSD
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