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FreeBSD is a free, open source Unix-like operating system descended from Unix via the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) branch through 386BSD and 4.4BSD. It runs on processors compatible with the Intel x86 family, as well as on the DEC Alpha, the UltraSPARC processors by Sun Microsystems, the Itanium (IA-64) and AMD64 processors. Support for the PowerPC and ARM architectures is in development. FreeBSD is developed together as an entire operating system. The kernel, all of the expected userland utilities such as the shell and the device drivers are held in the same source code revision tracking tree (CVS). This is in contrast to Linux, a similar and more well known free Unix-like operating system, which is developed as a kernel by one group, userland utilities by others such as the GNU project, and put together with applications into distributions that package all the parts together by others. As an operating system, FreeBSD is generally regarded as being quite reliable and robust, and FreeBSD is the only free operating system listed in Netcraft's longest uptime list for web servers. [1] (http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html) Missing image
BSD-daemon-rendering.png A rendering of the BSD daemon by Poul-Henning Kamp
History and developmentInitial development of FreeBSD was started in 1993, and took its sources from 386BSD. However, due to concerns about the legality of all the sources used in 386BSD, FreeBSD re-engineered much of the system with the FreeBSD 2.0 release in January of 1995 using the 4.4BSD-Lite release from the University of California, Berkeley. The FreeBSD Handbook (http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/) includes more historical information about the genesis of FreeBSD (http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/history.html). The current (November 2004) FreeBSD release is FreeBSD 5.3.[2] (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/announce.html) FreeBSD developers maintain (at least) two branches of simultaneous development: a -STABLE branch of FreeBSD, from which releases are cut about once every 4-6 months. The latest 4-STABLE release of FreeBSD is 4.11, this is the last of 4-STABLE releases. The first 5-STABLE release was 5.3. The other development branch, -CURRENT, contains aggressive new kernel and userspace features. If a feature gets stable and mature it is eventually backported ("MFC" - Merge from CURRENT) to the STABLE branch. FreeBSD 5 includes a number of new features, including many that are security related. The TrustedBSD project was formed for the express purpose of adding trusted operating system functionality to the FreeBSD operating system. An extensible mandatory access control framework (the TrustedBSD MAC Framework), filesystem Access Control Lists (ACLs) and the new UFS2 filesystem all came from TrustedBSD. Some of the TrustedBSD functionality has been integrated into the NetBSD and OpenBSD operating systems as well. FreeBSD 5 also has support for encrypted filesystems, through the GDBE system written by Poul-Henning Kamp. [3] (http://www.freebsd.org/~phk/) Other major FreeBSD 5 functions are related to more finely grained in-kernel locking to improve SMP performance, and a m:n (kernel:userland) threading solution called KSE which will be the default threading (pthreads) library, starting with 5.3. PortsThe FreeBSD ports system provides a consistent way of installing software ported to FreeBSD. It uses Makefiles laid out in a directory hierarchy, so software can be deinstalled and installed with the make command. Each port, or software package, is maintained by a 'port maintainer,' an individual who is responsible for staying current with the latest software developments. Precompiled (binary) ports are called "packages", and are available for download. The pre-compiled packages are generally separated into two sections, one intended for use with the 4.x code branch (4.9-RELEASE, 4.10-RELEASE, 4.10-STABLE) and another for use with the 5.x branch. In almost all cases a package created for the 4.x branch of FreeBSD can be installed in versions 5.2.1-RELEASE and beyond without difficulty. LicenseFreeBSD is released under the BSD License, which allows everyone to use and redistribute FreeBSD as they wish, as long as they do not remove the copyright notice and the BSD license itself (which does not prohibit re-distribution under another license). Derivatives
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