Pierre Pronchery

The major BSD Operating Systems, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, tend to evolve independently from each other. However, they still share large parts of their respective vision and idioms - in other words, they have way more similarities than differences to each other. An important common requirement is to support a wide range of computer devices and equipment. Unfortunately, device drivers from a BSD system are usually not directly suitable for the others. The differences vary in different amounts depending on each subsystem, bus, kernel API, etc. This presentation will illustrate the situation with a few examples, and work as a call for volunteers from every BSD project. The goal is to explore areas where more code can be shared among the different BSDs, with a focus on device drivers. Generally, good ideas deserve a chance to be visible across the different systems!

The aim of this presentation is to attempt to create a common effort, in any shape or form, in order to foster cooperation between the major BSD systems in terms of driver development in particular. The ideal outcome of this presentation could be the creation of a committee and/or of a mailing-list - formal or informal - which could convene regularly and share the state of the development for each BSD, and identify areas where designs could converge towards easier code sharing of device drivers for instance. I am myself involved with the NetBSD project (khorben@), member of the Board of the NetBSD Foundation, and would happily coordinate on that side.

Status report for the EdgeBSD Project

Status report for the EdgeBSD Project.

This presentation will summarize the status and current roadmap of the EdgeBSD Project, which started from the NetBSD codebase in mid-2013. The aims at broadening and community development around NetBSD thanks to a tentatively more modern development workflow, based on Git.

The DeforaOS desktop environment is one of three major components from the DeforaOS Operating System project. It is Open Source and meant to be portable, currently supporting Linux, *BSD, MacOS X, and possibly more. More than just an alternative desktop, it can be adapted for embedded use, be it with a stylus or with finger-based interaction. It has already been released and presented as a Debian-based smartphone (Openmoko) and a NetBSD-based tablet device for instance.

The DeforaOS Project was started in 2005 with one specific goal: seamlessly integrating software on personal devices (workstation, laptop, PDA...), possibly involving the migration of running applications across them. While this is still being worked on (with a working prototype), the development of the project involved a deep understanding of the design and implementation of existing systems. Therefore, a number of components has been developed again from scratch, so as to more easily support the more innovative components.

Doing so quickly highlighted three major parts: a self-hosted environment (libc, basic tools, assembler and compiler), the distributed framework (main objective of the project), and a desktop environment which is what will be presented here. While initially intended to fully grasp the specific constraints of GUI applications when supporting the distributed framework for the DeforaOS Project, it is meant to be fully usable and sufficient for regular desktop use, including a file manager, desktop manager, panel, web browser, e-mail client, telephony application and more.

The DeforaOS desktop is currently based on the Gtk+ toolkit, usually requiring version 2.6 or newer (including Gtk+ 3.0). It can be found packaged for Debian (via the hackable:1 project), FreeBSD (official ports), NetBSD and more (via pkgsrc).

This presentation will detail the reasons, objective, status and roadmap of the EdgeBSD project, which started from the NetBSD codebase earlier this year. It aims at broadening and experimenting around community development around NetBSD thanks to a tentatively more modern development workflow, based on Git.

NetBSD is arguably the first community-based Free/Open Source Software project: it featured a public version control system and mailing-lists back during its inception, 20 years ago. Driven by its very thorough approach to development and technical design, it gained and deserved a reputation of being clean, portable, and simply a cool platform to work and research on.

Over the years, NetBSD received contributions from hundreds of developers, pioneering in areas such as cryptography, host security, networking, and virtualization. However, its rigorous code & member integration process can also be seen as harmful, especially when compared to modern project management and distributed version control systems.

This is where EdgeBSD kicks in. A new member of the family of BSD-based Operating Systems, it is starting development with the current NetBSD codebase and Git for Source Code Management. Package management is based on pkgsrc.

The primary goal of EdgeBSD is to provide an ambitious environment for working as a bigger community on the NetBSD Project. This will be achieved thanks to a more modern development infrastructure, while taking a more aggressive stance on integrating and enabling features (many readily available).

Ultimately, EdgeBSD should be just as fun and attractive as a Research & Development platform while delivering a modern, robust, and industrial-grade system for all ranges of computer devices, thanks to a more versatile and personalized development workflow.

The AFUL, a French non-profit organization, has launched a contest called AFULTab to challenge developers to propose a FOSS tablet environment with the hardware of their choice. NetBSD enthusiast and DeforaOS developer is currently working on his own proposal, both adapting NetBSD for tablet hardware and polishing the user interface from the DeforaOS desktop environment. This talk will summarize the work done, in progress and planned before the official release date on May 1st.