Episode Details

We cover TrueOS/Lumina working to be less dependent on Linux, How the IllumOS network stack works, Throttling the password gropers & the 64 bit inode call for testing.

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Developer Commentary: Philosophy, Evolution of TrueOS/Lumina, and Other Thoughts.

• Philosophy of Development
  • No project is an island. Every single project needs or uses some other external utility, library, communications format, standards compliance, and more in order to be useful.
  • A static project is typically a dead project. A project needs regular upkeep and maintenance to ensure it continues to build and run with the current ecosystem of libraries and utilities, even if the project has no considerable changes to the code base or feature set. “Upstream” decisions can have drastic consequences on your project.
  • Through no fault of yours, your project can be rendered obsolete or broken by changing standards in the global ecosystem that affect your project’s dependencies.

• Operating system focus is key. What OS is the project originally designed for? This determines how the “upstream” dependencies list appears and which “heartbeat” to monitor.

• Evolution of PC-BSD, Lumina, and TrueOS. With these principles in mind – let's look at PC-BSD, Lumina, and TrueOS.

  • PC-BSD : PC-BSD was largely designed around KDE on FreeBSD. KDE/Plasma5 has been available for Linux OS’s for well over a year, but is still not generally available on FreeBSD. It is still tucked away in the experimental “area51” repository where people are trying to get it working first.
  • Lumina : As a developer with PC-BSD for a long time, and a tester from nearly the beginning of the project, I was keenly aware the “winds of change” were blowing in the open-source ecosystem.
  • TrueOS : All of these ecosystem changes finally came to a head for us near the beginning of 2016. KDE4 was starting to deteriorate underneath us, and the FreeBSD “Release” branch would never allow us to compete with the rate of graphics driver or standards changes coming out of the Linux camp.

• The Rename and Next Steps

With all of these changes and the lack of a clear “upgrade” path from PC-BSD to the new systems, we decided it was necessary to change the project itself (name and all). To us, this was the only way to ensure people were aware of the differences, and that TrueOS really is a different kind of project from PC-BSD. Note this was not a “hostile takeover” of the PC-BSD project by rabid FreeBSD fanatics. This was more a refocusing of the PC-BSD project into something that could ensure longevity and reliability for the foreseeable future.

Does TrueOS have bugs and issues? Of course! That is the nature of “rolling” with upstream changes all the time. Not only do you always get the latest version of something (a good thing), you also find yourself on the “front line” for finding and reporting bugs in those same applications (a bad thing if you l