Episode Details

This week on the show, Allan and I are going to be showing you a very interesting interview we did talking about using FreeBSD to drive

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Headlines

FreeBSD Core Team Election

• Core.9 has been elected, and will officially take over from Core.8 on Wednesday, 6 July 2016
• Many thanks to the outgoing members of the core team for their service over the last 2 years
• 214 out of 325 eligible voters (65.8%) cast their votes in an election counting 14 candidates.
• The top nine candidates are, in descending order of votes received:
• 180 84.1% Ed Maste (incumbent)
• 176 82.2% George V. Neville-Neil (incumbent)
• 171 79.9% Baptiste Daroussin (incumbent)
• 168 78.5% John Baldwin
• 166 77.6% Hiroki Sato (incumbent)
• 147 68.7% Allan Jude
• 132 61.7% Kris Moore
• 121 56.5% Benedict Reuschling
• 108 50.5% Benno Rice
• There was no tie for ninth.
• BSDNow and the entire community would also like to extend their thanks to all those who stood for election to the core team
• Next week’s core meeting will encompass the members of Core.8 and Core.9, as responsibility for any outstanding items will be passed from outgoing members of core to the new incoming members ***

Why I run OpenBSD

• This week we have a good article / blog post talking about why the posted has moved to OpenBSD from Linux.

“One thing I learned during my travels between OSs: consistency is everything.

Most operating systems seem to, at least, keep a consistent interface between themselves and binaries / applications. They do this by keeping consistent APIs (Application Programming Interfaces) and ABIs (Application Binary Interfaces). If you take a binary from a really old version of Linux and run or build it on a brand-spanking new install of Linux, it will likely Just Work™. This is great for applications and developers of applications. Vendors can build binaries for distribution and worry less about their product working when it gets out in the wild (sure this binary built in 2016 will run on RedHat AS2.1!!).“

• The author then goes through another important part of the consistency argument, with what he calls “UPI” or “User Program Interfaces”. In other words, while the ABI may be stable, what about the end-user tooling that the user directly has to interact with on a daily basis?

“This inconsistency seems to have come to be when Linux started getting wireless support. For some reason someone (vendors, maybe?) decided that ifconfig wasn’t a good place to let users interact with their wireless device. Maybe they felt their device was special? Maybe there were technical reasons? The bottom line is, someone decided to create a new utility to manage a wireless device… and then another one came along… pretty soon there was iwconfig(8), iw(8), ifconfig(8), some funky thing that let windows drivers interface with Linux.. and one called ip(8) I am sure there are others I am forgetting, but I prefer to forget. I have moved onto greener pastures and the knowledge of these programs