NeXTBSD Is Creating Lots Of BSD Excitement

NeXTBSD was announced last weekend and it's easily been the most emailed in tip all week. Lots of Phoronix readers are curious about this new operating system derived from FreeBSD 10.1 that adds in various Mac OS X components. NeXTBSD seems like a very interesting open-source project while this morning I finally found the time to explore more about it and write-up a post.

NeXTBSD was announced last week by Jordan Hubbard and Kip Macy at the Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group (BAFUG). NeXTBSD / FreeBSD X is based on the FreeBSD-CURRENT kernel while adding in Mach IPC, Libdispatch, notifyd, asld, launchd, and other components derived from Apple's open-source code for OS X.

The basic launchd/notifyd/asld/libdispatch stack atop their "fork" of FreeBSD is working along with other basic components of their new design. Within the next month they hope to have an installer working for their OS plus fix remaining issues, as outlined via this blog post.

Those wishing to learn about NeXTBSD can see the announcement video below. Or there are the slides via SlideShare.net.

Code for the project can be found via GitHub and their website is NextBSD.org.