Bitrig: The Short-Lived OpenBSD Fork

Bitrig, the operating system that forked OpenBSD back in 2012, is no longer being developed.

Bitrig saw its initial release in 2014 but it's been relatively quiet since. In fact, pretty much forgotten on my end until seeing an LLVM commit this week mentioning Bitrig is dead and has been merged back into OpenBSD. (Update: contrary to the LLVM message, not all of Bitrig has been merged back into OpenBSD.)

Further showing the project is no more is the GitHub project area showing no more work since 2016.

Bitrig's focus was on developing a BSD OS for modern hardware (no legacy platform focus), become an incubator for new developers and ideas, and use commercially-friendly code where available. Among the work done by Bitrig was on porting libc++ to the platform to get rid of libstdc++, FUSE/puffs support, NDB kernel support, PIE support for AMD64, and more. But they had other goals that were never quite accomplished like fine-grained multi-processing, EFI support, Address Sanitizer support, porting the FreeBSD 802.11 stack, and using the LLD linker.

Those wanting to relive Bitrig's goals can find the Wiki area still in tact.

Bitrig now joins the ranks of DesktopBSD, Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, Ging, NeXTBSD, and other no longer actively maintained BSD distributions.