Bitrig Is Still Around, But Without An Official Release

Written by Michael Larabel in BSD on 2 December 2013 at 12:29 AM EST. 31 Comments
BSD
Last year I wrote about OpenBSD being forked as Bitrig, a new BSD operating system. It's been a year and a half since the project's inception but there still isn't an official release, except there are development snapshots and there is still development work happening.

Bitrig is still aspiring to be a free, fast, and secure open-source operating system. The Bitrig.org project site still reads, "We are in the process of getting our first public release ready. Please be patient and check back often to see where we are at. The plan is to have something available for public consumption soon. We currently do have snapshots available."

In going through the Bitrig Git repository for the base system, there's still frequent work happening. At the time of writing the latest commit was just hours ago and multiple commits happen almost daily. Operating system snapshots are available.

Hopefully 2014 will bring an official Bitrig release... But for now we have FreeBSD 10.0 coming soon and there was the very exciting DragonFlyBSD 3.6 release a few days ago.

I was reminded of Bitrig this weekend when a new patch appeared to fix the open-source Radeon xf86-video-ati driver in being compiled by LLVM's Clang. One of the early changes for Bitrig -- and also now done by FreeBSD and other BSD platforms -- is using LLVM's Clang C/C++ compiler over GCC. The Radeon driver had an issue with optimized Clang builds due to some variables being uninitialized, which is corrected by this patch.
Related News
About The Author
Michael Larabel

Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

Popular News This Week