A dissatisfied discussion of the NextBSD talk being “just marketing” was brought to my attention recently. The gist of it is that the premature publicity resulting from Jordan’s recent BAFUG talk has inadverently created expectations that we’re not delivering on.

What works (and does not) now:

  • The basic ecosystem of launchd, notifyd, asld, and libdispatch work.
  • These can be installed by cloning the NextBSD repo from github, building GENERIC or MACHTEST kernels, installing a new world on an existing 10.x or CURRENT system, and then following the instructions in the README.
  • Launchd will start the initial jobs that are part of the repo now.
  • At this moment the release ISO installer does not work due to an interaction between launchd and the environment created by make release for the installer.

What will work in the very near future:

  • Somewhere between this weekend and mid-September we will have the installer working. This means that an existing FreeBSD install won’t be necessary to try out NextBSD. This is obviously pretty rudimentary and even before the unanticipated wave of interest a source of displeasure for me. Under ‘Milestones’ I refer to this as Milestone 0.
  • The remaining issues currently fall in to Milestone 1 and I expect to have them addressed by the end of September. At that time the system should, in some sense, be complete with future work being to convert rc and to tie notifyd in to potential consumers.

To potential users I apologize for the misunderstanding and I sincerely hope that you will stay tuned in.