4.4BSD-Lite2 VS InitWare

BSD was last released in 1995, v4.4 Lite R2. Trust me you'd hate it because it wouldn't run on your hardware at all.

The GNU system was originally developed largely on BSD platforms, and 4.4BSD-Lite2, antecedent of all the modern BSD platforms, was a complete OS only thanks to these components from GNU: Emacs, File, Gas, GCC, Gawk, GDB, GROFF, and GZIP. Apart from FreeBSD (which is trying to appeal to anti-GPL vendors by removing as much GPL code as possible), I don't think there's that much antipathy towards the GPL from the other BSD platforms, and definitely not from DragonFly BSD or my native NetBSD.

Fear not. They get to be part of the future too.

> Yes indeed, I should've expanded to requiring user namespaces and other kernel magic I can't expect from any random box i wanna work on.

That's fair, do have to make sure to avoid to modules that do user systemd services.

Longer term, though, I am hoping https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare will help with the userland part. And I hope to personally help with things like

https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-arch/2022-January...

https://lore.kernel.org/lkml/f8457e20-c3cc-6e56-96a4-3090d7d...

to get us more sane cross-platform system calls.

I know, but support is still in FreeBSD. My big long term plan is:

1. Work on FreeBSD cross in Nixpkgs, because I need a way to pin forks and run nice tests without going insane. (We already have NetBSD cross.)

2. Rig up a booting image that uses https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare, the fork of systemd.

3. Add support to CloudABI in initware.

4. Bang on drum for other OSes and upstream systemd to implement this stuff we can can good portable abstractions -- I think this is our best shot to get "portable containers".

I haven't bothered to have a beef with systemd, but some of us have discussed https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare to support non-Linux kernels. That would be really fun.

I'm the first to admit that I'm ignorant of the facts here, but seeing that a systemd fork ran on OpenBSD for the first time two months ago does not give me confidence that it's "an option" in the sense that you can trust it to work well.

And to be pedantic (this is an OpenBSD thread, after all), it's not "systemd", it's a fork of systemd called "InitWare", and the GitHub repo describes it as "alpha software".

Someone also pointed out in the discussion you linked that it doesn't seem to include journald. Here's a relevant PR: https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare/pull/27

The project GitHub is found at https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare

You may have heard of InitWare https://github.com/InitWare/InitWare. Discussions, note that one of the titles is misleading: