9 hours ago
OpenBSD 7.9 was already on the 6.18.y longterm support version for the drm(4) drivers, Jonathan Gray (jsg@) completed the update back in March, sponsored by the OpenBSD Foundation.
https://marc.info/?l=openbsd-cvs&m=177310343311915&w=2
I just wanted to highlight Jonathan's continued efforts backporting updates in my usual "HYPE" post series for the upcoming OpenBSD 8.0 release.
(I'm the author of the mastodon post that was shared.)
8 hours ago
Note that OpenBSD is on 7.9 now and all releases are possible breaking changes.
They release every six month and increment by 0.1. And after 0.9 they rollover to the next whole number.
So don’t think of version “8.0” as a major release per se, since OpenBSD is a fixed schedule release - not a Major.Minor release.
6 hours ago
> OpenBSD is on 7.9 now and all releases are possible breaking changes.
> don’t think of version “8.0” as a major release per se, since OpenBSD is a fixed schedule release - not a Major.Minor release
Are these two statements a contradiction?
Thinking out loud, maybe the spirit of your comment is, “Every OpenBSD release is possibly a breaking change; the version numbers don’t mean anything.” Otherwise, I don’t see how it’s relevant to mention the current release ends in .9, then explain how the next version is constructed.
Please help me understand. I truly have no sense of how things work in OpenBSD land. The spirit of my comment here is entirely in good faith, just trying to learn.
5 hours ago
What they meant is that, in terms of scale, the jump from 7.8 to 7.9 is more or less the same as the jump from 7.9 to 8.0
This is similar to Linux kernel versioning
5 hours ago
I think they mean in addition to all releases possibly having breaking changes, the developers did not pick 8.0 instead of 7.10 because they thought this is a significant milestone, but instead because they always roll from N.9 to (N+1).0.
OpenBSD predates popular semantic versioning conventions by a few years.
4 hours ago
nta but yes your spirit reading is correct. They're saying OpenBSD treats the version number as an integer, and every update adds .1. So 7.8 -> 7.9 -> 8.0, regardless of how significant or breaking the changes are.
8 hours ago
How does GPL code get ported to BSD?
7 hours ago
Most of the common drm code and kernel gpu drivers are already MIT/X licensed for historical reasons, same goes for the Mesa GL and Xorg components.
4 hours ago
Huh; I would have thought that importing MIT code into a GPL codebase (like the Linux kernel) essentially “beats out” the original MIT-licensing and instead creates an GPL-licensed fork of said code; thus making such forked code ineligible for re-import into an MIT/BSD-licensed project like the OpenBSD kernel (unless that project wants to be infected by the component’s licensing and become GPL-licensed in turn.)
Are you saying instead that the DRM drivers in the Linux kernel (the in-tree parts, I mean, not the firmware blobs) exist as an island of MIT-licensed code inside the otherwise GPL-licensed codebase?
Or are these parts of the Linux kernel not even technically in-tree, but rather developed in a separate canonical repo and frequently synchronized into the kernel as a vendored dependency? That’s the only way I can see this working; but it’s unclear to me why this state of things would have been maintained for any length of time when the Linux kernel was the only consumer…
3 hours ago
> I would have thought […]
That‘s a common misunderstanding how licenses work on HN. Often even worse: "MIT allows relicensing" (no it doesn‘t, and sub-licensing is something different).
Behold the full set of licenses and copyright notices that apply to the Linux kernel, scanned with FOSSology[1] and ScanCode[2], and curated by licensing professionals: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Open-Source-Compliance/pac...
Yes, you need to supply all of those if you distribute the Linux kernel in binary form. No, most companies don‘t do that in practice. Yes, they are in breach of all those licenses. Yes, next kernel release there will be changes.
I‘ve long been procrastinating on writing a blog post about exactly that.
4 hours ago
No, you don't get to change the license on someone else's code just because you import it into your project.
4 hours ago
Each file has their own license, and they are on the same repo.
4 hours ago
The GPL is (in)famously viral. You can't base something on a GPLed codebase and say that your thing isn't covered by the GPL. The GPL is specifically designed to forbid that specific thing.
4 hours ago
You can take BSD-licensed code and package it into a GPL bundle, which is what the kernel is doing. You can also extract the BSD-licensed code without the GPL-licensed code and it will be fine.
4 hours ago
It depends on how closely the code is coupled to the rest of the project. Traditionally, sharing an address space carried the GPL taint. There's nuance to it, of course, but the question was never really settled, and nowadays people just ignore licenses.
3 hours ago
OpenBSD has a strict "no GPL" policy. It does not incorporate GPL code in the kernel, and it has slowly weeded out GPL code from userland. This is one reason why it builds with Clang instead of GCC.
If Linux DRM weren't licensed under more permissive terms, OpenBSD simply wouldn't permit its inclusion.
7 hours ago
I wonder if it's downloaded after installation, like nonfree codecs in many Linux distros
5 hours ago
Yes. The firmware blobs get downloaded at the end of the install via `fw_update`.
10 hours ago
9 hours ago
There are parts of me that don't want to say this but will LLMs actually help Linux and smaller OSes by accelerating reverse engineering hardware that doesn't have open/good enough specs? Will we reach a point where hibernate works reliably on Linux? Weird hardware can be used well by FreeBSD?
8 hours ago
This has nothing to do with LLMs. The *BSDs have been porting Linux video drivers for years. This is just the status quo of how video drivers on OpenBSD work.
5 hours ago
I see quite a lot of announcements of compatibility and porting efforts -you would never know if someone used an LLM to help, but I would bet money it is being done without admitting it.
5 hours ago
Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean they don't. As I said, the same people have been doing this for years, long before LLMs. They need to re-sync with upstream periodically so that's why you see announcements of new stuff.
4 hours ago
What makes you say I don't know how to do it?
Also, people who have been doing something for years are exactly the people who benefit the most from having pointless toil removed from the workflows.
Attitudes like yours are exactly why we won't know what level of AI assistance is used. People won't admit it because there is a lot of downside to doing so - especially in communities like this.
4 hours ago
Because you assumed they would direct an LLM to do it and lie about it. Seems like projection to me.
4 hours ago
Your logic is ridiculous - I wouldn't post publicly like this if I was projecting.
It is just an obvious fact that when there are hostile swarms of people like you, that it is prudent to not disclose when you used an llm to unblock yourself.
I was being very neutral about this obvious fact and you became irrationally hostile.
9 hours ago
I'm very happy and lucky to have to a modern laptop where everything just works including S3 hibernation in FreeBSD.
MSI Modern 15