This has a feeling very much of a research project to see how well an init framework like launchd would work in FreeBSD. There's been talk amongst a lot of developers that the current init needs to be replaced by /something/, but that something is still up in the air.
It's not just launchd, it's the entire low-level OS X userspace.
Nor is it research. It very much appears to be commercial, since it's undertaken by iXsystems. They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit. End goal appears to be get upstream FreeBSD in it, too.
There's nothing of research value here. It's Mach. It's practically an anachronism to do such a thing deliberately.
I actually have quite a lot to say on this topic, so I think I'll write an in-depth blog post on it.
Not necessarily anachronstic, considering the iXsysems CTO is Jordan Hubbard, who was previously at Apple as director of UNIX technology. Out with the old in with the less old?
They're providing enough of a Mach-style interface that would allow them to use launchd. Basically, they're creating a compatibility layer in the kernel that allows it to pretend to be Mach.
> They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit.
And this is why I won't use any of the "FreeBSD made easy!" distros: FreeNAS, PC-BSD, pfSense, etc. Better to learn how to configure the official release to your intended use case.
> CTO is Jordan Hubbard
I swear, every last OS always has to have one of those "let's replace all this stuff that's worked for 40 years and go with all this brand-new, much more complicated stuff because old = bad, new = good!" types.
People just don't like the idea of incremental improvements, nor find beauty in simplicity anymore.
> They're integrating it into FreeNAS and I think PC-BSD will follow suit
Are they planning to rebase FreeNAS on this? Why not just stay on a normal FreeBSD base? Or will there not be much noticeable difference feature wise from the user's perspective?
I can appreciate the idea of integrating launchd as a new init system and I know people have been working on that for a while, but this seems like it's much more than just that to me. Or am I misunderstanding?
It's more than that, yes. It's the entire low-level OS X system libraries like libSystem, libasl, libdispatch, libnotify and so forth.
I'm not sure if they're going to wholly rebase FreeNAS on top of NextBSD, but the launchd integration has been there in feature branches for a while now.
