Distributions and Operating Systems: GNU/Linux, BSD and More

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Nov 20, 2025

• The Lions Operating System ☛ LionsOS 0.3.0

  LionsOS is an operating system based on the seL4 microkernel with the goal of making the achievements of seL4 accessible. That is, to provide performance, security, and reliability.

  LionsOS is being developed by the Trustworthy Systems research group at UNSW Sydney in Australia.

• Stefano Marinelli ☛ Static Web Hosting on the Intel N150: FreeBSD, SmartOS, NetBSD, OpenBSD and Linux Compared

  Instead of synthetic CPU or I/O tests, I wanted to measure how different operating systems behave when they serve a small static site with nginx, both over HTTP and HTTPS.

  This is not meant to be a super rigorous benchmark. I used the default nginx packages, almost default configuration, and did not tune any OS specific kernel settings. In my experience, careful tuning of kernel and network parameters can easily move numbers by several tens of percentage points. The problem is that very few people actually spend time chasing such optimizations. Much more often, once a limit is reached, someone yells “we need mooooar powaaaar” while the real fix would be to tune the existing stack a bit.

  So the question I want to answer here is more modest and more practical: [...]

• BSD

  • Liam Proven ☛ How the Linux-vs-BSD culture clash looked in the 1980s/1990s

    (Repurposed HN comment.)
    
    The BSD/Linux thing was there right from the start, but it was more complicated than a simple us-vs-them. The thing is that there were a whole bunch of competing commercial Unix-like OSes in the 1980s.

    But there were other prejudices as well.

    In Proper Grown-Up Unix terms, PCs were toys, poorly-made weird little things that were no more than office equipment. So nothing worth using ran on the 386.

  • University of Toronto ☛ We're (now) moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD for firewalls

    A bit over a year ago I wrote about why we'd become interested in FreeBSD; to summarize, FreeBSD appeared promising as a better, easier to manage host operating system for PF-based things. Since then we've done enough with FreeBSD to have decided that we actively prefer it to OpenBSD. It's been relatively straightforward to convert our firewall OpenBSD PF rulesets to FreeBSD PF and the resulting firewalls have clearly better performance on our 10G network than our older OpenBSD ones did (with less tuning).

• SUSE/OpenSUSE

  • OpenSUSE ☛ Hack Week Project Targets Bug Triage Automation

    The Bugzilla Goes AI - Phase 1 project proposes using a locally hosted AI model to summarize bugs, recommend next steps and deliver a daily digest through a simple Web Interface.

  • Michael Ablassmeier: building SLES 16 vagrant/libvirt images using guestfs tools

    SLES 16 has been released. In the past, SUSE offered ready built vagrant images. Unfortunately that’s not the case anymore, as with more recent SLES15 releases the official images were gone.