| Author: | The OpenBSD Project |
| Developer: | Thorsten Glaser, Benny Siegert, Ádám Hóka, others |
| Family: | Unix, BSD |
| Source Model: | Open source |
| Released: | OpenBSD-current-mirabilos #0[1] |
| Frequently Updated: | yes |
| Kernel Type: | Monolithic |
| Ui: | mksh, IceWM, evilwm |
| License: | Mostly BSD, GPL, MirOS Licence |
| Working State: | Current [2] |
| Supported Platforms: | i386, SPARC |
| Updatemodel: | Binary security updates for stable releases |
| Package Manager: | MirPorts, pkgsrc |
MirOS BSD (originally called MirBSD) is a free and open source operating system which started as a fork of OpenBSD 3.1 in August 2002.[3] It was intended to maintain the security of OpenBSD with better support for European localisation. Since then it has also incorporated code from other free BSD descendants, including NetBSD, MicroBSD and FreeBSD. Code from MirOS BSD was also incorporated into ekkoBSD, and when ekkoBSD ceased to exist, artwork, code and developers ended up working on MirOS BSD for a while.
Unlike the three major BSD distributions, MirOS BSD supports only the x86 and SPARC architectures.
One of the project's goals was to be able to port the MirOS userland to run on the Linux kernel, hence the deprecation of the MirBSD name in favour of MirOS. .
MirOS BSD originated as OpenBSD-current-mirabilos, an OpenBSD patchkit, but soon grew on its own after some differences in opinion[4] between the OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt and Thorsten Glaser. Despite the forking, MirOS BSD was synchronised with the ongoing development of OpenBSD, thus inheriting most of its good security history, as well as NetBSD and other BSD flavours.[5]
One goal was to provide a faster integration cycle for new features and software than OpenBSD. According to the developers, "controversial decisions are often made differently from OpenBSD; for instance, there won't be any support for SMP in MirOS". There will also be a more tolerant software inclusion policy, and "the end result is, hopefully, a more refined BSD experience".[6]
Another goal of MirOS BSD was to create a more "modular" base BSD system, similar to Debian. While MirOS Linux (linux kernel + BSD userland) was discussed by the developers sometime in 2004,[7] it has not materialised.
The most important differences to OpenBSD were:[9]
Aside from cooperating with other BSDs, submitting patches to upstream software authors, and synergy effects with FreeWRT, there was an active cooperation with Grml both in inclusion[11] [12] and technical[13] areas. Other projects, such as Debian[14] are also fed with MirSoftware.
MirPorts was a derivative of the OpenBSD ports tree and was developed by Benny Siegert. MirPorts does not use the package tools from OpenBSD written in Perl, but continues to maintain the previous C-based tools. New features are in-place package upgrades and installing a MirPorts instance as a non-root user. Unlike OpenBSD ports, MirPorts are not tied to specific OS versions and even on stable releases using the newest version was recommended. MirLibtool was a modified version of GNU libtool 1.5 installed by MirPorts to build shared libraries in a portable way.
Multiple platforms are supported "out of the box":
Following the MirOS BSD policy of faster software availability to the user, many ports removed for political reasons in OpenBSD (e.g. all the DJB software or the Flash Plugin) have been kept in MirPorts and can continue to be used. MirPorts was intended to be a place for unofficial or rejected OpenBSD ports.