Video Decode and Presentation API for Unix ( VDPAU ) is a royalty-free application programming interface (API) as well as its implementation as free and open-source library ( libvdpau ) distributed under the MIT License . VDPAU is also supported by Nvidia .
79-468: The VDPAU interface is to be implemented by device drivers , such as Nvidia GeForce driver , nouveau , amdgpu , to offer end-user software, such as VLC media player or GStreamer , a standardized access to available video decompression acceleration hardware in the form of application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) blocks on graphics processing units (GPU), such as Nvidia's PureVideo or AMD's Unified Video Decoder and make use of it. VDPAU
158-454: A kernel and drivers, and relying on third-parties such as GNU for system software. The FreeBSD source code is generally released under a permissive BSD license , as opposed to the copyleft GPL used by Linux. The project includes a security team overseeing all software shipped in the base distribution. Third-party applications may be installed using the pkg package management system or from source via FreeBSD Ports . The project
237-618: A message-based protocol for communicating with their devices—as user-mode drivers. If such drivers malfunction, they do not cause system instability. The Kernel-Mode Driver Framework (KMDF) model continues to allow development of kernel-mode device drivers, but attempts to provide standard implementations of functions that are known to cause problems, including cancellation of I/O operations, power management, and plug and play device support. Apple has an open-source framework for developing drivers on macOS , called I/O Kit. In Linux environments, programmers can build device drivers as parts of
316-503: A monolithic kernel, with a modular design. Different parts of the kernel, such as drivers, are designed as modules. The user can load and unload these modules at any time. ULE is the default scheduler in FreeBSD since version 7.1, it supports SMP and SMT . The FreeBSD kernel has also a scalable event notification interface, named kqueue . It has been ported to other BSD-derivatives such as OpenBSD and NetBSD . Kernel threading
395-451: A device driver implementing these functions would communicate to the particular serial port controller installed on a user's computer. The commands needed to control a 16550 UART are much different from the commands needed to control an FTDI serial port converter, but each hardware-specific device driver abstracts these details into the same (or similar) software interface. Writing a device driver requires an in-depth understanding of how
474-607: A large amount of FreeBSD code, and vice-versa. In 1974, Professor Bob Fabry of the University of California, Berkeley , acquired a Unix source license from AT&T . Supported by funding from DARPA , the Computer Systems Research Group started to modify and improve AT&T Research Unix. The group called this modified version "Berkeley Unix" or " Berkeley Software Distribution " (BSD), implementing features such as TCP/IP , virtual memory , and
553-430: A lawsuit against BSDi and alleged distribution of AT&T source code in violation of license agreements. The lawsuit was settled out of court and the exact terms were not all disclosed. The only one that became public was that BSDi would migrate its source base to the newer 4.4BSD-Lite2 sources. Although not involved in the litigation, it was suggested to FreeBSD that it should also move to 4.4BSD-Lite2. FreeBSD 2.0, which
632-492: A modern graphics stack is available via drm-kmod. A large number of wireless adapters are supported. FreeBSD releases installation images for supported platforms. Since FreeBSD 13 the focus has been on x86-64 and aarch64 platforms which have Tier 1 support. IA-32 is a Tier 1 platform in FreeBSD 12 but is a Tier 2 platform in FreeBSD 13. 32 bit ARM processors using armv6 or armv7 also have Tier 2 support. 64 bit versions of PowerPC and RISC-V are also supported. Interest in
711-482: A new installer which was introduced in FreeBSD 9.0. bsdinstall is "a lightweight replacement for sysinstall" that was written in sh. According to OSNews , "It has lost some features while gaining others, but it is a much more flexible design, and will ultimately be significant improvement". Prior to 14.0, the default login shell was tcsh for root and the Almquist shell (sh) for regular users. Starting with 14.0,
790-455: A number of Microsoft Windows native NDIS kernel interfaces to allow FreeBSD to run (otherwise) Windows-only network drivers. The Wine compatibility layer, which allows the running of many Windows applications, especially games, without a (licensed) copy of Microsoft Windows , is available for FreeBSD. FreeBSD's kernel provides support for some essential tasks such as managing processes, communication, booting and filesystems. FreeBSD has
869-404: A particular type of device that is attached to a computer or automaton . A driver provides a software interface to hardware devices, enabling operating systems and other computer programs to access hardware functions without needing to know precise details about the hardware being used. A driver communicates with the device through the computer bus or communications subsystem to which
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#1732798230850948-461: A proprietary product. However, the FreeBSD project is still developing and improving its ZFS implementation via the OpenZFS project. The currently supported version of OpenZFS is 2.2.2 which contains an important fix for a data corruption bug. This version is compatible with releases starting from 12.2-RELEASE. FreeBSD ships with three different firewall packages: IPFW , pf and IPFilter . IPFW
1027-578: A regular desktop or a laptop. The X Window System is not installed by default, but is available in the FreeBSD ports collection . Wayland is also available for FreeBSD (unofficially supported). A number of desktop environments such as Lumina , GNOME , KDE , and Xfce , as well as lightweight window managers such as Openbox , Fluxbox , dwm , and bspwm, are also available for FreeBSD. Major web browsers such as Firefox and Chromium are available unofficially on FreeBSD. As of FreeBSD 12, support for
1106-432: A security mechanism and an implementation of operating-system-level virtualization that enables the user to run multiple instances of a guest operating system on top of a FreeBSD host. It is an enhanced version of the traditional chroot mechanism. A process that runs within such a jail is unable to access the resources outside of it. Every jail has its own hostname and IP address . It is possible to run multiple jails at
1185-437: A target for exploits . Bring Your Own Vulnerable Driver (BYOVD) uses signed, old drivers that contain flaws that allow hackers to insert malicious code into the kernel. Drivers that may be vulnerable include those for WiFi and Bluetooth, gaming/graphics drivers, and drivers for printers. There is a lack of effective kernel vulnerability detection tools, especially for closed-source OSes such as Microsoft Windows where
1264-416: A third party repository. In 2020, a new project was introduced to automatically collect information about tested hardware configurations. FreeBSD has a software repository of over 30,000 applications that are developed by third parties. Examples include windowing systems , web browsers , email clients , office suites and so forth. In general, the project itself does not develop this software, only
1343-544: A variety of articles, mainly maintained by The FreeBSD Documentation Project. FreeBSD's documentation is translated into several languages. All official documentation is released under the FreeBSD Documentation License , "a permissive non-copyleft free documentation license that is compatible with the GNU FDL". FreeBSD's documentation is described as "high-quality". The FreeBSD project maintains
1422-534: A variety of mailing lists. Among the most popular mailing lists are FreeBSD-questions (general questions) and FreeBSD-hackers (a place for asking more technical questions). Since 2004, the New York City BSD Users Group database provides dmesg information from a collection of computers ( laptops , workstations , single-board computers , embedded systems , virtual machines , etc.) running FreeBSD. From version 2.0 to 8.4, FreeBSD used
1501-571: Is FreeBSD's native firewall. pf was taken from OpenBSD and IPFilter was ported to FreeBSD by Darren Reed. Taken from OpenBSD, the OpenSSH program was included in the default install. OpenSSH is a free implementation of the SSH protocol and is a replacement for telnet . Unlike telnet, OpenSSH encrypts all information (including usernames and passwords). In November 2012, The FreeBSD Security Team announced that hackers gained unauthorized access on two of
1580-593: Is an independently developed back-end driver that in turn uses OpenGL (for drawing and scaling), and VA-API if available (for decoding). It has been reported to work on some Intel graphics and Adobe Flash Player . The accelerated scaling with just OpenGL functionality is needed mostly because of Flash player, which uses un-accelerated scaling if VDPAU is unavailable. Almost all other video software that runs on Linux or FreeBSD supports Xv . It's essential for full-screen video on slower computers without native VDPAU support. The VDPAU to VA-API translation for HW decoding
1659-444: Is distributed by Nvidia independently of their proprietary Linux graphics driver in an effort to help the adoption of VDPAU by those outside of Nvidia. This open source library package contains a wrapper library and a debugging library allowing other manufacturers to implement VDPAU in their device drivers. Device driver In the context of an operating system , a device driver is a computer program that operates or controls
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#17327982308501738-557: Is faster, the user has fewer customization options. FreeBSD version 10.0 introduced the package manager pkg as a replacement for the previously used package tools. It is functionally similar to apt and yum in Linux distributions . It allows for installation, upgrading and removal of both ports and packages. In addition to pkg, PackageKit can also be used to access the Ports collection. First introduced in FreeBSD version 4, jails are
1817-563: Is important that the hardware manufacturer provide information on how the device communicates. Although this information can instead be learned by reverse engineering , this is much more difficult with hardware than it is with software. Microsoft has attempted to reduce system instability due to poorly written device drivers by creating a new framework for driver development, called Windows Driver Frameworks (WDF). This includes User-Mode Driver Framework (UMDF) that encourages development of certain types of drivers—primarily those that implement
1896-407: Is improved stability, since a poorly written user-mode device driver cannot crash the system by overwriting kernel memory. Because of the diversity of modern hardware and operating systems, drivers operate in many different environments. Drivers may interface with: Common levels of abstraction for device drivers include: So choosing and installing the correct device drivers for given hardware
1975-552: Is more common for users to compile those programs directly on FreeBSD. No noticeable performance penalty over native FreeBSD programs has been noted when running Linux binaries, and, in some cases, these may even perform more smoothly than on Linux. However, the layer is not altogether seamless, and some Linux binaries are unusable or only partially usable on FreeBSD. There is support for system calls up to version 4.4.0 , available since FreeBSD 14.0 . As of release 10.3, FreeBSD can run 64-bit Linux binaries. FreeBSD has implemented
2054-514: Is not FreeBSD-specific so it deals with the technical aspects of all BSD-derived operating systems, including OpenBSD and NetBSD . In addition to BSDcon, three other annual conferences, EuroBSDCon, AsiaBSDCon and BSDCan take place in Europe , Japan and Canada respectively. The FreeBSD Project is run by around 500 committers or developers who have commit access to the master source code repositories and can develop, debug or enhance any part of
2133-404: Is not an emulation ; Linux's system call interface is implemented in the FreeBSD's kernel and hence, Linux executable images and shared libraries are treated the same as FreeBSD's native executable images and shared libraries. Additionally, FreeBSD provides compatibility layers for several other Unix-like operating systems , in addition to Linux, such as BSD/OS and SVR4 , however, it
2212-472: Is often a key component of computer system configuration. Virtual device drivers represent a particular variant of device drivers. They are used to emulate a hardware device, particularly in virtualization environments, for example when a DOS program is run on a Microsoft Windows computer or when a guest operating system is run on, for example, a Xen host. Instead of enabling the guest operating system to dialog with hardware, virtual device drivers take
2291-475: Is often asked to become a committer. FreeBSD developers maintain at least two branches of simultaneous development. The -CURRENT branch always represents the " bleeding edge " of FreeBSD development. A -STABLE branch of FreeBSD is created for each major version number, from which -RELEASE is cut about once every 4–6 months. If a feature is sufficiently stable and mature it will likely be backported ( MFC or Merge from CURRENT in FreeBSD developer slang) to
2370-576: Is supported and promoted by the FreeBSD Foundation . Much of FreeBSD's codebase has become an integral part of other operating systems such as Darwin (the basis for macOS , iOS , iPadOS , watchOS , and tvOS ), TrueNAS (an open-source NAS / SAN operating system), and the system software for the PlayStation 3 and PlayStation 4 game consoles. The other current BSD systems ( OpenBSD , NetBSD , and DragonFly BSD ) also contain
2449-757: Is targeted at Unix-like operating systems (including Linux , FreeBSD , Solaris ). VDPAU allows video programs to access the specialized video decoding ASIC on the GPU to offload portions of the video decoding process and video post-processing from the CPU to the GPU. Currently, the portions capable of being offloaded by VDPAU onto the GPU are motion compensation (mo comp), inverse discrete cosine transform (iDCT), VLD (variable-length decoding) and deblocking for MPEG-1 , MPEG-2 , MPEG-4 ASP (MPEG-4 Part 2) , H.264/MPEG-4 AVC and VC-1 , WMV3 / WMV9 encoded videos. Which specific codecs of these that can be offloaded to
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2528-457: Is that they can be loaded only when necessary and then unloaded, thus saving kernel memory. Depending on the operating system, device drivers may be permitted to run at various different privilege levels . The choice of which level of privilege the drivers are in is largely decided by the type of kernel an operating system uses. An operating system which uses a monolithic kernel , such as the Linux kernel , will typically run device drivers with
2607-413: Is to provide abstraction by acting as a translator between a hardware device and the applications or operating systems that use it. Programmers can write higher-level application code independently of whatever specific hardware the end-user is using. For example, a high-level application for interacting with a serial port may simply have two functions for "send data" and "receive data". At a lower level,
2686-649: Is useful with recent Intel graphics hardware, as some software supports HW decoding through VDPAU but not VA-API. VDPAU can also be used as a backend for VA-API and OpenMAX IL , which themselves cover a subset of the VDPAU capabilities; so any software that uses the VA-API or OpenMAX IL is also partly capable of using VDPAU (e.g., VLC media player). Nvidia VDPAU Feature Sets are different hardware generations of GPU's supporting different levels of (Nvidia PureVideo) hardware decoding capabilities. For feature sets A, B and C,
2765-400: Is via protection rings . On many systems, such as those with x86 and ARM processors, switching between rings imposes a performance penalty, a factor that operating system developers and embedded software engineers consider when creating drivers for devices which are preferred to be run with low latency, such as network interface cards . The primary benefit of running a driver in user mode
2844-529: The Berkeley Fast File System . The BSD project was founded in 1976 by Bill Joy . But since BSD contained code from AT&T Unix, all recipients had to first get a license from AT&T in order to use BSD. In June 1989, "Networking Release 1" or simply Net-1 – the first public version of BSD – was released. After releasing Net-1, Keith Bostic , a developer of BSD, suggested replacing all AT&T code with freely-redistributable code under
2923-559: The Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) which currently runs on IA-32 , x86-64 , ARM , PowerPC and RISC-V based computers. The first version was released in 1993 developed from 386BSD — the first free Unix system — and has since continously been the most commonly used BSD-derived operating system. FreeBSD maintains a complete system, delivering a kernel , device drivers , userland utilities, and documentation, as opposed to Linux only delivering
3002-687: The KAME project . Prior to version 11.0, FreeBSD supported IPX and AppleTalk protocols, but they are considered old and have now been dropped. As of FreeBSD 5.4, support for the Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP) was imported from the OpenBSD project. CARP allows multiple nodes to share a set of IP addresses, so if one of the nodes goes down, other nodes can still serve the requests. FreeBSD has several unique features related to storage. Soft updates can protect
3081-612: The PCI bus or USB is identified by two IDs which consist of two bytes each. The vendor ID identifies the vendor of the device. The device ID identifies a specific device from that manufacturer/vendor. A PCI device has often an ID pair for the main chip of the device, and also a subsystem ID pair that identifies the vendor, which may be different from the chip manufacturer. Computers often have many diverse and customized device drivers running in their operating system (OS) kernel which often contain various bugs and vulnerabilities , making them
3160-460: The PlayStation 4 operating system is derived from FreeBSD 9. Netflix , WhatsApp , and FlightAware are also examples of large, successful and heavily network-oriented companies which are running FreeBSD. 386BSD and FreeBSD were both derived from BSD releases. In January 1992, Berkeley Software Design Inc. (BSDi) started to release BSD/386 , later called BSD/OS, an operating system similar to FreeBSD and based on 4.3BSD Net/2. AT&T filed
3239-668: The TrustedBSD project. The project was founded by Robert Watson with the goal of implementing concepts from the Common Criteria for Information Technology Security Evaluation and the Orange Book . This project is ongoing and many of its extensions have been integrated into FreeBSD. The project is supported by a variety of organizations, including the DARPA, NSA, Network Associates Laboratories, Safeport Network Services,
VDPAU - Misplaced Pages Continue
3318-529: The kernel , separately as loadable modules , or as user-mode drivers (for certain types of devices where kernel interfaces exist, such as for USB devices). Makedev includes a list of the devices in Linux, including ttyS (terminal), lp ( parallel port ), hd (disk), loop, and sound (these include mixer , sequencer , dsp , and audio). Microsoft Windows .sys files and Linux .ko files can contain loadable device drivers. The advantage of loadable device drivers
3397-584: The Dom0 privileged domain for the Xen type 1 hypervisor. Support for running as DomU (guest) has been available since FreeBSD 8.0. VirtualBox (without the closed-source Extension Pack ) and QEMU are available on FreeBSD. Most software that runs on Linux can run on FreeBSD using an optional built-in compatibility layer . Hence, most Linux binaries can be run on FreeBSD, including some proprietary applications distributed only in binary form. This compatibility layer
3476-641: The GPU depends on the generation version of the GPU hardware. VDPAU was originally designed by Nvidia for their PureVideo SIP block present on their GeForce 8 series and later GPUs. On March 9, 2015, Nvidia released VDPAU version 1.0 which supports High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) decoding for the Main, Main 4:4:4, Main Still Picture, Main 10, and Main 12 profiles. VDPAU is implemented in X11 software device drivers , but relies on acceleration features in
3555-557: The RISC-V architecture has been growing. The MIPS architecture port has been marked for deprecation and there is no image for any currently supported version. FreeBSD 12 supports SPARC but there is no image for FreeBSD 13. FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack is based on the 4.2BSD implementation of TCP/IP which greatly contributed to the widespread adoption of these protocols. FreeBSD also supports IPv6 , SCTP , IPSec , and wireless networking ( Wi-Fi ). The IPv6 and IPSec stacks were taken from
3634-658: The TrustedBSD MAC Framework has been adopted by Apple for macOS . FreeBSD has been ported to a variety of instruction set architectures . The FreeBSD project organizes architectures into tiers that characterize the level of support provided. Tier 1 architectures are mature and fully supported, e.g. it is the only tier "supported by the security officer". Tier 2 architectures are under active development but are not fully supported. Tier 3 architectures are experimental or are no longer under active development. As of December 2023 , FreeBSD has been ported to
3713-584: The University of Pennsylvania, Yahoo!, McAfee Research, SPARTA, Apple Computer, nCircle Network Security, Google, the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory, and others. The project has also ported the NSA 's FLASK /TE implementation from SELinux to FreeBSD. Other work includes the development of OpenBSM , an open-source implementation of Sun's Basic Security Module (BSM) API and audit log file format, which supports an extensive security audit system. This
3792-730: The consistency of the UFS filesystem (widely used on the BSDs) in the event of a system crash. Filesystem snapshots allow an image of a UFS filesystem at an instant in time to be efficiently created. Snapshots allow reliable backup of a live filesystem. GEOM is a modular framework that provides RAID (levels 0, 1, 3 currently), full disk encryption , journaling , concatenation, caching, and access to network-backed storage. GEOM allows building of complex storage solutions combining ("chaining") these mechanisms. FreeBSD provides two frameworks for data encryption: GBDE and Geli . Both GBDE and Geli operate at
3871-520: The default shell is sh for both root and regular users. The default scripting shell is the Almquist shell. FreeBSD is developed by a volunteer team located around the world. The developers use the Internet for all communication and many have not met each other in person. In addition to local user groups sponsored and attended by users, an annual conference, called BSDcon, is held by USENIX . BSDcon
3950-433: The design of a kernel is the support it provides for protection from faults ( fault tolerance ) and from malicious behaviours ( security ). These two aspects are usually not clearly distinguished, and the adoption of this distinction in the kernel design leads to the rejection of a hierarchical structure for protection . FreeBSD FreeBSD is a free and open-source Unix-like operating system descended from
4029-407: The desired application's source code , either from a local or remote repository , unpack it on the system, apply patches to it and compile it. Depending on the size of the source code, compiling can take a long time, but it gives the user more control over the process and its result. Most ports also have package counterparts (i.e. precompiled binaries), giving the user a choice. Although this method
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#17327982308504108-458: The disk level. GBDE was written by Poul-Henning Kamp and is distributed under the two-clause BSD license. Geli is an alternative to GBDE that was written by Pawel Jakub Dawidek and first appeared in FreeBSD 6.0. From 7.0 onward, FreeBSD supports the ZFS filesystem. ZFS was previously an open-source filesystem that was first developed by Sun Microsystems , but when Oracle acquired Sun, ZFS became
4187-656: The following architectures: The 32-bit ARM (including OTG) and MIPS support is mostly aimed at embedded systems ( ARM64 is also aimed at servers ), however FreeBSD/ARM runs on a number of single-board computers , including the BeagleBone Black , Raspberry Pi and Wandboard. Supported devices are listed in the FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE Hardware Notes. The document describes the devices currently known to be supported by FreeBSD. Other configurations may also work, but simply have not been tested yet. Rough automatically extracted lists of supported device ids are available in
4266-475: The framework to allow these programs to be installed, which is known as the Ports collection. Applications may either be compiled from source ("ports"), provided their licensing terms allow this, or downloaded as precompiled binaries ("packages"). The Ports collection supports the current and stable branches of FreeBSD. Older releases are not supported and may or may not work correctly with an up-to-date Ports collection. Ports use Makefiles to automatically fetch
4345-816: The granting of commit access to the source code repositories. A number of responsibilities are officially assigned to other development teams by the FreeBSD Core Team, for example, responsibility for managing the ports collection is delegated to the Ports Management Team. In addition to developers, FreeBSD has thousands of "contributors". Contributors are also volunteers outside of the FreeBSD project who submit patches for consideration by committers, as they do not have commit access to FreeBSD's source code repository. Committers then evaluate contributors' submissions and decide what to accept and what to reject. A contributor who submits high-quality patches
4424-834: The hardware GPU. All Nvidia graphic cards for which the driver implements VDPAU are listed in Nvidia PureVideo . S3 Graphics added VDPAU to the Linux drivers of their Chrome 400 video cards . As of version 14.02.17 of its Linux device driver, VDPAU is available with the S3 Chrome 430 GT, S3 Chrome 440 GTX, S3 Chrome 530 GT and the S3 Chrome 540 GTX hardware. ATI/AMD released an open source driver for Radeon HD 4000+ graphic cards featuring VDPAU acceleration. Intel does not offer VDPAU drivers, they only support their VA-API . It is, however, possible to use Intel's VA-API drivers by way of libvdpau-va-gl . Nvidia hopes other GPU designers will make their products compatible with
4503-401: The hardware and the software works for a given platform function. Because drivers require low-level access to hardware functions in order to operate, drivers typically operate in a highly privileged environment and can cause system operational issues if something goes wrong. In contrast, most user-level software on modern operating systems can be stopped without greatly affecting the rest of
4582-470: The hardware connects. When a calling program invokes a routine in the driver, the driver issues commands to the device (drives it). Once the device sends data back to the driver, the driver may invoke routines in the original calling program. Drivers are hardware dependent and operating-system-specific. They usually provide the interrupt handling required for any necessary asynchronous time-dependent hardware interface. The main purpose of device drivers
4661-509: The integrity of the binary packages and determined that no unauthorized changes were made to the binary packages, but stated that it could not guarantee the integrity of packages that were downloaded between 19 September and 11 November. FreeBSD provides several security-related features including access-control lists (ACLs), security event auditing, extended file system attributes, mandatory access controls (MAC) and fine-grained capabilities . These security enhancements were developed by
4740-537: The maximum video width and height are 2048 pixels , minimum width and height 48 pixels, and all codecs are currently limited to a maximum of 8192 macroblocks (8190 for VC-1/WMV9). Partial acceleration means that VLD (bitstream) decoding is performed on the CPU, with the GPU only performing IDCT , motion compensation and deblocking . Complete acceleration means that the GPU performs all of VLD, IDCT, motion compensation and deblocking. The libvdpau standalone VDPAU library
4819-593: The name FreeBSD was chosen for the project. The first version of FreeBSD was released in November 1993. In the early days of the project's inception, a company named Walnut Creek CDROM , upon the suggestion of the two FreeBSD developers, agreed to release the operating system on CD-ROM . In addition to that, the company employed Jordan Hubbard and David Greenman, ran FreeBSD on its servers, sponsored FreeBSD conferences and published FreeBSD-related books, including The Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey . By 1997, FreeBSD
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#17327982308504898-404: The open source VDPAU library and provide drivers with VDPAU acceleration by mentioning example names of hardware specific drivers for Intel and ATI: libvdpau_intel.so and libvdpau_ati.so. Intel has stated they are considering VDPAU. sunxi SoCs ( Allwinner ) have experimental VDPAU implementation. Mesa as of v8.0 includes VDPAU for video cards that utilize Gallium3D . As of late 2013, there
4977-446: The opposite role and emulates a piece of hardware, so that the guest operating system and its drivers running inside a virtual machine can have the illusion of accessing real hardware. Attempts by the guest operating system to access the hardware are routed to the virtual device driver in the host operating system as e.g., function calls . The virtual device driver can also send simulated processor-level events like interrupts into
5056-481: The original BSD license . Work on replacing AT&T code began and, after 18 months, much of the AT&;T code was replaced. However, six files containing AT&T code remained in the kernel. The BSD developers decided to release the "Networking Release 2" (Net-2) without those six files. Net-2 was released in 1991. In 1992, several months after the release of Net-2, William and Lynne Jolitz wrote replacements for
5135-457: The project's servers. These servers were turned off immediately. More research demonstrated that the first unauthorized access by hackers occurred on 19 September. Apparently hackers gained access to these servers by stealing SSH keys from one of the developers, not by exploiting a bug in the operating system itself. These two hacked servers were part of the infrastructure used to build third-party software packages. The FreeBSD Security Team checked
5214-509: The same privilege as all other kernel objects. By contrast, a system designed around microkernel , such as Minix , will place drivers as processes independent from the kernel but that use it for essential input-output functionalities and to pass messages between user programs and each other. On Windows NT , a system with a hybrid kernel , it is common for device drivers to run in either kernel-mode or user-mode . The most common mechanism for segregating memory into various privilege levels
5293-407: The same time, but the kernel is shared among all of them. Hence only software supported by the FreeBSD kernel can be run within a jail. bhyve , a new virtualization solution, was introduced in FreeBSD 10.0. bhyve allows a user to run a number of guest operating systems (FreeBSD, OpenBSD , Linux , and Microsoft Windows ) simultaneously. Other operating systems such as Illumos are planned. bhyve
5372-436: The six AT&T files, ported BSD to Intel 80386 -based microprocessors, and called their new operating system 386BSD . They released 386BSD via an anonymous FTP server. The development flow of 386BSD was slow, and after a period of neglect, a group of 386BSD users including Nate Williams, Rod Grimes and Jordan Hubbard decided to branch out on their own so that they could keep the operating system up to date. On 19 June 1993,
5451-452: The source code of the device drivers is mostly not public (open source) and drivers often have many privileges. A group of security researchers considers the lack of isolation as one of the main factors undermining kernel security , and published an isolation framework to protect operating system kernels, primarily the monolithic Linux kernel whose drivers they say get ~80,000 commits per year. An important consideration in
5530-419: The sysinstall program as its main installer. It was written in C by Jordan Hubbard . It uses a text user interface , and is divided into a number of menus and screens that can be used to configure and control the installation process. It can also be used to install Ports and Packages as an alternative to the command-line interface . The sysinstall utility is now considered deprecated in favor of bsdinstall,
5609-441: The system. Even drivers executing in user mode can crash a system if the device is erroneously programmed . These factors make it more difficult and dangerous to diagnose problems. The task of writing drivers thus usually falls to software engineers or computer engineers who work for hardware-development companies. This is because they have better information than most outsiders about the design of their hardware. Moreover, it
5688-501: The system. Most of the developers are volunteers and few developers are paid by some companies. There are several kinds of committers, including source committers (base operating system), doc committers (documentation and website authors) and ports (third-party application porting and infrastructure). Every two years the FreeBSD committers select a 9-member FreeBSD Core Team, which is responsible for overall project direction, setting and enforcing project rules and approving new committers, or
5767-451: The virtual machine. Virtual devices may also operate in a non-virtualized environment. For example, a virtual network adapter is used with a virtual private network , while a virtual disk device is used with iSCSI . A good example for virtual device drivers can be Daemon Tools . There are several variants of virtual device drivers, such as VxDs , VLMs , and VDDs. Solaris descriptions of commonly used device drivers: A device on
5846-451: Was Walnut Creek's "most successful product". The company later renamed itself to The FreeBSD Mall and later iXsystems . Today, FreeBSD is used by many IT companies such as IBM , Nokia , Juniper Networks , and NetApp to build their products. Certain parts of Apple 's Mac OS X operating system are based on FreeBSD. Both the PlayStation 3 and Nintendo Switch operating system also borrow certain components from FreeBSD, while
5925-434: Was introduced in FreeBSD 5.0, using an M:N threading model . This model works well in theory, but it is hard to implement and few operating systems support it. Although FreeBSD's implementation of this model worked, it did not perform well, so from version 7.0 onward, FreeBSD started using a 1:1 threading model , called libthr. FreeBSD's documentation consists of its handbooks, manual pages, mailing list archives, FAQs and
6004-400: Was released in November 1994, was the first version of FreeBSD without any code from AT&T. FreeBSD contains a significant collection of server-related software in the base system and the ports collection, allowing FreeBSD to be configured and used as a mail server , web server , firewall , FTP server , DNS server and a router , among other applications. FreeBSD can be installed on
6083-534: Was shipped as part of FreeBSD 6.2. Other infrastructure work in FreeBSD performed as part of the TrustedBSD Project has included GEOM and OpenPAM. Most components of the TrustedBSD project are eventually folded into the main sources for FreeBSD. In addition, many features, once fully matured, find their way into other operating systems. For example, OpenPAM has been adopted by NetBSD . Moreover,
6162-638: Was traditionally considered in the hardware manufacturer 's interest to guarantee that their clients can use their hardware in an optimal way. Typically, the Logical Device Driver (LDD) is written by the operating system vendor, while the Physical Device Driver (PDD) is implemented by the device vendor. However, in recent years, non-vendors have written numerous device drivers for proprietary devices, mainly for use with free and open source operating systems . In such cases, it
6241-602: Was written by Neel Natu and Peter Grehan and was announced in the 2011 BSDCan conference for the first time. The main difference between bhyve and FreeBSD jails is that jails are an operating system-level virtualization and therefore limited to only FreeBSD guests; but bhyve is a type 2 hypervisor and is not limited to only FreeBSD guests. For comparison, bhyve is a similar technology to KVM whereas jails are closer to LXC containers or Solaris Zones . Amazon EC2 AMI instances are also supported via amazon-ssm-agent Since FreeBSD 11.0, there has been support for running as
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