MirBSD is a BSD operating system project, also home to the mksh shell, the jupp editor, and posts on open source licensing.
HN commenters link it when discussing mksh and small BSD projects; some question how active it is, and one notes the mksh page is blocked.
I forgot to ask earlier: how much "worse" is OpenBSD's SMP implementation than Linux's/everyone else's?
> SELinux was released in 1998. Linux was totally usable back then. I've been using it since 1995.
Oh, okay then. Nice...
> I've never heard anyone claim lacking SMP support being a feature.
https://www.mirbsd.org/about.htm:
> Controversial decisions are often made differently from OpenBSD; for instance, there won't be any support for SMP in MirOS.
Not really sure how to interpret that ^ but it sounds like a deliberate stand to me, like it's a feature. I totally get there's some context there, but I'm not sure what exactly it is.
> In the case of OpenBSD it was just that nobody got around to it until much later.
Mmm.
> The project never had even close to the number of developers as Linux or FreeBSD.
I see. I (genuinely) wonder why.
> Back in the 90s OpenBSD focused on code audit and fixing bugs rather than adding features. I found it most useful as a firewall and nameserver because it came with ipf and they included BIND with chroot support built in.
Interesting.
> Installation was dead simple. As long as you stuck to well supported hardware, it just worked out of the box.
Ha :P
How good was hardware support?
> Back then SMP meant you had multiple physical CPUs, and that wasn't generally necessary for systems dealing with 100mbit interfaces.
Right. That makes sense.
> If you needed to deal with a lot of traffic you had to get real routers because the PC…
"If anyone knows of a shell which meets my criteria of being lightweight but with command history and tab completion (paths, command names and command arguments), I'd really appreciate any suggestions. Otherwise I may have to look into extending dash or something."
I would also love to know the answer to this question. I am a big fan of shells and shell programming in general and POSIX shell in particular.
Only suggestion I currently have is ksh, of which there are a few implementations, ksh93 still developed (https://github.com/att/ast), pdksh from OpenBSD (of which there is a portable version here: https://github.com/ibara/oksh) and MirBSD ksh (https://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm).
Otherwise of interest is mrsh: https://github.com/emersion/mrsh which was recently mentioned by Drew DeVault in a blog post linked here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18777909.
EDIT: And by mentioning mrsh, I meant it as a better/easier base to extend to get what you are asking for.
People are still actively working on Illumos. The last change was yesterday morning.
* https://illumos.org
People are still actively working on MirBSD. There's a CVS commit account that can be followed on the FediVerse.
* http://www.mirbsd.org
It's DragonFly BSD, not Dragon BSD, and the irony of that is that you missed FreeBSD, which is of course still going.
* https://dragonflybsd.org
* https://freebsd.org
As is GhostBSD, which tracks FreeBSD.
* https://ghostbsd.org
HardenedBSD is still going. Shawn Webb regularly talks about it on the FediVerse.
* https://hardenedbsd.org
The problem is: like regexes, there's no 1 true cpio but rather many flavors.
pax's cpio supports[0]:
- bcpio - Old binary cpio format. Selected by −6.
- cpio - Old octal character cpio format. Selected by −c.
- sv4cpio - SVR4 hex cpio format.
- sv4crc - SVR4 hex cpio format with checksums. This is the default format for creating new archives.
GNU cpio supports[1]:
- binary
- old ASCII [hex?]
- new ASCII
- crc
- HPUX binary
- HPUX old ASCII
0. http://www.mirbsd.org/MirOS/cats/mir/cpio/cpio-20200904.pdf
1. https://www.gnu.org/software/cpio/manual/cpio.html
> MirOS BSD is still around, too.
According to [1],
- the most recent release was from March 16, 2008; 18 years ago
- the most recent preview was from January 17, 2016; 10 years ago
So, despite the fact that the MirOS website [2] has some small News updates from 2026, I would see the evidence on the side that MirBSD is dead, but I would love to be proven wrong on this point.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=MirOS_BSD&oldid=1298050663
[2] https://www.mirbsd.org/
I was going to check the status of mksh (the Android system shell), but the project page returns:
"Unavailable For Legal Reasons - Sorry, no detailled error message available."
http://www.mirbsd.org/mksh.htm
The Android system shell is now abandoned? This is also in rhel9 basesos.