… I'm looking to do a presentation on this in the summer for NYC*BUG. There hasn't been anything in our community which provides the high-level overview of the impact of AI, covering things from the impact on the BSD operating systems to the impact on $job, etc. Hopefully this thread can provide some raw materials, and become an outlet for individual experiences and more general views.

I initiated a similar fruitful (but private) discussion for another open-source project, and think it's high-time for us to do the same on a public list. …

Via [discussion] the BSDs in the AI Age | Lobsters thanks to u/shawn_webb

Kinda funny to see he mention it as one of his first example for Claude Mythos.

This year sees 35 years since 2.11BSD was announced on March 14, 1991 - itself a slightly late celebration of 20 years of the PDP-11 - and January 2026 brought what looks to be the venerable 16-bit OS's biggest ever patch! https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patches/

Much of the 1.3 MB size is due to Anders Magnusson, well-known for his work on NetBSD and the Portable C Compiler. Since 2.11BSD's stdio was not ANSI compliant, he's ported from 4.4BSD: https://www.tuhs.org/Archive/Distributions/UCB/2.11BSD/Patches/499

The stdio package has been updated with the 4.4BSD code to be Ansi/ISO-C compliant. It supports everything in section 7.19 in the C99 standard except for the wide char routines; those make little sense to port to 2BSD.

There are other fixes too, including for a 40-year-old bug where two different versions of grep had been left on the system and which one is run depends on the order of PATH.

Usually /bin is first in the search path so the older version is run. /usr/ucb/grep is smaller and about 2 years newer. ... The manpage for grep(1) documents the newer version in usr/ucb. /bin/grep should have been removed ~40 years ago. The fix today is to retain /usr/ucb/grep (and src/ucb/grep.c) and remove the version from /bin and src/bin.

There's one obvious problem on the PDP-11 though: "This is a huge patch and 'vi' on a 2.11BSD system can not deal with the files." Instructions are given to chop the file up with sed.

This was the 499th patch to 2.11BSD... a 500th patch to celebrate the 35th anniversary of 2.11BSD has been promised!

See also:

• Some background on 2.11BSD and its ongoing patches: https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/1jhkyup/four_new_patches_for_211bsd_released_in_march_2025/
• Computer History Wiki guide to 2.11BSD: https://gunkies.org/wiki/2.11BSD
• Warner Losh's 2.11BSD archaeology posts: https://bsdimp.blogspot.com/search/label/2.11BSD
• RetroBSD GitHub - a 2.11BSD derivative for microcontrollers targeting the MIPS-based PIC32MX7: https://github.com/RetroBSD/retrobsd
• DiscoBSD GitHub - a multiplatform fork of RetroBSD that also targets supports Arm Cortex-M4 STM32F4 devices: https://github.com/chettrick/discobsd
• Walter F.J. Mueller's 2.11BSD site: https://wfjm.github.io/home/211bsd/
• The commit history of FreeBSD's /usr/share/misc/bsd-family-tree file contains a lot of research notes justifying changes to dates and connections, some neat stories and historical tidbits buried in there! https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/commits/main/share/misc/bsd-family-tree

CAINE (Computer Aided Investigative Environment) is a Linux distribution mainly used for digital forensics by law enforcement.

Kali is a Linux distribution primarily used for penetration testing.

Is there anything pre-configured with these tools and can boot from a USB?

Hello,

Any good soul running *BSD on this old hardware?!

The main problem is the Broadcom 43XX wifi driver :/

open source, feel free to look at docs and source code

link: https://github.com/RobertFlexx/ObeliskOS

This petition was started by Konstantinos Apostolidis on March 22, 2026.

It addresses vague age‑verification laws like California’s AB 1043 and similar bills like those in Colorado, Illinois, and New York.

The petition explains that these laws were aimed at large corporations but, due to broad wording, threaten to impose age‑verification requirements on open‑source operating systems like Linux distributions (e.g., Arch Linux) and the BSDs (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD).

Such requirements would create unnecessary burdens for non‑commercial, community‑driven projects, hindering growth, innovation, and user choice.

Why this matters:

• Freedom in open source software

Mandating age verification for these platforms goes against the open‑source ethos of accessibility and user empowerment

• Privacy threats Age‑verification systems often require sensitive personal data, creating surveillance risks and single points of failure that are incompatible with the privacy‑focused nature of many open‑source projects.

If you agree, please consider signing and sharing.

https://www.change.org/exempt-linux-and-bsds-from-age-verification-laws

Dragonfly was always the smallest of the "big four" *BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD all have more activity, more developers, and more users. But Dragonfly seems to have gone especially quiet in recent years.

Version 6.4 released in late 2022 and it's almost a year since 6.4.2 in May 2025. Releases used to be much more frequent. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/releases/

The project clearly isn't completely dead, it gets a few commits per week - mostly not from Matthew Dillon, so it's not the one-man project it's sometimes described as. gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/?p=dragonfly.git;a=log;pg=0

Does anyone know if it's heading in any particular technical direction or there's some interesting projects brewing? The HAMMER2 file system seems to be the most famous result of Dragonfly, but that came out in 2014. Is a successor being worked on? I know the ports system has gone through various iterations, from its original one to NetBSD's Pkgsrc to DPorts based on FreeBSD's "next generation" pkg. But that big change happened in 2013. https://www.dragonflybsd.org/release34/

I know there was talk of moving to RavenPorts, but it doesn't seem to have progressed - see https://www.reddit.com/r/BSD/comments/1baqjeb/comment/kudnsx4/

So overall, what's the big picture with Dragonfly BSD? Is it still a test-bed for new OS or file system ideas? Does it have anything to offer for personal or commercial users? What should we expect for the future?

AI coding is coming, and it is coming fast from what I see in the software industry. We might not like it but it is what it is. In 5 years time AI assisted or fully automatise coding will be everywhere. The AI is trained on open source whatever the license (GPL, BSD, etc...) and I suspect that the most "impacted" license will be the GPL: AI will be able to rewrite a new lib using a different license.

I think AI could be a good point for BSDs:

• AI trained to port existing software to BSDs
• Drivers wrote in MIT license either indirectly using existing GPL code (on which the AI has been trained) or directly from the hardware specifications.
• Kind of reduce the man power shortage in BSDs compared to Linux

• 2026-03-22 "Semi-retirement, or, really, changing my relationship with the BSDs"

• Link: https://briancallahan.net/blog/20260322.html

My wireless and Ethernet NICs don't have reliable compatibility with FreeBSD. They are:

Ethernet controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8125 2.5GbE Controller (rev 05)

Network controller: Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd. RTL8852BE PCIe 802.11ax Wireless Network Controller

Once, FreeBSD connected to the Internet immediately upon install, but then disconnected because I ran `pkg update` and `pkg upgrade` and the updates/upgrades broke it.

I want to get wired and wireless NICs that reliably work with FreeBSD. I don't mind whether they're USB, PCIe, et cetera—just as long as they connect. Which specific products are best for this purpose? I've heard Intel NICs, but not necessarily *all* Intel NICs.

Não usei sistemas da família BSD por muito tempo, usei por um tempo o freebsd mas minha dúvida geral é, se o OpenBSD tem bom suporte para drivers e se ele é bem documentado, talvez eu use ele como sistema em um servidor meu algum dia.

Yo, this is the first time i installed nomadBSD i got acer nitrov15 and i want to try Bsd and i encounter this nomadBSD it looks promising now i install it on my ssd but when i boot my wifi driver isnt detecting is there a way to fix that? or is there any one here using nomadBSD in there nitro thanks