The BSD of the 21st century.
Drivers load themselves Real graphics in a VM Writable live ISO launchd as PID 1 amd64 & arm64
Why NextBSD
The machine already knows what hardware it has, how to put a picture on the screen, and how to get on the network. You should not have to tell it.
No loader.conf, no kld_list, no rc.conf. Kexts carry their own device IDs and the kernel scans the live bus. Plugged in is configured.
Boot it in UTM, QEMU or VirtualBox and the display just works, at a proper resolution, with no driver to install and no xorg.conf to write. Other BSDs leave a VM on a basic framebuffer; we ship the KMS drivers they don’t.
The first BSD of its kind with a pivot root on par with Linux. Boot to a writable root — install packages, change settings, break things. The image is never copied into RAM, so there is no boot delay and no memory tax, and your disk is never touched.
Services are plists, not shell scripts. launchd is PID 1 — parallel start, launch on demand, and whatever dies comes back.
DHCP fires the moment a link comes up. Bonjour is in the base, not a port. Wi-Fi waits for the handshake before it claims to be connected.
pkg upgrade moves base, kernel and userland forward together — from a repository already configured before you first boot.
libdispatch, libxpc, CoreFoundation, IOKit. The actual Darwin runtime on a BSD kernel, not a compatibility shim.
Both cross-built, boot-tested and published on every merge. arm64 ships the same day as amd64 — same image, same ISO, same packages.
A properly built Linux AppImage — one that bundles its own libraries — just runs. No container, no VM, no emulator. And yes, FreeBSD packages can be installed.
Status
Our own kernel, ABI-compatible with FreeBSD, with Mach built in — mach_msg, ports, port rights, bootstrap server. Kernel extensions provide drivers for GPU, Wi-Fi, and other hardware.
Apple’s launchd-842.92.1 — the last open-source release — ported onto our Mach + libxpc stack. PID 1 capable.
Typed inter-process messaging on top of libdispatch + Mach. Forked from ravynOS; bootstrap server + connection lifecycle in flight.
DoneGrand Central Dispatch with a native Mach backend for our kernel — DISPATCH_SOURCE_TYPE_MACH_RECV on kqueue.
Hybrid CF: GNUstep libs-corebase for value types; swift-corelibs CF for CFMachPort, CFRunLoop, CFBundle. Ships with Apple ICU.
DoneLightweight named-event bus and Apple System Logger — structured log records, BSD-text dual output, same C API.
DoneOne daemon owns network state, hostname, DNS. Apple’s configd ported as netconfigd with a Mach-RPC API.
Apple’s Bonjour — multicast DNS and DNS-SD service discovery, ported as the system mDNS daemon with the same dns-sd API.
A replacement for devmatch/devd exposing an IOKit-shape IORegistry — IOServiceWaitQuiet, IORegistryEntryGetBusyState, and IOKitWaitQuiet.
Lay down a fresh install, or move an existing system forward in place — from tagged releases or the rolling continuous stream alike.
DoneKMS graphics drivers ship as kexts today, matched to hardware by the IOKit registry with nothing to configure. Hundreds more are to follow, through an upcoming automated conversion process.
In progressDiskArbitration over libgeom, with disk arrival and removal delivered by the in-kernel IOKit registry.
Linux binaries run natively — the ABI, FUSE and fdescfs are all compiled in, and a well-built AppImage runs today. The remaining polish is making every AppImage work without a second thought.
Bluetooth support — pairing and the profiles that matter on a desktop: HID for wireless keyboards and mice, audio for headsets.
TODODarwin’s PowerManagement — pmset and the power-management userland for sleep, wake, and battery policy.
History
A long lineage runs from Bell Labs UNIX, through Mach and NeXTSTEP, into Darwin and the BSDs — and lands here. NextBSD Redux is the latest pickup of work that has changed hands more than once.
AT&T’s Bell Labs builds UNIX — the operating system every system on this timeline ultimately descends from.
UC Berkeley releases the first Berkeley Software Distribution, a set of enhancements layered on AT&T UNIX.
Berkeley ships the Fast File System and TCP/IP networking — storage and networking groundwork that later BSDs, and macOS, would inherit.
CMU develops the Mach microkernel — a message-passing foundation that becomes the kernel core of NeXTSTEP and, later, Darwin.
After leaving Apple, Jobs starts NeXT to build a new generation of workstations and software.
NeXT releases NeXTSTEP — the Mach kernel and BSD userland under an object-oriented application layer. The blueprint NextBSD follows.
The open BSD distributions emerge and carry the Berkeley lineage forward. FreeBSD becomes the base NextBSD builds on.
NeXTSTEP — Mach, BSD, and the Objective-C runtime — comes back to Apple and becomes the foundation of its next operating system.
Apple ships Mac OS X atop Darwin — the Mach kernel fused with BSD userland — the open-source core under every Apple OS since.
The effort to ship Darwin as a standalone, installable operating system ends — leaving the system layer open but homeless.
A sponsored project sets out to bring the Darwin system layer — Mach IPC, launchd, libdispatch, notifyd — onto a FreeBSD base. Joe Maloney contributes to it — EFI and ZFS loader work, release packaging, an i915 graphics update — the first thread running from that effort to this one.
A new macOS-compatible effort starts on a FreeBSD base, pursuing a familiar desktop and app experience.
ravynOS shifts its kernel direction toward XNU.
A new vision based on those earlier efforts.
Team
A small team working in the open. As the effort grows, this is where core developers and key contributors will be credited.
Pairs on porting, auditing, and integration as a force multiplier.
anthropic.com/claude