What is FreeBSD

FreeBSD is an open source Unix like operating system. It is a continuation of BSD which came out of the University of California, Berkeley. It has been under development, in different forms, for over 40 years. FreeBSD has been used by many companies from large websites to small embedded devices.

Why use FreeBSD in an embedded product

FreeBSD is a fast, secure, stable, well documented, permissively licensed system.

Speed

FreeBSD is a fast, efficient operating system. Developers are continuously working to improve FreeBSD's speed. FreeBSD is used in some of the busiest servers on the internet. Because of this it has been designed to be efficient in the resources it uses, including CPU usage. This helps with embedded systems with only a little memory that need to reserve as much memory as possible to the required tasks.

Security

FreeBSD has many security systems built in. These include: user permissions; FreeBSD jails, a self contained copy of FreeBSD from within it's self; the Mandatory Access Control Framework; and, full disk encryption.While most systems don't need all these features they can be used when needed.

Documentation

FreeBSD is extensively documented. This includes documentation for each utility installed on the system to the programming interfaces to extensive comments detailing how the source coded works. FreeBSD is often applauded for it's extensive documentation.

Licensing

The FreeBSD license doesn't require companies using it to release their changes. This is useful in an embedded system that contain devices where the developers are unable to release drivers for.

Even though there is no requirement to submit source code back to the FreeBSD project many developers find they can reduce the cost of maintaining their code if it is submitted back. This is seen when a company moved from one major version of FreeBSD to the next. When they have submitted their changes back these will be available to them in the next release of FreeBSD without having to update the source code them self. Because of this there are many companies developing FreeBSD.

How WhiteQueue Consulting can help

I have been using and developing FreeBSD since the early 2000's. Using this experience I can help you with custom development of and on FreeBSD. I can also help with building a file system customised to fit the needs of the project. If you need custom drivers written, changed to the operating system or support getting a development environment setup I can help.

To find you more contact us.