Juniper Backs FreeBSD With MIPS Port
Commercial Networking vendors make code contributions to the open source OS and benefit in return.
In particular, as part of the FreeBSD 8.0 release, there is new experimental MIPS support which was contributed by networking vendor Juniper Networks (NYSE: JNPR).
MIPS is an important RISC
Juniper's involvement with FreeBSD, goes deeper than just MIPS, as Juniper's core JUNOS operating system has its roots in FreeBSD. JUNOS is used in nearly every Juniper networking product and is now also being licensed to third party vendors and is also part of the Juniper OEM gear that is sold by Dell and IBM.
Though Juniper does not directly ship FreeBSD in its commercial products today, according to Bushong, Junos continues to benefit from its roots in FreeBSD. Juniper has been updating its Junos operating system every 90 days since the operating system was first released in 1998.
"Today, we still use FreeBSD as our base operating system, Bushong said. "FreeBSD has proven to be quite flexible in supporting vendor innovation, and its proven track record of reliability, performance, and scalability is paramount in the networking world."
Juniper's connection to FreeBSD isn't limited to historical connections either and goes beyond its Junos roots.
"Juniper maintains a strong relationship with the FreeBSD committer community, sponsoring various projects within FreeBSD that will ultimately serve the entire user base, " said Bushong.
FreeBSD is one of the earliest open source operating system projects and is a descendant of the original, open source BSD work performed at the University of California, Berkeley. The FreeBSD 8.0 release officially became available on November 25th and was the first major release since the FreeBSD 7.0 release in February of 2008.
Juniper isn't the only networking vendor to make a contribution that ended up in the FreeBSD 8.0 release. Network security and optimization vendor Blue Coat (NASDAQ:BCSI) helped out with their contribution of a new routing architecture that takes advantage of parallel processing capabilities.
One of Blue Coat's key products is its ProxySG appliance which was recently updated. Sitting at the core of the ProxySG is its networking kernel which was partially derived from the FreeBSD kernel.
The FreeBSD 8.0 release