Wasabi Certified® BSD : Features

Choosing an operating system is one of the most critical design decisions for OEMs building network devices or server appliances. As network based products become increasingly rich in features new demands require a robust network operating system as a foundation. BSD has a 25 year heritage of ongoing enhancement and advancing networking features often copied by others. A robust operating environment that leverages open source Unix with commercial grade testing and support. Other open source operating systems have adverse licensing provisions or a "roll-your-own" quality that makes them unsuitable for complex applications with a substantial level of user developed intellectual property. Wasabi Certified BSD has the technical, support, and licensing features that are needed in today's and tomorrow's advanced network devices and server appliances.

To learn more about Wasabi Certified BSD's many features, select an item below:

Core OS features

Wasabi Certified BSD is based upon BSD, an open source, Unix-like operating system that has been developed for over ten years by thousands of programmers around the world. In addition to its [outstanding networking functionality] BSD's portability and advanced system design make it an ideal OS choice for network-based applications, server appliances, and network-intensive storage products. Key BSD features include:

Advanced File System Support

High Performance enhanced FFS (Many embedded products ship with an old version of the BSD FFS)
All major filesystems supported including NFS version 3, MS-DOS FAT, Linux EXT2, ISO CD 9660, and NTFS
4.4BSD Log Structured File System (LFS)
Wear-leveling Flash Support works with all file systems
Robust file system support and file system layer abstraction
Support for large filesystems of up to 4 terabytes

Secure, Protected Memory Design

Advanced, object-oriented virtual memory with unified buffer cache and advanced sharing semantics
All the standard Unix features:
Memory protection
Security
Reliability
Copy on write
Sharable images

Advanced Virtual Memory Features added for BSD:

Original Mach VM completely replaced with UVM
Page loanout for zero-copy data movement
Tunable page and file data cache
Memory pool manager reduces TLB thrashing and object allocation overhead
Tunable cache coloring

Comprehensive device driver support

USB SCSI

PCI Serial ATA

RAID 0,1,5 VME

PXE USB 2

iSCSI PCMCIA

ATA100 Compact Flash

CardBus Ethernet/GigE

Interoperability
Unique binary compatibility protects users' investment in existing applications by in-kernel support for non-native binaries (for the same processor) to run transparently. Systems include:

Linux (i386, m68k, alpha, powerpc, mips, arm)
Solaris and SVR4 (sparc, i386, m68k)
SunOS (m68k)
BSD/OS (i386) and FreeBSD (i386)
HP/UX (m68k)

Rich Unix Functionality

Solid and Fast Internet Protocols
IPSec and IPv6
User-threads support
Advanced Storage Protocols
Remote Maintenance
3,000 software packages
POSIX-compliant APIs
RAID support
140 million lines of packaged third-party code
64 bit addressing capability

Lines of Code

Kernel 3,250,000

xsrc 5,500,000

Base Systems 10,512,000

Prepack. 3rd Party SW 140,000,000

Tiny Minimum Footprint
Footprint as small as 400KB

All major features including filesystems, advanced networking, remote access, console support, and a layer of userland applications suitable for a storage appliance or network black box.

^Back to Top

Networking Features

BSD is the gold standard in TCP implementations. Its renowned networking stack has been fully maintained and updated for over twenty five years, from its selection by DARPA to its contemporary status as the reference implementation for Unix.

Many OS kernels use BSD networking code, but often an old version, from 4.4BSD or earlier. However, only a fully up-to-date BSD networking stack takes advantages of the thousands of new lines of code written every year.

TCP/IP Development by Year

Year Lines Changed

1993-94 12,780

1994-95 11,877

1996-97 9,241

1997-98 18,040

1999-2000 29,687

2000-01 14,671

2001-02 26,028

Standard networking features include:

Comprehensive networking stack including IPv6 & IPv4, High security with IPSec (IPv4&IPv6),VPN Tunnels, Kerberos 5, SSH and OpenSSL support
Routing and switching
GbE support
802.11b support
vlans and bridging
All major filesystems supported including NFS version 3, DOS, FAT32, ext2FS (Linux) FFS, LFSfs, ISO 9660, NTFS
Support for large filesystems of up to 4 terabytes - 64 bit addressing

^Back to Top

Special Embedded Features

Wasabi Certified BSD contains proprietary extensions created by Wasabi Systems engineered especially for embedded, networked storage, and server appliance uses. Special embedded features in Wasabi Certified BSD include:

Support for wear leveling flash devices.
A micro webserver to aid OEMs in the development of web-based user interfaces for remote system configuration and management.
Boot from Compact Flash
WasabiRAID and Wasabi Journaling File System (available as separately-licensed modules)
Additional hardware support on some platforms
TCP/IP optimizations

Platform retargeting and development services for embedded OEMs are also available from Wasabi Systems' professional services development team, the world's leading provider of embedded BSD products and services. Click here to find out more.

^Back to Top

Certification and Testing

Wasabi Certified BSD is the only commercially-available, GPL-free Unix-like operating system with professional certification and support. All Wasabi Certified BSD packages have been thoroughly tested, certified, and documented at Wasabi's performance and testing facility. Wasabi's standard test procedure includes:

Building the source code in accordance with the same instructions provided to users
Installation of the binary image on the reference platform
Exhaustive testing of all of the functions provided by the reference platform/software package according to generally accepted benchmarks and methodology
Verification of the BSP documentation
Documentation of the build and test procedures used to certify the software package

Moreover, as the BSD source code changes, existing Wasabi Certified BSD packages will be retested on a recurring basis to ensure that they are still fully functional. Wasabi Certified BSD takes the uncertainty out of BSD Unix. For more information about Wasabi testing and certification methodologies, or to purchase Wasabi Certified NetSBD for your hardware platform, contact us at sales@wasabisystems.com.

^Back to Top