5BSD - a verifiable FreeBSD derivate

cracauer@ · Thursday at 12:25 PM

[no affiliation, I just spotted this]

5BSD — Private Compute With Verifiable Integrity

5BSD provides secure execution infrastructure for workloads where data exposure, tampering, and unverifiable state are unacceptable. Open source, permissively licensed.

www.5bsd.org

Webpage is a little pretty and light on technical detail. Better info is on Linkedin in the author's posts:

Kory Heard - Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex | Professional Profile | LinkedIn

I build 5BSD the base operating system for security sensitive appliances. Other… · Location: Dallas-Fort Worth Metroplex. 500+ connections on LinkedIn. View Kory Heard’s profile on LinkedIn, a professional community of 1 billion members.

www.linkedin.com

The source code is forked from FreeBSD. https://github.com/5BSD/5BSD

Charlie_ · Thursday at 12:47 PM

I seem to recall SCO using the term 5BSD.

ms(5BSD) — UnixWare 2.01

MG · Thursday at 12:53 PM

The Github readme.md talks like it's FreeBSD. Weird...
Why is it not just a program?

sualbee · Thursday at 12:58 PM

cracauer@ said:
Webpage is a little pretty and light on technical detail.

Hmm, I wonder why that might be the case?

cracauer@ · Thursday at 1:07 PM

MG said:
The Github readme.md talks like it's FreeBSD. Weird...
Why is it not just a program?

It's a framework to run programs.

blackbird9 · Friday at 3:59 PM

Interesting

MG · Friday at 4:20 PM

cracauer@ said:
It's a framework to run programs.

It can't be nested like a VM or jail? I see no need to be a system-wide configuration. The FreeBSD kernel must go because something doesn't work on GENERIC? What are they hiding?

ralphbsz · Friday at 5:49 PM

cracauer@ said:
It's a framework to run programs.

Oh, you mean like an operating system?

Sorry, bad joke.

sualbee · Friday at 8:10 PM

Should it be explicitly stated that this project has been clearly vibe coded? To spot that you don't even need to look at the commit log (which I did). The website is 100% similar to all the slop we see everywhere nowadays: huge amounts of rambling text without much sense, but of course full of buzzwords with no real technical details that would tell us at least something concrete about the project and/or its developers.

MG · Friday at 9:07 PM

sualbee said:
Should it be explicitly stated that this project has been clearly vibe coded? To spot that you don't even need to look at the commit log (which I did). The website is 100% similar to all the slop we see everywhere nowadays: huge amounts of rambling text without much sense, but of course full of buzzwords with no real technical details that would tell us at least something concrete about the project and/or its developers.

Not convinced of that. Look up the core figures and public crtitics. I might be superstitious but it has the smell of a digital ID / age veficitation platform trying to become lawful "OS provider" next year with a special security infrastructure.
What has Oracle to do with it?

Emrion · Friday at 9:48 PM

Is someone managed to try this thing?

I don't understand anything. I don't even see where to begin.
I feel that as just words and schemes void of any sense.

msplsh · Friday at 10:32 PM

sualbee said:
Should it be explicitly stated that this project has been clearly vibe coded

Yes.

bakul · Friday at 11:32 PM

Should be moved to off-topic.

sualbee · 2026-08-29T14:34:30+0100

MG said:
Not convinced of that. Look up the core figures and public crtitics. [...]
What has Oracle to do with it?

Where should I look that up? All I could find about the author is countless very abstract, if not meaningless, posts on Twitter and LinkedIn, plus only one (still pending) small FreeBSD contribution. Please share your findings, if you have more.

But what I also see:
- 100% LLM-generated website with no attempts to hide it,
- the project has only one author (excl. Claude),
- the author makes basic git workflow-related mistakes,
- 1.3 million LOC were added by 577 commits since May 15,
- these commits touch many different FreeBSD subsystems,
- some commits I checked clearly lack human validation and contain obvious mistakes even for me (who spent like 10 minutes on it).

I could try to build it just to be sure, but I'm already pretty sceptical about this verifiable/isolated/auditable/tamper-evident/etc BSD as it is. And, by the way, "Oracle" is just a name for its service manager, which has nothing to do with the company. Just another buzzword.

MG · 2026-08-29T15:10:23+0100

sualbee said:
Where should I look that up? All I could find about the author is countless very abstract, if not meaningless, posts on Twitter and LinkedIn, plus only one (still pending) small FreeBSD contribution. Please share your findings, if you have more.

Google for the developer and critics. I just downloaded that github archive. What's going on? It contains apparent binary /bin/sh/sh but it can't be accessed. I can't determine the binary format. It feels like a borked archive. The sh manpage ssems recent FreeBSD.

Phishfry · 2026-08-29T16:03:20+0100

sualbee said:
And, by the way, "Oracle" is just a name for its service manager, which has nothing to do with the company. Just another buzzword.

Thanks I was trying to figure out who would run Oracle and bluetooth....
Neo would have been my choice.
Verifiable Integrity.
BBB stamp of approval? UL listed?