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NextBSD

A BSD whose system plumbing comes from Darwin. launchd is PID 1, services are .plist files, hardware events flow through an in-kernel IOKit registry over Mach IPC, and the network is configured by ipconfigd talking to configd — all on a FreeBSD-derived kernel that reports NextBSD for uname -s.

If you have ten minutes and a spare VM, start with Getting Started.

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New here?

Page	What it covers
Getting Started	Download an image and boot it in QEMU. No install required.
Apple Silicon Mac (UTM) Guide	Step-by-step on an M-series Mac, including the Gershwin desktop.
Installing NextBSD	Put it on a disk with nextbsd-installer.
Installing Packages	Point pkg at the NextBSD repository and keep a system current.

Using the system

Page	What it covers
Command Reference	The Darwin-derived commands: launchctl, ioreg, syslog, kextstat, and friends.
Service Management with launchd	Starting, stopping and writing services as property lists.
Filesystem Layout	The four-domain model, and where things actually live.

Understanding the design

Page	What it covers
How NextBSD Differs	Side-by-side with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
Project Repositories	How the pieces are built and which repo owns what.

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The short version

Coming from FreeBSD, three things will surprise you immediately:

1. There is no rc.conf. Services are property lists under /System/Library/LaunchDaemons/, controlled with launchctl. See Service Management with launchd.
2. There is no kldload. The kld* command-line tools are deliberately removed; kextload, kextunload and kextstat replace them. (The kld syscalls remain — only the CLI front-ends are gone.)
3. ipconfig is not ifconfig. NextBSD ships Darwin's ipconfig, a different tool with a different CLI. Both it and FreeBSD's ifconfig are present.

Getting help

• Discussions — questions, ideas, showing off what you built.
• Issues — bugs in the OS or its build.
• nextbsd.org — project overview and component status.

NextBSD is pre-production. Continuous builds are published on every merge and are boot-tested in CI, but there is no stable release yet. Run it in a VM before you run it on anything you care about.