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What's New In FreeBSD 7.0

Posted by kdawson on Tue Feb 26, 2008 05:40 PM
from the what-indeed dept.
Operating Systems Software BSD
blackbearnh writes "FreeBSD is about to release the much-anticipated version 7, and as usual there's a comprehensive interview with over two dozen of the major contributors over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers to discuss all the details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."
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Submission: What's New in FreeBSD 7.0 by blackbearnh (637683)
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  • I wish there were nvidia drivers for amd64 :(
  • * Does FreeBSD support Xen Dom0 yet?
    * Did they fix ZFS RAID-Z2 (double parity) support yet?
    * Is KDE 4 is ports yet?
    * What version of X.Org are they using, did they fix the dri/drm problems with ATI cards yet?

    • Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 (Score:5, Interesting)

      by tknd (979052) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @06:51PM (#22566422)

      I was toying around with Freebsd 7.0 RC3 just a few days ago, well actually I was testing it to see if ZFS was really working as claimed. A very basic installation to a 40gb disk went pretty quick (5 to 10 minutes). Rebooted into the installed system and everything was fine. Took an old 1.6gb drive I had and plugged it right in, recognized as /dev/da1 or whatever. Ran "zpool create tank da1" and BAM! /tank already mounted and ready to go. No stupid fdisk, no stupid format command, no fstab nonsense.

      Now I wouldn't run out and switch everything to freebsd 7 and zfs because work isn't finished. For example there's no ACL support since ZFS supports NFSv4 ACLs while freebsd only supports Posix1e. My next test will involve getting samba working and this may be a little tricky since there are some reports of issues with running samba on ZFS. But all of the available reports are quite old (half a year or older). I don't really care about the ACLs because I just intend to use the system as a single user and a convenient area to dump my files on a bunch of disks that all conveniently appear as one along with some redundancy (better than just a bunch of disks and raid5).

      • Yes, but does ZFS RAID-Z2 work yet? The last time I tried it (FreeBSD 7-RC1) I got a kernel panic right off the bat. The test system was a 16 disk array using two Supermicro AOC-SAT2-MV8 cards (Marvell Hercules-2 PCI-X chipset). This same system worked perfectly fine using Solaris Express 10/07.
        • Using Broadcom ServerWorks motherboard chipset? Some pretty serious DMA bugs in the HT1000 were worked around pretty recently, not sure if they made it to RC1. There were also reports of problems with the Marvell SATA chipset used on that card, though mine works fine for what little use I have of it.
      • I can tell you from first-hand experience that whatever the samba issues were, they've since been fixed. I've run ZFS with Samba as my home fileserver with 7.0RC1 and had no issues.

      • Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 (Score:4, Interesting)

        by larry bagina (561269) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @07:25AM (#22571824) Journal
        Earlier this year, we (fortune 1000 company) switched from a mixture of Linux/Windows 2003 to Solaris just for ZFS. (We have a few remaining Windows boxes which we may always be stuck with). We were hoping ZFS would make it's way into Linux (we were ready to put up a lot of cash to make it happen). All the dick wagging and license posturing made us re-evaluate our commitment to linux.

  • I have to ask... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Lally Singh (3427) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @06:17PM (#22565992) Journal
    I mean this as advocacy bait :-D

    Why would I choose FreeBSD over, say, Solaris x86 or Linux?

    • Why would I choose FreeBSD over, say, Solaris x86 or Linux?


      You probably wouldn't unless you were one of those people who gets all excited about the difference between GPL an BSD licensing.

      • not sure about freeBSD, but I know openssh came from openBSD. The reputed security there and throughout the rest of the OS can provide great peace of mind to those of us who are paranoid. if my memory serves correctly it was generally more lightweight from a default install than a linux distro would be, I know openBSD is still a very minimal install because I've used it more recently. I overcome the default loaded crap on most linux distros by using arch linux myself. does any one know how much of the netwo

        • not sure about freeBSD, but I know openssh came from openBSD. The reputed security there and throughout the rest of the OS can provide great peace of mind to those of us who are paranoid. if my memory serves correctly it was generally more lightweight from a default install than a linux distro would be, I know openBSD is still a very minimal install because I've used it more recently. I overcome the default loaded crap on most linux distros by using arch linux myself. does any one know how much of the netw

      • There's a lot more that differentiates FreeBSD than its licensing. For some people/situations, that might be a priority, but it wasn't for me and I still went with FreeBSD. Same with countless other people/companies.

    • Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Enleth (947766) <enleth@enleth.com> on Tuesday February 26 2008, @07:20PM (#22566776) Homepage
      You probably would, if you liked it, if not for any other reason. For most use cases, wether The Right Tool for The Job(tm) is Linux, BSD, Solaris or just about anything else should be determined by asking the people due to be in charge what they feel most comfortable with. And that's it. If you don't expect to push the system to its limits in a very specific way, fear a particular kind of attack vectors or require in-kernel support for this or that newfangled widget, be it hardware or software, and don't consider some platform a burden in the case of staff turnover, the most sensible choice is really what the staff would like to work with.

      Actually, in most other cases it's even easier, because there often is an industry standard - e.g. half (warning: that's an educated guess, that is, a number pulled out of my, er, back pocket, representing something close to reality in a simplified, but suitable way) of the banks and other financial institutions tend to use Solaris a lot (the other half using IBM stuff) just because a tried way of doing things for them and there's no point in changing that.

      And if you want an OS for personal use, feel free to choose on any basis you like, from the license to the number of lines of code to the project founder's hair color - just be careful not to become a brainwashed zealot...

      • Re:I have to ask... (Score:4, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2008, @07:30PM (#22566872)
        Just a bit of statistics that might help you understand where FreeBSD is used en-masse besides Yahoo! (only other one I can think of right now):

        I work for a company that solely employs FreeBSD at financial institutions across the US (and one site in Hyderabad, India). Here's the run-down (warning, these statistics were compiled in less than an hour, solely for this post; I just did a quick head-count via our named DNS records):

        3,483 FreeBSD systems employed by Bank of America
        1,544 for PNC
        872 for Wells Fargo
        around 100 or so for Mellon
        around 500 or so for JPMorgan Chase

        I'm forgetting a few... but you get the point.

        Seems to be a big hit in the financial institutions. BTW, all systems mentioned are used for check processing in wholesale lockbox sites.

        (crossing my fingers that this information isn't confidential, lol)
    • This is going to sound snarky, but it's not intended that way- if you don't already know the answer to that, you probably aren't going to choose FreeBSD. The reason I say that is because the advantages of FreeBSD are really only relevant at the point where you're making your living off of the care and feeding of servers, and even there it seems to be largely opinions or software availability that drive the decision between UNIX variants and Linux. Some say that BSD is better put together than Linux (I disag

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ImustDIE (689509)
      I can't speak for Solaris, but I've used various Linux distros quite a bit (both for servers and desktops). I absolutely love FreeBSD. Having everything unified and maintained by one group brings consistency that you just don't find in linux. Ports is amazing; it has over 17,000 packages iirc and you can be sure they will 'just work', installing everything in just the right places (consistency!), automatically installing prereqs, and even compiling from source if you wish. Like others have mentioned: i

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by a_nonamiss (743253)
      I have to answer this seriously, as I recently started using FreeBSD for two specific projects, and I'm loving it. First and foremost, it's great when you know EXACTLY what you need to do. I'm speaking here of FreeNAS [freenas.org] and pfSense [pfsense.com]. Both are designed to be embedded and run on FreeBSD, and both were designed to do very specific tasks. Both will install entirely on and boot directly from any garden variety USB flash drive. Because the memory footprint is so small, they run by loading the entire OS into a RAMdri

  • Some interesting info on jemalloc (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bconway (63464) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @07:40PM (#22566948) Homepage
    This is kind of old news, but we ran into it at work today. Within the past couple weeks, Firefox 3 has imported FreeBSD 7's (je)malloc for its superior multithreaded performance and non-fragmentation.

    http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/beta-3.html [blogspot.com]

    More info on jemalloc:

    http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html [sharanet.org] (near the bottom, under "Userland enhancements")

    http://people.freebsd.org/~jasone/jemalloc/bsdcan2006/jemalloc.pdf [freebsd.org]

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by ruinevil (852677)
      If only FreeBSD's threading didn't break Wine's support for Blizzard games...

      I couldn't play Starcraft D:. I hear WoW works with it though.

      • The Wine breakage is most likely down to how Linux implements pthreads - there are some grey areas in the POSIX threads spec, where things could be more strictly enforced such as double locking or freeing of mutexes. Linux takes a less stringent approach than FreeBSD and NetBSD, accepting such common coding mistakes, whereas the kernel and libc threading code in the BSD's will print an error and dump core. Being a fan of such things as rigidly type safe languages and compilers that offer a high degree of wa

  • After 48 posts, not one has opened a discussion specific to TFA. Other than to say RTFA.

    Linux Vs BSD is a moot argument, I have my preference, and I'm not going to change because yours differs. Similarly, no amount of bible bashing is going to convince me that man and dinosaurs walked together 2000 years ago!

    To get on topic... (no I am not new here) :p

    I am running RC1 ATM, and will upgrade to the final as soon as it is out. I'd like to know if anyone has successfully implemented RAID-z yet, and
    • A number of changes are merely fixes, starting off with network performance.

      I'm shocked to see FreeBSD claiming to be the reference implementation of SCTP. It's been in Linux for years.

      Performance monitoring is of course old hat.

      Heh. A "large number of CPUs" is 8+ to you. Linux is struggling to handle 16384. (yes, SMP-style NUMA with 1 OS image)

      Tmpfs is way old.

      ARM architecture is of course way old. Niagra is old too.

      Wow, "(as seen in Solaris & others)" for the fine-grained permissions stuff. Can't ment
        • Well one of the most common SATA controllers, the Silicon Graphics family, are totally borked in all flavors of BSD. Is that fixed yet?

  • Why FreeBSD??? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by swordgeek (112599) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @09:53PM (#22568236) Journal
    Lots of people are asking why FreeBSD. There's a simple answer. Not comprehensive, not all-encompassing, but a decently accurate and sufficient answer for most cases.

    FreeBSD is just plain ol' Unix. No bells, no whistles (except ZFS--Fancy!), just Unix as it always was. And sometimes, that's exactly the right answer to a problem.

  • Who really cares? (Score:3, Funny)

    by bluefoxlucid (723572) on Wednesday February 27 2008, @08:51AM (#22572466) Journal
    Slashdot shows like all BSD news as just a collapsed article... is that my settings (I get Linux and MS and OSX and Vista stuff), or it it just because nobody gives a shit?

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by The Ancients (626689)
      Apple use it as the basis for OS X for one.

      • Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Informative)

        by tverbeek (457094) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @06:44PM (#22566346) Homepage

        Apple use it as the basis for OS X for one.
        No they don't. There may still be some cross-pollination between them, by way of packages they both use, but Darwin/OSX and FreeBSD forked a long time ago.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by KugelKurt (908765)
          Darwin is not a fork of FreeBSD. Darwin has its own kernel that's partially BSD-based. Darwin's userland is mostly FreeBSD and Apple contributes the changes to the FreeBSD-based userland directly to the FreeBSD project. So the relationship between Apple and FreeBSD (at least on the userland part) is similar to Ubuntu and Debian.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by bconway (63464)
          Read and learn [apple.com].

          This fully-conformant UNIX operating system--built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5--bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source products.

    • Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Funny)

      by Drooling Iguana (61479) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @05:48PM (#22565662)
      It makes an excellent test subject on which to practice necromancy.
    • I heard somewhere that it was dead. They seemed to have some reputable source backing them up...

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      what for?
      Kickin' ass and takin' names, of course.

    • Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by misleb (129952) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @06:17PM (#22566004)

      what for?


      Web serving and mail filtering, here. But it's nothing I couldn't use Linux for. It is all the same software, really. Honestly, the only reason I don't use LInux is because FreeBSD is what was here when I got here and I figured I should at least take the time to learn it. Also, if it ain't broke...

      -matthew

    • Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LizardKing (5245) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @06:26PM (#22566114) Homepage

      what for?

      Better performance than Linux, that degrades under load much more predictably than Linux (as does Solaris, but FreeBSD is better on commodity hardware). A better written C library (just look at the source code to glibc - it's shockingly bad, unreadable macro soup as though its maintainer hates C). A better documented userland than Linux with complete and accurate manpages.

      FreeBSD is popular amongst hosting companies (the tools for security are easier to use and more mature than Linux), and is also used by companies like Yahoo! because of it's reliability and performance. Linux has outperformed FreeBSD for a while, as the fine grained locking introduced in version 5 matured, but the pain getting it right is beginnng to pay off now.

      • Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday February 26 2008, @06:41PM (#22566310)
        > Better performance than Linux,

        Heh, don't get cocky :) It's good to have some competition at last, we've only been waiting... for over 5 years.

      • I don't know. I think the best reason to use FreeBSD now is habit. And there's a huge number of working FreeBSD systems, so people just gradually upgrade them - no sense to fix something when it is not broken...

        The other reasons are not very convincing. Personally, I like GNU userland better ("screen" - I love you!), for example. Glibc may not nice, but it works fine (I only looked at its sources when I needed to build a cross-platform toolchain).

        Oh, and Linux has much better hardware support.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by Cyberax (705495)
            Yes, but it is a part of GNU tools (which you most certainly can use on FreeBSD).

            But it's not present in the 'native' FreeBSD userland.
    • The running of a nation wide bank in Australia, the perimeter security for a myriad of other companies. The US Military for example (no citation available - not sure where I have the info from on that one).

      But hey, BSD is dead, netcraft confirms it.

      I just hope 7 gives me the same speed increase over 6 as 6 did over 5.
      • I hope for the maturity and rock solid stability that I remember from 4. The innovations in 5 were needed and long overdue, but the decrease in stability has not recovered in 6 (IMHO).

        I have never used another OS that was as stable as FreeBSD 4.11.
        • I hope for the maturity and rock solid stability that I remember from 4. The innovations in 5 were needed and long overdue, but the decrease in stability has not recovered in 6 (IMHO).

          I've found 6.x to be almost stable as 4.x on the hardware I run it on, the only problems I've had have been on a couple of occasions where it didn't like USB hardware on a desktop machine getting disconnected without warning which seemed to lock up everything USB-related.

          I have never used another OS that was as stable as Fr

    • FreeBSD isn't used on the desktop as much as GNU/Linux is, obviously because it's hardware support is not as good, but it is used on heaps of high-end servers out there, including most promimantly Yahoo! I suppose if Microsoft do buy Yahoo! there will be some truth to the saying "FreeBSD is dying", but that's not the case yet and MS Yahoo turning down FreeBSD won't be its end, either
    • If is good enough for Barack Obama (Democrat) - FreeBSD, Apache by pair Networks http://www.douglaskarr.com/2007/06/23/2008-elections-by-server/ [douglaskarr.com] then it is good enough for me!

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Contrary to popular belief, it is this parasitic nature that actually ends up profoundly improving the operating system and proliferating it. Think of the following hypothetical scenario:

      1. CEO sees product XYZ and thinks to himself "Wow, we can compete with that!"
      2. CTO responds to CEO with "We need to research viable means to penetrate this [new] vertical-market with a high profit margin." This all means "I'll get back to you with the cheapest possible implementation after I consult our developers."
      3

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Are you asking if you can run FreeBSD in VMware? or are you asking if VMware has vmware-tools for support in FreeBSD?

      Either way, the answer to both is "Yes". I've run almost every conceivable version of FreeBSD in both VMware ESX and GSX and they also make vmware-tools to be installed (via the fake CD-ROM that you can mount via the menu bar) so that you can get better resolutions of video etc. etc.
    • FreeBSD has Linux 2.4.x binary support built into it, as well as support for the 2.6.x branch is almost complete.

    • Re:FreeBSD Rant (Score:4, Informative)

      by Heavy Machinery (65932) on Tuesday February 26 2008, @09:50PM (#22568196) Homepage
      Check out page 25 of this document: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/GuestOS_guide.pdf [vmware.com]

      According to the Guest OS compatibility table, FreeBSD 6.2 is supported on VMWare Workstation 6.0.2 and VMWare ACE 2.0.2

      Having said that, VMWare guest is running on a fairly standard sort of virtualised platform. With VMWare ESX 3.5 you can use a Buslogic virtual scsi controller or an LSI virtual scsi controller. So you may have to do some fiddling to get FreeBSD to load the appropriate device driver (don't ask me how, I've only ever done generic installs of FreeBSD)

      VMWare ESX Server 3.5 will (officially) support:
        * Ubuntu Linux 7.04
        * Solaris 10 for x86
        * Suze Linux Enterprise Server 10
        * Redhat Enterprise Linux 5
      and various other OSs...

      I've been using ESX 3.5 on an HP DL385 G2 with dual core Opterons and 8GB of RAM, I wonder if that is powerful enough to run Vista as a guest OS... :-)

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