FreeBSD 7.0 Release Now Available

cperciva writes "The first release from the new 7-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. FreeBSD 7.0 brings with it many new features including support for ZFS, journaled filesystems, and SCTP, as well as dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."

Just use the default geometry

[by Anonymous Coward]

You don't need to set the disk geometry unless you have weird-ass old disk hardware. Just accept the defaults.

Re:Just use the default geometry

[djupedal (584558)]

Leave my old weird ass out of this...

Re:

[Brian Gordon (987471)]

Hold on, if you partition with a different utility like gparted/qtparted, will BSD take the space it's given or insist on partitioning something itself?

No need to comment

[RiotingPacifist (1228016)]

with the announcement of the features last night the following topics were beaten to death already:
Why use FreeBSD? (why not?)
FreeBSD is dead! (clearly its not)
FreeBSD is not dead!
yahoo use freeBSD (nobody cares)
FreeBSD vs Linux (ooh flame ware, but then everybody realized that it doesnt matter some people prefer FreeBSD for stability & the fact its all integrated, some people prefer linux because it has lots of flashy features & there are loads of projects to add extra features to it ( but they're not integrated and don't always play well together)!)

please go about your business there's nothing to spam about here!

Re:No need to comment

[LingNoi (1066278)]

You just made Slashdot boring. : /

Re:

[BasharTeg (71923)]

How about the benchmarks that show that FreeBSD just took the performance crown from Linux?

ZFS Support

[T-Bone-T (1048702)]

The summary says it has ZFS support but the website says experimental ZFS support. That seems like a pretty important distiction.

Re:ZFS Support

[dewarrn1 (985887)]

ZFS is indeed labeled experimental, and it's an important distinction. That said, I believe that Pawel Dawidek, who ported the file system from Solaris, is using it in production. The chief caveat at the moment is that ZFS should only be used on the amd64 architecture. Other issues are not specific to FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS, e.g., the large memory footprint, but are instead inherent to the current release of ZFS and would be the same under any OS. More about the project at http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS/ [freebsd.org].

Re:ZFS Support

[zulux (112259)]

Seconded!

We're using FreeBSD 7.2 RC2 ZFS in a production environment on Amd64. It's getting hammered, and holding up fine.

1) ZFS has *solved* our storage problems.
2) ZFS needs 2GB of RAM
3) You should run it on a dual core processor if you're going to use compression.
4) Research glabel so you can move drives around from cable to cable and still use the same device name.*

*more info: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=glabel&sektion=8 [freebsd.org]

Re:

[setagllib (753300)]

Your company may have access to some sweet technology, but I doubt a time machine is one of them. Perhaps you're really running 7.0RC2, not 7.2RC2.

If you *do* have a time machine, do CPU topology detection and EFI+GPT work in 7.2? Does 8.0 have a new installer yet? Inquiring minds want to know.

Re:

[bhima (46039)]

for #1 yes, for #2 NO.

Have a nice day.

Re:ZFS Support

[voisine (153062)]

This is not intended as a troll... really... but it's good to keep in mind that this is the FreeBSD team's definition of "experimental". You may be more accustomed to the meaning that the Linux community attaches to that term. When Linux says it's experimental, that generally means it won't work for most people. When FreeBSD says it's experimental, that means you can probably use it in production but you might want to keep an eye on it.

Re:

[PReDiToR (687141)]

When Linux says it's experimental, that generally means it won't work for most people.

Define "work".
As I posted up in the thread, pata_via incorrectly detects my 80 wire cables as 40 wires, but the whole switch over from /dev/hda to /dev/sda (and sdb, hpt366 still puts my 4 RAID chip devices as hda b c and d) went very smoothly and two kernels ago was labelled EXPERIMENTAL.

Turning off all EXPERIMENTAL kernel options leaves you with a system that really is only good for i386, not the i686 and better.

Funnily enough, the devices connected to the HighPoint chip are using the same cables, s

Re:

[Tuzanor (125152)]

The same is also true for ZFS on solaris. It's not QUITE there, yet.

Re:

[tonyr60 (32153)]

Yep, about the same status as NTFS....

Good developer interview at onlamp

[Jeff- (95113)]

There is a good interview with many key FreeBSD contributers about new technologies and improvements in 7.0. It is quite technical.

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2008/02/26/whats-new-in-freebsd-70.html?page=1 [onlamp.com]

More good summaries of kernel development

[Steve Hamlin (29353)]

GREAT article - it is interesting for a non-programmer to read this type of technical detail, presented in an understandable way. For me, right at the edge of my theoretical-only knowledge. A detailed summary, I guess. (oxymoron)

Similar article on NetBSD: Waving the flag: NetBSD developers speak about version 4.0 [arstechnica.com] (1/30/2008)

Linux focused links:

Current discussion:
LWN: Kernel [lwn.net]
KernelTrap [kerneltrap.org]
KernelNewbies: Summary of Linux Changes [kernelnewbies.org]
---
The Wonderful World of Linux series are excellent history - in-depth for outsiders:
WWOL 2.2 [kniggit.net]
WWOL 2.4 [kniggit.net]
WWOL 2.6 [kniggit.net]
---
Towards Linux 2.6 - A look into the workings of the next new kernel [ibm.com](2003)
Kernel Comparison: Linux (2.6.22) versus Windows (Vista) [pbwiki.com](2007)

Any luck with HT1000 DMA yet?

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

I have a dual-Opteron rackmount Dell with a ServerWorks HT1000 chipset, running 7.0-PRELEASE from January 15, that was having DMA-related fits. Does anyone know if they've got that problem under control yet? I had seen it discussed a lot on the mailing lists but lately haven't had the time to follow closely. Either way that server's staying on the 7-STABLE line because it's so much faster that I can live with running the drives in PIO4 (and with 4GB of RAM those drives don't get touched a lot).

Re:

[mike_sucks (55259)]

You're probably better off asking the -stable or -current mailing lists.

/mike

An important remaining question

[damn_registrars (1103043)]

Is when FreeBSD and wine will start to care about each other.

Jealous of ZFS

[cblack (4342)]

I've been reading about zfs for awhile and recently started implementing it on some Solaris servers and really getting into it. It's nice. Really nice. I am anxiously awaiting being able to run it on linux (not via FUSE) in production. Has anyone heard anything on the objections over license compatibility and stepping beyond traditional filesystem areas of the kernel?

Upgrading HOWTO?

[ewhac (5844)]

So: How do you upgrade an existing system from FreeBSD 6.0 without wiping the entire system and installing from scratch?

And before anyone asks:

• Yes, I know about the ports collection.
• Yes, I know about the binary packages.
• Yes, I know how to configure and compile the kernel.
• No, I've never really tried to compile userspace.

All the docs I've read on the subject tend to suggest that the Real Way to keep a FreeBSD system current is to download the kernel and userspace core every so often and recompile them. And that's fine, sorta, except that it doesn't address how to deal with the "leftovers", such as config files that have been moved or eliminated. (I mean, honestly, compiling the world is not a realistic way to keep current on X.org.)

Who has practical experience doing this? How do you keep your machines current, particularly with security patches?

Schwab

What *I* found in Freebsd 7.0

[esbee (882147)]

My feedback as an user of "current" Linux distros.

- I found the same sysinstall that I saw 4+years ago when I last tried installing Freebsd.
- I found that the official way to configure is to generate the config file template using 'Xorg -configure' and then hand editing the xorg.conf config file!!!!
- I found that the standard install still installs TWM and doesn't even ask for KDE/GNOME (I know you need to install the packages *after* the install, and yes I know I can use sysinstall) and you are dropped to a text login after install.
- I found that my amd64 cpu with the nvidia integrated card doesn't have an nvidia driver. And the default nv driver can't make use out of DDC to configure my brand new widescreen LCD monitor.
- I found that my mouse pointer is invisible in X.

Now, before other start, please understand why I am saying this - I know Freebsd has a different approach to building a distro. I also know that reasons like prop. drivers are not its fault. I also accept that I probably am facing some system specific issue inherent in any .0 release of distros.

My point here is simply to let how a typical user who thought of migrating to Freebsd thinks. I for one, value using my relatively new hardware to the fullest, so I am going back to Ubuntu.

I still have tremendous regards for Freebsd as a server. I have found them to be much more stable than any current Linux distro, and capable of much more punishment too.

Re:

[Brandybuck (704397)]

- I found the same sysinstall that I saw 4+years ago when I last tried installing Freebsd.

What's the problem, does sysinstall not work for you? I've never had a problem with it. If you fear the sight of plain text, then FreeBSD will not be for you. While FreeBSD makes a damned awesome desktop system, that is not its goal. It is not designed for Aunt Tillie.

- I found that the official way to configure is to generate the config file template using 'Xorg -configure' and then hand editing the xorg.conf confi

Re:

[nurb432 (527695)]

Its been easy for the last several releases if you are willing to accept defaults.

Re:

[piojo (995934)]

Hmm. The time I tried to install FreeBSD, the installer choked on my hardware. I tried two different dell desktops. Part of the problem was an inability to deal with a USB keyboard. I hope that has been fixed, and I plan to try FreeBSD again, some day. I'll stick with a more common OS, for now.

Re:Still hard to install?

[halber_mensch (851834)]

Hmm. The time I tried to install FreeBSD, the installer choked on my hardware. I tried two different dell desktops. Part of the problem was an inability to deal with a USB keyboard. I hope that has been fixed, and I plan to try FreeBSD again, some day. I'll stick with a more common OS, for now.

FWIW, there's something about Dells and USB keyboards and the FreeBSD single user mode. I'm not sure exactly what the problem is (or I'd contribute my own fix), but a workaround is to go to the loader prompt on boot (option 6 I think) and enter 'set hint.atkbd.0.disabled="1"'m then 'boot'. This will bump the AT keyboard out of the way and allow the USB keyboard to function. You'll either need to set this in your /boot/device.hints after installation or remember to do it whenever you boot into single user mode.

Re:Still hard to install?

[parc (25467)]

I haven't run FreeBSD since 6.0, but the problem with Dells, IIRC, is that the AT controller acts like there's a keyboard there even if there isn't one.

I had no problem using the clearly labeled "boot with USB keyboard" menu option.

It's a moot point -- with the at mux that came in I believe halfway through the 6-series, you can have as many keyboards as you feel like.

Re:

[MattBurke (58682)]

There's something about Dells, USB keyboards and any non-windows installer... Tried about 5 os boot disks on a vostro before I discovered you need the keyboard in just the right socket - and then it screwed up after you chose the kbd type in the installer, necessitating a different machine to install on. Once installed it's worked well.

Re:Still hard to install?

[nsayer (86181)]

Slated for 7.1 is support for booting GPT [wikipedia.org] partitioned disks. This will make the whole partitioning thing even easier, since it will make BSD labels and the MBR go away entirely, and partitioning will be done entirely using LBA addressing.

Re:Still hard to install?

[PReDiToR (687141)]

LBA adressing -- brought to you by the RAD Redundant Acronym Department.

Are they a subsidiary of the Department of Redundancy Department?

Reminds me of a .SIG here - They repeated themselves over and over again incessantly without end - or however it goes.

Re:Still hard to install?

[halber_mensch (851834)]

I don't want to have to figure out disk geometry to install an OS...have they made it as easy as Ubuntu?

I'd gladly give it a go.

Let me fix that for you.

I don't want to have to figure out something worthwhile to say...it's not my favoritest Linux so I'll just discredit it.

I refuse to willingly evaluate it without preconceived prejudice.

Re:Still hard to install?

[smash (1351)]

Its easier.

Press "A" for auto partitioning and then "A" in the disk layout section for auto-defaults.

As it has been since at least FreeBSD 4.0.

Re:Still hard to install?

[by Anonymous Coward]

Please look at PC-BSD or DesktopBSD; they would be the equivalent to Ubuntu.

http://www.pcbsd.org/ [pcbsd.org]
http://www.desktopbsd.net/ [desktopbsd.net]

Disk Geometry trolling isn't funny or have you confused this with partitioning. So, are you trolling or are you stating that you don't like to partition drives. If it is partitioning then you may want to check out the above links; if you're trolling, then continue with what you're doing

Re:Still hard to install?

[by Anonymous Coward]

I've never needed to know any of those things to install FreeBSD. We run a number of FreeBSD virtual machines and physical servers. I installed them all myself. The most complicated part was entering network information, since all of these systems had static IPs and weren't using DHCP. Unless you're doing something out of the ordinary, you can just use all the defaults and have a fully working system in 15-20 minutes on an average machine.

I've been using FreeBSD since version 2.2.7. I've been using Linux and other OSs even longer. Operating systems that have been around as long as these weren't just created from the start to be a breeze to install. Linux used to require a lot more manual configuration than it does now... just because something like Ubuntu makes it easy doesn't mean it always was. Linux has progressed in this area, and so has FreeBSD, and so have most other mature operating systems.

Also, FreeBSD is not targeted at the same audience as something like Ubuntu. A better comparison would be PC-BSD and Ubuntu, as they are targeted at desktop users. I guess maybe FreeBSD could be compared to the server or alternate editions of Ubuntu, in which case the install process (using text screens) is fairly similar.

Re:

[LM741N (258038)]

Ubuntu easy to install? Perhaps. But does it meet the quality standards of FreeBSD and esp OpenBSD? I dumped Ubuntu and over wrote the partitition with OpenBSD because everytime I tried to manually enter in my network encryption parameters manually, the next time Ubuntu booted it just ignored it and locked onto the strongest unencrypted signal.

Re:Performance is really lacking

[eht (8912)]

Actually, the usual answer is the pre release have extra stuff turned on to help enable debugging. That's why it's not a release where they turn that extra stuff off, or you can recompile the pre release kernels and such.

Re:ZFS?

[by Anonymous Coward]

It's quite good. Where I work, we've been using the release candidates to store upwards of 15 TB of data, spread over about 50 hard drives. We haven't had any problems, and the performance has been fantastic.

Solaris still offers better support, but the ZFS support offered by FreeBSD is production quality.

Re:ZFS?

[Neo-Rio-101 (700494)]

It's actually pretty stable. Having said that, there are some issues surrounding it. For starters, FreeBSD 7.0 uses ZFS ported from version 6, whereas Solaris now has ZFS pegged at version 10. There have been numerous enhancements made to ZFS in v10 which aren't in v6. It remains to be seen how the FreeBSD implementation catches up to the Solaris implementation. There is an upgrade command in ZFS that can upgrade the file system to the new version - but no idea how this will work in future FreeBSD versions yet. Secondly, ZFS runs better on 64bit - so using the 32-bit i386 release is not recommended. Thirdly, you need quite a large clump of memory - over 1GB and preferably 2GB or more. It is recommended to tune some kernel memory parameters to ensure that ZFS doesn't cause your system to panic. ZFS seems to like munching on memory in an attempt to scale. Otherwise ZFS is really good and very stable - perfect for use in a file server. Just don't build your file server on old 32-bit hardware, and make sure you have plenty of RAM.

Re:ZFS?

[tonyr60 (32153)]

"Does ZFS really require that much memory?"
No, but if it is available it will certainly use it. The upside of ZFS using more memory is that disk IO will be lower so better overall performance.

Re:

[tonyr60 (32153)]

So you have not used ZFS yet? If so, you would know "why not just use Linux and lvm2?" It is just so easy and fast to add extra storage and provide data security across many different devices. For one thing, newfs is redundant.

Re:STABLE

[cperciva (102828)]

*I love how STABLE just sticks out, like BSD wasn't stable before. Ha!*

"7-STABLE" is FreeBSD-speak for "this implements the FreeBSD 7 API/ABI, and any program you write or compile for an earlier release will work just fine on a later release". In other words, the Application Programming/Binary Interfaces won't change in incompatible ways.

This is in contrast to Linux, where updating to a new kernel (belonging to the same "stable" kernel branch, or even applying security patches) can make programs break until you recompile them.

Re:STABLE

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

Linux has had journaling file systems for years.

FreeBSD hasn't wanted journaling filesystems for years, since we've had softupdates which solve many of the same problems but with half the writes. The recent gjournal plugin to the GEOM system is a block-level journal. In other words, it handles all writes to a device, whether or not the overlying filesystem supports journaling. Journaled FAT anyone?

I just said journal a lot, didn't I?

Re:STABLE

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

You couldn't be more wrong.

You underestimate my capacity for wrongness.

Softupdates don't solve the important unclean shutdown fsck problem very well. Background fsck is a nightmare for any production system with non-trivial amount of spinning rust.

How's that? I mean, I'd rather not have to fsck my terabyte RAIDs, but if I have to, at least the system can be running live and undegraded while the loose ends get cleaned up.

Wrong. Half the writes as compared to the naive gjournal journalling. Real modern journalling filesystems usually have the option to journal just metadata. What's more, journalling is far more flexible than softupdates. You can journal to a small battery backed RAM device for example.

If you're just journaling metadata, then you're not getting the full benefit of journaling (and definitely not anything more than softupdates offers, as it's basically an in-memory ordered journal of metadata transactions to be committed). As far as the battery-backed RAM: that's like saying cats are better than dogs because you can give them medicine if they get ringworm. BTW, with FreeBSD's GEOM system, you could journal to an encrypted RAID on a remote host if you wanted to. You might have already known that; others might not.

Wrong. There has to be some filesystem support work done.

Wrong. gjournal is a generic journaling provider. You can use it to wrap any other GEOM component. From it's own man page:

When gjournal is configured on top of gmirror or graid3 providers, it also keeps them in a consistent state, thus automatic synchronization on power failure or system crash may be disabled on those providers.

Pretty neat, huh? You can wrap it around your RAID to make it crashproof. If you think background fscks are bad, then you've probably never watched a few terabytes of mirror resync itself. Anyway, what you misunderstood is that filesystems have to be altered to interact meaningfully with the underlying journal. UFS has been so modified. That doesn't mean that other filesystems won't work on top of it (which would be silly because a gjournal looks just like any other block device), but that they're not optimized for it.

Re:

[stox (131684)]

If FreeBSD doesn't have a driver, you can use the Windows driver. Geom will allow disk encryption, to an even greater degree than TrueCrypt.

Re:Journaled filesystems?

[Just Some Guy (3352)]

No, you read that right. The reason is mainly that FreeBSD users have been enjoying something called "softupdates" for the last decade or so, which is sort of like an in-memory journaling. Rather than writing metadata directly to disk, it's queued in memory, grouped into an efficient order, then transactionally committed to the underlying drive. The disk is never in an inconsistent state, even without a journal to fall back on. If the system crashes, a special fsck that can run while a filesystem is mounted read-write comes along and deallocates any space that's no longer used but hasn't yet been marked as empty.

Because of that, there hasn't been much need or real drive to get journaling into FreeBSD. The solution they're going with is actually nicely abstracted, in that you configure a journal for a whole device through GEOM (which is kind of like a Lego set for building drive setups). Although you'd probably never want this, you could theoretically have two "drives" that reside on remote machines (via ggate) bound together with RAID1 (via gmirror), encrypted (via geli), and with a local journal (via gjournal).

Re:

[excelblue (739986)]

I happen to have a very similar setup on my FreeBSD 7-STABLE system right now, and it works great.

You should have no problems at all. It'll work perfectly.

However, is there a compelling reason for you to switch? Debian is a great operating system, and unless it's not working out too well for you, you should not just switch for no good reason. You risk being unproductive for a few days, running into issues you don't know about, etc.

Re:

[dadragon (177695)]

How does one install new software on BSD? (do you compile everything from source?)

I upgraded from 6.2 to 7.0-PRERELEASE by doing the following:

It's a convolouted process, but I wanted to follow FreeBSD 7 development. It's easier when you do it from a binary CD. Basically you restart from the CD and upgrade and it's automated.

Start by updating my system source:
$ sed -e 's/RELENG_6/RELENG_7/' /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile > /root/7-supfile
$ csup -h cvsup6.freebsd.org /root/7-supfile

Now the sou

Do it!

[DarkEmpath (1064992)]

Seriously, jump! I switched from Debian (2.something, I think) to FreeBSD 4.5 *years* ago. I haven't been happier.

I'm still running FreeBSD 6.3 on my server, and I will upgrade to 7 soon, but I found PC-BSD to be the better desktop system (DesktopBSD had strange quirks, and wasn't as polished).

PC-BSD uses the "stable" FreeBSD as it's base, so although it's currently FreeBSD 6.3 based, that'll no doubt change to 7.0 soon. PC-BSD also uses KDE as it's desktop environment, so you'll have no trouble with your a

Re:

[phoenix_rizzen (256998)]

You're probably spoiled by the package manager. Ports are neat, but apt is a dream. At the very least you'll have to get used to a different way of doing things. If you use a lot of custom repositories (e.g. rarewares [rarewares.org]) you might encounter a few headaches getting all the software you want. There are some things, like 'apt-cache search' that it's not immediately obvious how to do on ports. I think you're just supposed to string together 'find' and 'grep' commands, since ports is just a tree full of text files.

# cd /usr/ports
# make quicksearch name=whatever