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FreeBSD 8.0 Released
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Nov 26, 2009 02:19 PM
from the to-be-thankful dept.
from the to-be-thankful dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights:
Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here. You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release."
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Submission: FreeBSD 8.0 Released by Anonymous Coward
[+]
Ask Slashdot: OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD? 405 comments
Norsefire writes "I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian). After a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way), I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story short: I narrowed the choices down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprise-y tools in the default install, and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a minimal mention of the differences. I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems."
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Awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)
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I was going to make a joke like "You mean other than Apple?" but that's too easy.
BSD's desktop users fill the same nitch as Slackware. Advanced users that want to do it themselves. That said, most Linux distro's were put together because, as we all know, Linux is a kernel, and not a complete OS. BSD's, are a more complete distro, and the ports system alleviates the need for a lot of stuff that Linux distros take care of (like a package manager.) Still, they both are "worth it" to develop for for their devel
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Gentoo fills the same niche with the Linux kernel. And since when is Slackware not a complete distro? Perhaps you meant “Linux From Scratch”...
P.S.: Please get your spelling right. It’s “niche”, “distros”, “BSDs” (second one only), and “develop for their developers”. Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^
Yes, well, you'll do until he shows up.
Parent
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I used to use Linux, but found FreeBSD to be easier to configure from the command line, more consistent in its filesystem layout, more responsive under load, and generally "smoother" in terms of process scheduling. I gave up linux desktop use (for FreeBSD, and later, OS
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends on your definition of BSD. Some people look at the userland and the large amount of BSD code in Mac OS X and call that BSD. I'd say there are more than 0.01% of users that are on mac os.
I started a project to make a desktop friendly BSD operating system called MidnightBSD. There's also PC-BSD and the now defunct DesktopBSD. The new problem is that Linux folks have grown inpatient with the linux on the desktop idea. They want it now and feel that supporting other operating systems in their FOSS work is slowing linux down. A few projects have really done some serious changes to their software to make it function poorly (or not at all) on other OSes including *BSDs. Sometimes it's a lack of people to make reasonable updates to the kernels for various things like "new" video interfaces. Even things like X.org have done shifts that make hardware acceleration a real pain in the butt on BSD platforms. I've been shunned many times for trying to provide patches both for MidnightBSD and previously FreeBSD to other projects.
The FreeBSD project has had trouble getting patches upstreamed for things like GCC and binutils in the past. In general, I think many GNU projects are starting to get grumpy with respect to *BSD patches. There's a backlash with BSD developers trying to write alternatives that are under the BSD license because we must to survive. Also, you get into situations like Apple buying cups and switching to LLVM because of fear of the GPLv3. Perhaps fear is not the right word.
The open source community is not one big happy group but a series of factions that don't get along. It's a shame really.
Parent
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It's not quite true to say that there is no corporate backing for FreeBSD. There are no major companies that heavily back the project, but Yahoo! used to employ six developers full time to work on the kernel (not sure if they employ anyone now - do they have any money left?), Apple's Darwin team often contributes code, Juniper sends patches back, and a few other companies contribute financially. You may remember a couple of years ago that the FreeBSD foundation was in danger of losing its non-profit statu
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Stick with it... might take a little while for the thought process behind BSD to "click" but once it does for you, linux is full of glaring inconsistencies and just feels "dirty" by compa
Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of this could be from a Linux distribution list of new features... Slightly ahead in some ways, slightly behind in others.
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Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)
FreeBSD has ported pf from OpenBSD.
Pf is nice.
Parent
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Yep, I know this.
So would you say that if my primary goal is to run Pf, it will make no difference if I install either freebsd or openbsd ?
I am thinking ease of installation, patches, etc. where there could be a delay before updates for freebsd. Also, does the freebsd port support 100% of the features implemented on openbsd and can it be considered as a totally equivalent alternative ?
Thanks for your reply.
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:4, Informative)
The maintainer of the freebsd port of pf is the same person as the openbsd author. FreeBSD current usually lags a few weeks in patchset from openbsd in regards to pf, and in either release you're generally running the same version.
Parent
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How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously - some anonymous person makes vague claims about how it's "higher quality" - without defining "quality" or providing any citations, reasons, or examples, and it's modded "insightful"?!?! TWICE!??!!
What. The. Fuck!??!!
Here's my refutation of this post - containing just as much "insightful" commentary as yours:
Nuh-uh!
So, where are *my* "insightful" mods?
Parent
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FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or the flashiest X desktops and themes, ...
Hey, Neither does Windows 7!
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:5, Informative)
Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer.
Wow - your impeccable logic has convinced me! Where do I sign up?
Right here! [freebsd.org]
Parent
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Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.
Works for me.
Live UFS dump is broken.
Works for me.
USB mass storage support is broken.
Wine is not supported;
And this is FreeBSD's fault why?
http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64 [winehq.org]
ZFS in double parity mode is broken
Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.
MTRR for older ATI cards is broken
If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.
Jumping the gun... (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.
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We all know that slashdotters don't rtfa, but he'll probably get some traffic from people who aren't regular slashdot readers and don't know how things work around here.
Re:Jumping the gun... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Jumping the gun... (Score:5, Informative)
I should also add that one link the submitter didn't include was instructions for upgrading to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from a previous release: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-07-11-freebsd-update-to-8.0-beta1.html [daemonology.net] (obviously, apply s/8.0-BETA1/8.0-RELEASE/ to the instructions).
Before anyone asks, yes, that link is on my personal website -- but no, I'm not just posting it here to drive traffic in my direction. That link is going to be in the official release announcement too.
Parent
Hey, you're the guy! (Score:2)
Your blog has been a great resource for me for a very long time. Thanks for all the informative posts... you were the only set of instructions that made sense for doing a binary upgrade :-)
Thank you sir!!!
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Thanks for the kind words -- I certainly should be able to write coherent instructions for doing a binary upgrade, though, given that I wrote FreeBSD Update. :-)
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Sorry if this comes across as a flame, but as the guy who wrote FreeBSD Update, perhaps you can answer a couple of questions:
Firstly, why is it so slow? I can cvsup and recompile the tree and install in less time that it takes freebsd-update upgrade to run; the two install steps then take even longer. If I run systat -iostat, I see it hitting the disk incredibly hard. Couldn't it just compare the last modification date of most of the files with the time of the last upgrade? Possibly this has been fixed
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I was wondering about that; I saw "FreeBSD 8.0 Final" a few days ago on FileForum [betanews.com], but the FreeBSD homepage said RC3 was the latest.
Was it released by RAZOR1911?
FreeBSD rocks :) (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll try it. (Score:2)
Using it now for my home "superserver" (Score:2)
PF + AltQ, a ZFS raidz array, and booting from a CF card. Excellent job, kudos to the FreeBSD team!
Great job! (Score:2)
Congratulations to all involved!
FreeBSD is a great Free Unix system.
Nothing yet... (Score:2)
Nothing yet on the website. Only 8 rc3 released on November 12th.
But on the FTP there is something on Nov. 22 labelled as 8.0
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i386/8.0/
wpa_supplicant replacement? (Score:2)
Re:wpa_supplicant replacement? (Score:4, Informative)
Are you running into the "need to create wlan0 instead of using the wifi device directly in 8.0" change? This has tripped up a lot of people.
Parent
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s/Linux/Windows/g
s/FreeBSD/Linux/g
There will be your answer.
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No, because Linux does add features not available on Windows.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:4, Informative)
FreeBSD is a very nice, clean system which is a pure joy to use as a server or desktop -- especially if you like to build your own software. But to each her own. :)
For quite a few years now we've had the ability to run linux binaries via a kernel module called the linuxulator. Handy for flash and a few other things.
Parent
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But to each her own.
Well, aren't you hip and and with it.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:4, Funny)
Her? This is Slashdot you know.
Parent
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:5, Informative)
Sound works. That's why I switched for FreeBSD. Back in the 4.x days (around 2001) multiple applications could write to /dev/dsp (back then they needed to have /dev/dsp.1 and so on, but that was fixed with FreeBSD 5), and all could play sound even though my cheap AC97 on-board sound didn't support mixing in hardware. On Linux, apps needed to be rewritten with ALSA to take advantage of mixing, or needed to use sound daemons which gave horrific latency. Meanwhile, I was playing music with XMMS, getting sound effects in BZFlag, and having my mail and IM clients go bing in the background when I got a message. FreeBSD 8 improves this with a full OSSv4 implementation, including per-application volume channels. Unlike the 4Front OSS implementation, there are some hacks that let apps that use the old OSS 3 API (and ABI) use these by faking a mixer device for each app. It also has the highest-performance mixing algorithm around and supports a few things like encoded digital pass through (for AC3 and similar on an external decoder) without disabling the in-kernel mixing.
ZFS is pretty useful to a desktop user. Run hourly / daily snapshots as cron jobs to guard against accidental deletion and then use zfs send to transmit them to your backup server.
The ULE scheduler originally provided better performance on latency-sensitive workloads (a typical desktop) at the cost of throughput. As a result, it wasn't enabled by default. With FreeBSD 8, it's been improved and now does better on all workloads (including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks) and scales linearly to 8 cores (I've not seen tests beyond that).
Jails probably aren't useful to most desktop users, but they are to power users. With ZFS, creating a new fail filesystem is just a matter of cloning a fresh install, which is an O(1) operation (and very fast) and that gives you an isolated install to work with. Great for running untested or untrusted apps; just install them in a jail and they can't get out. With FreeBSD 8, you can now assign a CPU to a jail and each jail has a complete virtualised instance of the network stack, so FreeBSD jails are effectively very lightweight VMs.
DTrace, again, is more useful to developers than end users. It lets you insert probes into running applications (using binary rewriting tricks, where function prologs are replaced with unconditional jumps to JIT-compiled code that does the profiling). This is by far the most powerful profiling and debugging framework I've come across.
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Parent
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Well said. I agree with everything except one bit:
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Laptops. Power usage.
FreeBSD isn't (AFAIK) tickless. Furthermore, a lot of my laptop's power saving features (SATA power saving, FB compression) aren't supported at all. My WiFi card is, but I'm not sure if the power-saving stuff is supported for that either.
With Linux, all of the above features are supported. As soon as FreeBSD gains support for those, I'm switching.
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Why on earth would a desktop user run FreeBSD instead of Linux, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Linux?
I'm not staying FreeBSD is better than Linux but FreeBSD is a more consistent system.
Linux, even with the best distributions, is a bunch of separate bits stuck together with 15 ways to do any given thing.
FreeBSD also does have some stuff Linux doesn't like PF, Jails, and better ZFS support.
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If ZFS is what you want (and on a desktop that's unlikely), Solaris has more mature ZFS support than FreeBSD.
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Support for more hardware, especially workstation oriented hardware?
Greater availability of applications? (Most desktop oriented apps are written for linux first and later possibly ported to bsd, many closed source apps cant be ported to bsd at all).
When i tried to use FreeBSD as a desktop, admittedly a few years ago, it worked well on my desktop (which was self assembled and intentionally bought using well known hardware) but wouldn't boot on my laptop (an ibm thinkpad 600e) and wouldn't run vmware (which
Re:What's the point in the screenshots? (Score:4, Insightful)
Parent
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