FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE Is Ready

ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.

They need to address some serious issues

[Bob Abooey]

As a core consultant developer for the *BSD kernel for 6 months last year I can't believe they are releaseing this. There are many issues which have not been resolved and are not being publicized to the public. The issues as I see them:

1) The implementation of threads still uses fine grain kernel level locking which does not adhere to POSIXX IEEE 811.2b level requirements, meaning this software is not, nor could it ever be certified for level 4 security.

2) The hash implementation which was used for prior backdoor's still exists and the modules which access it have not been auditied by third party engineers. This is a serious security violation which the dev team refuses to address. In fact they are doing all they can to sweep it underground, hoping people will just forget about it.

3) There is still no credible evidence that the new implementation of the TCP/IP stack is an improvement over the broken one they are trying to replace from the 4.3.xx series. The benchmarks I saw before leaving were just short of horrible and the potential for data loss was rated as QQQ on the topenhiemer algorithm.

I am currently petitioning the core dev team to remove my code from the project due to my differences with them, but they are the most pious and insufferable people I have ever worked with, so I doubt they will. Use this product at your own risk.