FreeBSD 5.0 Available

Vegard writes "Although not yet officially announced, the 5.0 version of FreeBSD is beginning to appear on the FreeBSD FTP site and mirrors world wide." Congrats to the developers. Update: 01/19 17:44 GMT by T : Some more detail -- Dan writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD Release Engineering team has officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 release. Improvements include second generation UFS filesystem, GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394 and many more! FreeBSD is also available on 64-bit sparc64 and ia64 platforms."

Hurrah for the BSD Team

[puto]

I use Linux and Free BSD. BSD was my first real delve into the Unix fold. A damn fine server OS and used by more people than most would think. SMP at its finest IMHO.

The team takes its time with updates, does them right the first time and make it a true pleasure to work with.

Kudos guys.

Puto

Free BSD for ALPHA anyone?

[UpLateDrinkingCoffee]

Just wondering, what is the state of FreeBSD for alpha? I have a monster Digital Personal Workstation (600au) that I picked up in a dot com like fire sale... seems like alpha support for linux is waning a bit so I was wondering where the FreeBSD camp stands in this area?

I've got debian on there right now if anyone was wondering...

FreeBSD Mirror sitres

[bihoy]

When FreeBSD 5.0 is officially released you should be able to get it from one of the FTP sites in the official list.

FTP Sites [freebsd.org]

Re:Hurrah for the BSD Team

[krismon]

SMP at its finest has yet to be seen, hopefully 5.0 will make your statement true, but with 4.x and below, we've had to switch to Linux for our databases because the threading wasn't managed by the kernel, and thus you can't have more than one thread from the same process on multiple processors at once. Pretty much useless for some applications, might as well just have 1 cpu.

Re:FreeBSD 5.0 NOT released

[Simon (S2)]

from the freeBSD Mail archives about the 4.5 announcement [freebsd.org]:

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 01:43:19PM -0800, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> Not only am I quoted as somehow having announced it (EH?), but
> slashdot has just announced the availability of FreeBSD 4.5. I've
> already posted a correction as part of the ensuing thread, but just a
> heads-up in case you guys start getting questions about it. From
> everything I can see, somebody recycled my 4.4 announcement or
> something and the slashdot editors didn't even bother to verify it.

And this wonderful newsflash is brought to us only a few weeks after the FIRST "Official" CD release of FreeBSD was pre-announced[1]. I immediately followed that up with a story about the 47th "Official" CD release of FreeBSD to be released on January 26, but they never posted it. The editing at Slashdot has been a joke recently. It is very clear that the posters don't even follow the links in the submissions. I will send some pointers to the editors to make sure this never happens again, as I'm sure many readers have already done.
- Murray

i think he is gonna get very angry this time also :))

Re:Nice linking

[wass]

That said, can someone knowledgeable offer some sort of explanation for why FreeBSD is able to support a higher network load than linux? Is the above link a real unbiased comparison?Does it have anything to do with linux being monolithic kernel? I thought Linux used the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack too, so wouldn't this seem to put them on roughly equal par? Are there any technical reasons the Linux kernel hackers haven't been able to catch up to FreeBSD's abilities?

Sorry to open the door for scores of both Linux and *BSD trolls to jump in with stupid responses like "myOS rox, yourOS sux", but hopefully there will be at least one level-headed response. Thx.

Re:Nice linking

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Does it have anything to do with linux being monolithic kernel?

FreeBSD is also built on a monolithic kernel. Monolithic kernels tend to be as fast or (usually) faster than MicroKernels - no message passing, everything is essentially 'global' and readily accessed. As far as monolithic goes, you might be having a brainfart about MacOS X, which is a MicroKernel (Mach) with a kernel level BSD blob (a mix of Free and NetBSD).

FreeBSD has always been able to withstand higher loads than Linux. Just been around longer. It has a more mature VM that can take the load, and has a more mature TCP/IP stack.

Not a troll, I just FreeBSD has stability advantages over Linux under high load. Linux has a lot of other advantages, take your pick. I don't know why folks get into religious arguments and start yelling over what free UNIX you should use. "You know if you use THIS free, stable, x86 UNIX-like system with a lot of application support, you're real cool, but if you use THAT free, stable, x86 UNIX-like system with a lot of application support, you're a total asshole man." I must be clueless; I just don't get it.

GEOM sounds interesting

[DrSkwid]

I hope one can run GEOM filters in userland. Sounds like a way to implement a totally soft file system.

I'll use the eponymous plan9 example of ftpfs [bell-labs.com]

ftps -m /n/FreeBSD ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD

This would mount the remote ftp site into your local namespace so that when you did ls /n/FreeBSD you got the directory listing of ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD

Shell programmers will instantly see the advantage of such a system over application level ftp clients.

You can use all the tools you presently use for files for manipulating the remote filesystem. None of your applications will have to understand ftp to operate and you can write new ones without even worrying about ftp libraries or whatever difficult protocol you can envisage.

plan9 achieves all this by employing a kind of universal protocol called 9p [now 9p2000] [bell-labs.com]. It's quite a simple protocol and just does not much more than read, write, walk.

It sounds like the filtering system is a way to implement virtual file systems. I do hope so.

There are many interesting applications for such a concept. The list supplied with plan9 is here [bell-labs.com]

Re:Nice linking

[ejungle]

Holy fucking shit.

According to freesoftware.com, the server runs FreeBSD on a one 550MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU-based machine with 4GB of memory, a gigabit ethernet adapter and two 200GB TeraSolutions TSR-2200 RAID-5 storage systems.

Sure, pushing bits isn't that hard. But this is a tiny box, especially when you've got 3000 different connections asking for various bits of data from a RAID 5 array (the slowest of raid configurations, great economy though...) That's where things get impressive. Sure most of the files are cached in the 4GB of memory, but to my knowledge any filesystem navigation requires real disk reads. To do that and maintain responsiveness while pushing 300Mbps is pretty impressive. I would have liked to see how fast FTP 'ls' commands returned results.

My esteem for FreeBSD has always been high, but it just "took it up another notch."

Insert clip of BSD Daemon shouting, "BAM!"

Now, to install it on my scavenged Pentium 90... *sob*