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BSD Operating Systems

October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report 182

Posted by Hemos from the the-state-of-the-union dept.
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has posted the 2003 FreeBSD year-end edition status report. He says many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including SGI XFS port, MIPS, PowerPC on PPCBug-based embedded boards, and networking locking and multithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004."
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October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report More

October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report

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  • How can BSD have XFS? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by emil ( 695 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @03:22PM (#8161354)

    XFS is GPL. Is SGI changing to a BSD license?

    Good heavens, that is a ridiculous quantity of acronyms!

  • OS X? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by monstroyer ( 748389 ) * <devnull@slashdot.org> on Monday February 02, 2004 @03:24PM (#8161377) Homepage Journal
    Has OS X, being semi-derived from FreeBSD [apple.com], been a contributing factor to this growth? As a slashdot user, i see a lot of "FreeBSD is dying" trolls, but with a major computer manufacturer like Apple on the BSD train, this seems more false then ever. However, the only thing i see in the article that could be Apple related is "shared key authentication interoperability with systems like OS X". To me, this doesn't seem like anything major in BSD source code contribution . In fact, Apple seems to give more back to KDE (i.e. Safari) than FreeBSD. Does Apple help or hinder BSD growth?

    • Re:OS X? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 02, 2004 @03:46PM (#8161665)
      Apple has a lot of local changes that likely will not be incorporated back to FreeBSD, similarly to the local changes they have in GCC.

      I think the primary reason there was more contributing back in the KHTML/Safari case was that there is a lot of user-visible improvement to be done there that everyone can agree on. Apple's focus in the lower-level parts of the system is often different enough from other projects that they aren't applicable directly.

      Open source projects (especially the BSDs) have a bit more of a perfectionist "find a good solution before doing anything" mentality compared to proprietary software, where it's more often "we want feature X, make it work somehow".

      Actually sometimes I think (feel fee to disagree) Linux has a sort of "lets do it somehow right away and then improve it" mentality, i.e. more by evolution than by design, which also gives good functional results but less consistency.

    • Re:OS X? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ysagal ( 746467 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @03:46PM (#8161667)
      I certainly don't think Apple hinders FreeBSD growth in any way. But I don't think the fact that Darwin was derived from the 4.x FreeBSD branch (and to some extent included 5.x stuff) had much impact on the growth of FreeBSD. What it did do is put the FreeBSD name in the mainstream by including references to it in its advertisements and such.

      It would be interesting to hear from Mac OS X developers on their interaction with the FreeBSD developers community. I doubt there is much, if any. It seems to me that Apple chose FreeBSD as a good starting point and ran with it, on occasion checking back to see if there's any good new stuff made. They are not after the hardcore FreeBSD users, but the folks that once in a while would like to have a shell and basic *nix functionality available to them, without sacrificing the pretty windows. Not surprisingly these are rarely the people that actively contribute to fbsd.

      (I think I dug a hole for myself. I didn't mean the Apple users don't run fbsd or can't contribute, but that most users that seek *nix in OSX don't need fbsd [otherwise they'd just run fbsd]. As such, there is little user feedback to Apple and no feedback to BSD.)

      -s
      • I can tell you've never really tried to get freebsd working *just right* on a laptop.

        That's why I got an apple, anyway -- to get a laptop that behaved like BSD but I didn't have to endlessly tweak. That, and to run NetBSD on PowerPC so I could endlessly tweak.
        • Actually, I spent just a half hour yesterday doing just that. Its a fairly new dell with wireless and acpi power management. Every problem that plauged me with linux was gone from FreeBSD. My acpi support worked fresh of the install with Suspend and battery monitoring working without any further configuration. acpi on linux often conflicted with my sound card and caused lots of strange noises. Even with windows, the ACPI implementation did not work. FreeBSD is the first OS that actually works correctl
      • I'm not sure use of FreeBSD and OS X are mutually exclusive. I have a couple of FreeBSD boxes around the place (one hosts my website, and the other drives a few dumb X terminals around my house and is used when I feel the need to tinker with something).

        The thing I like about FreeBSD is that I can set it up, and then forget about it. Upgrading is easy, and requires minimal downtime (upgrading from 4.8 to 4.9 produced about a minute of downtime, and the fact the ports are upgraded separately from the bas

      • I agree. I'd wager apple has already given back more to KHTML with its work on safari, than it has to FreeBSD
    • FreeBSD is dying about as much as Linux, Windows, or the MacOS is...they are all viable operating systems and they all have their place in the computer world. They all have good support, a good sized user base, and perform well at their intended tasks. That is my genaric rant/reply to all the "X is dying" people.

    • Re:OS X? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ph43thon ( 619990 )

      well.. here is the trail of logic for the "BSD is dying" troll: BSD is dying -> major computer manufacturer like Apple uses BSD?? -> Apple is dying Then again, I'm not inclined to refer to Apple as a major computer manufacturer (with about 5% of the world personal computer market). Then again, the world computer market is farly big.. so 5% isn't really that shabby.

      Anyway, I use FreeBSD. I figure it will maybe change into something else.. but it won't die. Also, I don't see how Apple could hind
  • I'm just curious to know as a digital camera photographer. For instance, I often use a Samsung 800k camera and on Linux the only support is via an obscure little tool you may have heard off, gphoto [gphoto.org] which is a bit clunky to set up. How is camera support on FreeBSD? I've considered switching.

  • That's a lotta stuff! (Score:3, Informative)

    by bc90021 ( 43730 ) * <bc90021 AT bc90021 DOT net> on Monday February 02, 2004 @03:29PM (#8161440) Homepage
    I read the report, and it's good to see that so much work is being done on BSD. Having tried it (and gone back to Gentoo), I was unaware that there was so much community support for it. I may just have to give it another look!
    • tigerhost.com ranks as one of the worst websites I have ever seen. How could you possibly think it's acceptable to have links appear as normal text? Ok.. that's really all I care to look at, so there may be more things wrong with it, but that in and of itself is pretty darn bad.
      • - All the links are available in the menus on the left.
        - Links that "surprise" people tend to make them more inclined to see what else they can find.
        - If you can find them, then I imagine just about anyone can, huh? :P
        • Given that a link is intended to "navigate", navigation should not "surprise" people... unless of course, you're Colombus. Navigation by definition is a controlled course. To navigate is to plan a course. None of those lend themselves to a "surprise" of any sort.

          And in closing, it does not make me more inclined to see what else is there. Unless I'm at "Homestarrunner.com" I don't want to hunt for easter eggs, your site (being a business) should not make me hunt for information. Everything I need shou

        • If you can find them, then I imagine just about anyone can, huh? :P
          Your witty jab at my intelligence aside, I browsed your website with stylesheets turned off in order to find them. I'm sure not too many people browse with their own stylesheets instead of yours.

  • I like BSD (Score:2, Informative)

    by queen of everything ( 695105 )

    I run FreeBSD on a webserver and I have been quite satisfied with it. I tried 5.2 and ran into some problems so I currently run 4.8. I think it makes a great server, I had a decent uptime, until the #$@#$ power was tripped, but it recovered perfectly. I'm glad that they are continuing to work to develop it and I will definitely install 5.2 once it is in stable release.

  • Merging in OpenBSD PF.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by zulux ( 112259 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @03:39PM (#8161579) Homepage Journal
    OpenBSD Packet Filter is *really* cool - I can't wait for it's availabiltiy in FreeBSD.


  • BSD isn't dying then? I thought with Apple onboard it would be dying faster or something like that since they are on the way out as well. Btw mods, i have an Apple mac. ;)

  • I just off the phone with (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    their development team. They are taking a break [historylink101.net] between RC versions. They deserve the rest. Good work guys!
  • Judging the number of Score=0 posts i thing Rob Enderle is posting at slashdot.

    Anyway I only used FreeBSD with bochs and i would say it is ok.

  • FreeBSD: Project Evil (Score:4, Funny)

    by metal_priest ( 534211 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @04:38PM (#8162333)
    That project certainly deserve the "coolest name" award. Basicly it's the freebsd equivalent of ndiswrapper to get wireless chips to work.
    It's remarkable how applicable this name is :)
    Here is a more detailed description [gw.com].

  • BSD: a lively corpse (Score:3, Funny)

    by puzzled ( 12525 ) on Monday February 02, 2004 @05:40PM (#8163160) Journal


    Despite the numerous BSD is Dying trolls on here, it seems to be quite a lively corpse.

    I have half a dozen 4.9 servers, a couple of 5.2 laptops, and I'm playing with the Motorola 88k RISC port of OpenBSD trying to get it to load on an MVME187 ...

    One of these days I'll get all crazy and complete the family by putting NetBSD on my toaster oven ...

    • BSD Dead? *CACKLE* NOT! (Score:2, Interesting)

      by cepler ( 21753 )
      I think you're confusing death with a workoholic that doesn't have time to talk:

      http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

      From those uptimes I'd say that BSD is most certainly not dead, it's quite hapily humming along reliably.

  • A Long Way in a Year... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Coocha ( 114826 ) <coocha@@@vt...edu> on Monday February 02, 2004 @11:15PM (#8166067) Homepage
    and by that I'm referring to FreeBSD and myself.

    I tested it for the first time about a year ago, and was seduced by the ports tree... it gave me the impression that BSD is a little more sleek in structure than most Linux distros.

    I upgraded my home server to 4.9 a few months ago, and the only downtimes were due to power outages... and after finding a little BIOS tweak in my Tyan Tiger, I think those will be minimized too :-)

    This weekend, I migrated from XP to 4.9 for my desktop machine after drag-n-drop of all things decided to quit working... wtf? There's a few things that I anticipate will be tricky, like Xinerama support for my Radeon 7000 VE dual display, tweaking Vmware so it'll work correctly, and openoffice is being strangely adamant at not compiling. I'm not much of a coder, so things like this tend to make me run to the 'net for assistance, but that's what a supportive userbase is for.

    Kudos to the FreeBSD team for attracting yet another user with a well-structured and well-executed OS.
    • There's a few things that I anticipate will be tricky, like Xinerama support for my Radeon 7000 VE dual display

      This is an X-windows/ATI problem. The issue is that most ATI cards are simply ATI branded and don't work exactly the same as another ATI branded card of the same model. I had this same problem both under FreeBSD and Linux. ATI manufactured cards would work fine, but ATI branded cards would not.

      openoffice is being strangely adamant at not compiling.
      Do _NOT_ attempt to compile OpenOffice. It si

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