FreeBSD 5.3 on the Horizon

underpar writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that FreeBSD is nearing a code freeze. August 15th is the deadline which will be followed by the usual beta testing and a final release hoped for by October 1st. ZDNet interviewed the software engineer leading the release work, Scott Long, for the article. He says: 'The 5.3 release will be the first one where we see the real benefits of that. The multithreaded network stack will outperform everything we've done before, for running applications such as Apache or MySQL.' Status reports can be found on the FreeBSD website." I've been using the last technology release of FreeBSD for some time now, and am really looking forward to the 5.3 release, as well as the 5-STABLE branch that's rumored to follow soon after.

Re:vinum_geom?

[cperciva]

Anyone know if vinum_geom will be stable in time for 5.3-RELEASE? Or if there's a native GEOM raid solution?

Quoth the status report:

Contact: Pawel Jakub Dawidek

I'm working on various GEOM classes. Some of them are already committed and ready for use (GATE, CONCAT, STRIPE, LABEL, NOP). The MIRROR class is finished in 90% and will be committed in very near future. Next I want to work on RAID3 and RAID5 implementations. Userland utility to control GEOM classes (geom(8)) is already in the tree.

Recent FreeBSD switcher

[Teancom]

My debian machine lost it's harddrive recently, coincidently about one hour before I had to head out of town for the weekend. So I needed to install something on some random harddrive and get my email server backup, quickly. Well, all I had laying around was the 5.1 install cds that I had downloaded when they were announced on /., with the intention of trying out FreeBSD sometime in the nebulous future. So I installed FreeBSD for the first time ever, and have all my accounts added back, along with the various services I needed (named, smtp, and ssh) on and configured, in about 45 minutes. That included going through the install with no documentation at all (my internet connection was also routed through the debian box). That was very impressive, to me at least. Now, granted, after I got back I spent every night for a week dinking around figuring out how things are different, switching from sendmail to postfix, upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2.1, adding ext2 support to copy over all my data, setting up X and sound, setting up support for my Zire 72, and playing around with ports until it became second nature.

So, my thoughts having been on FreeBSD for a couple months? Honestly, I dunno. I haven't noticed any speed difference at all, despite many a BSDer's claim to the contrary (this is a 750Mhz Duron with 1.25GB ram). I had to switch out my soundcard (Envy24-based Chaintech for an SB64 I had laying around) because it wasn't supported. The support for my Zire seems to be much nicer (I've always had problems in Linux with USB-based Palms, and tools like KPilot). I really like the init system, and /etc/rc.conf is nice (once you figure out what's supposed to be in there). It's a bit of a pain when trying to run various things (like nagios), where scripts and whatnot are written for Linux and break subtly (or completely) on FreeBSD. However, that's generally a one-line fix of some sort (change an argument passed to ps or nslookup, for instance), so it's not a huge deal. I've never liked Gentoo, and doing a 'portupgrade -a' makes me long for 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. I really like the kernel configuration, it works like a champ. I've recompiled my kernel probably six or seven times (chasing various hardware and software settings), and I've never had a single thing go wrong. I really wish it supported my APC usb-based UPS, but it doesn't.

In summary, when I change hardware in the near future, I'll probably end up putting debian back on. The expanded hardware support, removal of all those little 'bumps' in making software work correctly, and ease and quickness of upgrading and installing software make debian win out. However, if it wasn't for Debian, FreeBSD would be my choice. I use (and administer) Redhat WS3 at work, and I'll take BSD over it any day of the week :-)

Of course, my ideal setup would be a G5 with OSX as my desktop, and OpenBSD on my server. That would be kinda doable if I still had seperate computers for workstation and server (Linux as desktop, OpenBSD on server), but the ever decreasing pool of working hardware forced me down to one. And I'm not masochistic enough to run OpenBSD on the desktop...

Re:Explain something!

[Fweeky]

Patents which will have rock solid prior art and thus will be invalid -- I doubt Microsoft would waste the money. They've certainly used BSD source before, and had access for plenty longer; can you point to anything from there that they've already patented?

Re:FreeBSD Daemon

[halivar]

As a life-long practicing Christian, active in my local church, with many practicing Christian friends, I just can not in good conscience use an operating system that uses an image of Satan as its mascot.

Context is everything. The BSD "daemon" is in no way supposed to lead people in worship or in any other way lead people to violate commandment #1. In fact, as an open source project, I feel that projects such as FreeBSD and Linux best represent the kind of software development the Acts early church of the Apostles would do: communal. Honsetly, it is not menat the celebrate satan or represent some sort of mystic iconography.

Microsoft, on the other hand (which you currently use in favor of BSD), is a perfect example of immoral greed (if you mods disagree; fine. I'm just calling it how it looks from here), which I find much more morally reprehensible than a cartoon devil; because unlike the cartoon, it is real.

So, as a recent convert to Christianity, I find a great moral symbol in the fact that I run 100% open source at home, as opposed to corporate mammon.

Re:FreeBSD Daemon

[DannyO152]

Other folks have responded. I'll just point out that the mascot is not Satan. Just as the mascot for the Duke Blue Devils and the icon on Underwood Devilled Ham are not Satan either. There isn't any thing holier about commercial products that have angels as their icon and the Anaheim Angels are not automatically the more righteous baseball team. (Back in the 80s there were baseball players with the name Teufel and Gott. It was not the apocalypse when they faced off.)

You have your faith and its symbols, ethics, and morals. It is a serious question as to how you integrate this into what some may call your secular existence. If you honestly believe that either God, Beelzebub or you will be confused as to your allegiances and as to what your mortal life means, then, you're right, stay away from FreeBSD.

Now, unlike the duality of heaven and hell, there are more than two points on the operating system spectrum. Other unix-like operating systems which do not use a devil mascot are NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux (many distros), and Solaris x86. The latter is a Unix operating system. Seek and you shall find.

Both your assumptions are wrong

[koinu]

There are a variety of Java engines for FreeBSD. All are compilable/downloadable from ports. FreeBSD has native engines and I'm using this Sun engine for FreeBSD for my projects:

java version "1.4.2-p6" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2-p6-koinu_17_apr_2004_23_41) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-p6-koinu_17_apr_2004_23_41, mixed mode)

Secondly, the linux emulation is fast. It's as fast as linux. I play various commercial 3D Linux-Games on FreeBSD and they run all fine. There is also no native acrobat reader for FreeBSD and I start it sometimes using linux emulation. There are no differences in speed, in my opinion.