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.

Explain something!

[Eric_Cartman_South_P]

Can someone please explain how FreeBSD goodies like updated 5.3 code would make it's way into Mac OS X? How long might it take, what bits, etc, have moved in past releases?

More BSD goodness

[Fux the Penguin]

I got into FreeBSD about 6 months ago and have not looked back. I was frustrated with RedHat and heard good things about the BSDs.

I have been tempted to check out OpenBSD, because of the networking. This FreeBSD 5.3 status announcement mentions work being done integrating PF (updates?) and ALTQ (new to FreeBSD?)

I'm working towards a site-to-site VPN deployment (hubs and spokes, of course) and am debating FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD. IPSec, queueing and redundancy (dynamic routing, perhaps DBU, and something like CARP) are requirements. Managability is important. "Room for growth" (transparent proxies, accounting, file/print services) would be icing on the cake.

I figure it all could be made to work either way. Is FreeBSD's IPSec and firewall (IPFW/PF) as solid os OpenBSD? How about queueing? I'm a "seasoned newbee" on BSD... My experience is with the FreeBSD 5.x branch, but I'm not sure what all is changing with 5.3. I figure on diving into OpenBSD someday, it's just that time can be hard to come by.

Any advice out there? Am I giving anything up if I commit to Free vs. Open BSD?

Re:More BSD goodness

[noselasd]

Well, speed. OpenBSD is committed to secuity, not speed, and it
has many rather slow internal algorithms.

I'd suggest NetBSD. It too cares greatly about security, and imports
lots of fixes from OpenBSD. And it's slimmer than FreeBSD. Not to
mention solid. I've many times managed to make both OpenBSD and FreeBSD
go mickey, but have yet to crash NetBSD.

snap!

[captnitro]

The following has been brought to you by IANAT (I Am Not a Troll).

I've been using FreeBSD since long before it was apparently dying, since maybe the 2.x branch. I never tried Linux until this past year, because I live under a rock on the dark side of the moon.

I tried SuSE, and it was great and all -- the setup was really nice -- but it's not there yet. In fact, I backed over it with 5.2 immediately afterwards. Why? Well, for day-to-day use, I didn't see any difference between Linux and BSD -- except the cluttered /etc, the fact that YaST didn't like me seeing the cluttered /etc, and this nagging feeling that it was a system of patched together parts, rather than a well-tested, stable "distribution" (note: I'm knocking the distro, not the kernel, and only slightly).

When it came down to it, FreeBSD and a daily-updated ports tree seemed to "click together" better than Linux. For most other day-to-day use, there wasn't a huge difference, though I will say BSD was a tad 'snappier'.

I urge those who haven't tried FreeBSD before to give it a chance. It's not that hard, and it is not, contrary to popular opinion, "better for servers". I play UT2004 and America's Army daily on my BSD box with no problems (thank you native nvidia drivers). What causes most people to gawk after seeing Linux is the text-mode installation -- which is just text menus, but still menus. (I've seen some installation programs that can make you wonder.. OpenBSD, I'm talking to you.)

Last month I introduced FreeBSD to someone who had never, ever used *nix in any form before. After about an hour explaining different concepts (slices, ports and packages, rc.conf), she was off and running and actually, almost sadly, hasn't asked for my help once since then. She had X and KDE up and running within the day.

So give it a try. We have no evil plan. (Except that, yanno, our mascot is related to Satan)

Re:More BSD goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

It depends which one you like more. OpenBSD has more security features, but quite frankly it might not matter to you for alot of things. FreeBSD has more software available, but again, that might not matter to you if you don't use that software anyhow.

Alot of knowledge you gain in one will apply to ther other, or at least help you figure out how to learn the equivilent. Really, try them both out for a while and use the one that you like best.

Re:More BSD goodness

[Anonymous Coward]

"OpenBSD 3.4". Gee, that's some tough explaining. That guy has hated openbsd since long before he put that out, he barely understands his own benchmarks as evidenced by the mmap() benchmark making no sense at all. And he refuses to redo the benchmarks since OpenBSD committed code to speed things up a couple weeks after that was released. Go install NetBSD and OpenBSD yourself, and run those exact benchmarks from that page, and you can prove for yourself that openbsd is just as "scalable". (speed already had very little to do with this, it was an issue of how high can things scale, not how fast can they be done).

Re:Java support?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is *NOT* a very good platform for deploying Java. It can be done, but it is a poor choice. The main reason is that FreeBSD still lacks a robust thread implementation. This problems with threads causes Java to barf frequently. Unless you are into major pain, stay away from Java on FreeBSD.

Re:Explain something!

[killjoe]

Or better yet when is freebsd going to be available on PPC. I'd love to install freebsd on my G5 (really I would! it would make a better server)

Re:How's the desktop responsiveness?

[endx7]

One factor that led me to switch back to Gentoo was the choppyness while working on the desktop environments. At that time I was using 5.1. So say if I was playing the audio/browsing/compiling etc, the computer would freeze for a moment.

I haven't really had any choppyness except for three things:

Sound: sometimes sound will get choppy on heavy (disk) load. Later, I found out that all those different sound utils (xmms, mpg123, etc) were using esound, so I disabled it, and suddenly, no more choppyness.

Gnome fade out. It's choppy, and I dunno why. People sometimes blame sched_ule, but I'm still running sched_4bsd, and it still does it.

Sometimes while playing doom (well, prboom), it waan't very smooth. (quake3 is fine though)

switcher

[BoydWaters]

So I was a Gentoo zealot for two years, it helped to teach me (more than I wanted to know) about Linux.

I got fed up with power-management issues on my employer-supplied laptop computer (a nice machine, but not Linux-friendly) and purchased a Macintosh PowerBook. Very nice, not as clean as Gentoo, but it got me interested in *BSD.

My server was running Gentoo SeLinux until last week. I've installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 and I am *very* happy with it as a stable, secure server platform.

Linux, Apache, etc. have lent legitimacy to Open Source, and BSD license is attractive to many who cannot otherwise use Open Source. So *BSD is helping spread Open Source, and to otherwise improve the quality of the aggregate code base.

Since Gentoo was developed by someone who liked BSD but wanted the device-driver support of Linux, I feel that most of my skills transfer very quickly. I feel that my learning curve on FreeBSD helps me better understand Mac OS X, which has an installed base of about 12 million computers (if Apple is to be believed).

BSD is dead? Hmm. I rather doubt it.

Re:Recent FreeBSD switcher

[Anonymous Coward]

As a fellow Debianista, I had very similar experiences when I tried BSD. But I also was getting very annoyed when updating a very minor thing triggers huge downloads and major recompiles, or when compilation of something huge like KDE fails and has to be restarted with different settings, etc. In conclusion, Debian rules. FBSD is nice compared to older Redhats (I heard they improved their distro somewhat in the recent years, but luckily I never had to find out)

Re:Windows Network Driver Compatibility!

[B747SP]

This is totally awesome!

You got that in one! As I said in an earlier post, I tinkered with it a bit last weekend. I got it up and running with an Intel Centrino b/g wireless (8022?) and a Broadcom gigabit ethernet card, simultaneously (tho that bit required a little bit of hacking) with no particular dramas at all. It just worked!

A little short on doco, but I'd be happy to help out with some pointers if you get stuck with it.