FreeBSD 4.X Lives On

An anonymous reader writes "In spite of FreeBSD 5.3 going to "production" status, FreeBSD is still planning at least one more full release of the mature production 4.x series. FreeBSD 4.11 Release Candidate 1 has been announced. The complete 4.11 release schedule is here. This is good news for those who can't or don't want to migrate to FreeBSD 5 yet."

Won't affect me much, but...

[Just Some Guy]

Nice work, guys. I admin a few servers that are several hundred miles away from where I live. When I swing by there next time, I'll definitely be upgrading to 5.x. In the mean time, it's nice to know that I'll still have a few new features and bugfixes to keep things reasonably current with a minimum of disruption.

Thanks for the nice work!

Re:Actually...

[idiotnot]

Man, someone else with the same view I have. The OMGFr33BSD trolls can't see the truth. FreeBSD 5.x is a dog. There's no other way to put it. [GIANT LOCKED]

My production stuff will remain on FBSD 4 until it gets to the point where a) I need new hardware for those particular machines, or b) I need to run new applications that refuse to work on 4.

New stuff going in is NetBSD, or Debian where NetBSD doesn't work (like on a machine of mine where 2.0 mysteriously crashes on heavy I/O....it's fine under Linux). When DragonFly finishes their experimentation and pronounces their kernel redesign "done," I will give it a look, too.

Still, BSD, and all the BSD's need a few things done....

1. Stable binary updates/packages for the things in the base system without moving to the next minor version number. (e.g. a backport of a binary ssh package when there's a vuln).
2. Removal from the base system of unnecessary elements. That Perl is not required to rebuild the system in FreeBSD and NetBSD is a good thing. Now, ditch sendmail and bind....especially sendmail. If you absolutely have to include an MTA in the base system, use Exim or Postfix.
3. Modern filesystem. I do notice a big difference between JFS or XFS and softupdated FFS on the same hardware. Linux's filesystems are much faster than BSD now, and the gap seems to widen every day. FFS2 does nothing to change the way FFS works -- it just allows larger partition sizes. Maybe they can do something with HFS+? Convince IBM, SGI, or Namesys to release one of their FS's under a BSD license?

Re:Actually...

[setagllib]

As OpenBSD devs said, sendmail has had a lot more testing and those security holes have been ironed out, so technically it's more 'reliable' than postfix which is much newer. But I agree to just take out MTAs entirely.

File systems, I wouldn't say FFS is so bad. It's very balanced; its performance is good enough in the real world, it takes very little processor and memory overhead (compared to the journalling file systems...), it survives even during sectors being mangled (ReiserFS dies because it has no superblock backups, and some others too). I wouldn't mind seeing a journalling FS in a BSD (well, there's LFS in NetBSD, which is log-structured and hence even more complete journalling), and in fact dillon has laid the foundations for such a system in DragonFly.

I think the perfect operating system in the world would be the cleanliness of NetBSD, the security of OpenBSD, the support of Linux, the extensive functionality of FreeBSD 5 (including its devfs, hot damn), the package management system of Gentoo Portage but with less kitschy colouring, and some really cool name nobody has yet thought of. The shortcomings of any given system are small (FreeBSD lacks portability and, in 5, cleanliness; NetBSD lacks corporate support and a responsive scheduler; Linux lacks cleanliness and security and a good network stack; DragonFly lacks support and portability) and would be easy enough to fix just by convincing enough people it's worth doing. Perfect systems are within our reach, but the universe won't let it happen.