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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD June-December Status Reports 190

Posted by CmdrTaco from the what-did-you-do-last-quarter dept.
An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "FreeBSD just published status reports covering June to December '04 with many interesting details about the work that went into 5-STABLE and a look ahead on plans and projects for 6-CURRENT."
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FreeBSD June-December Status Reports More

FreeBSD June-December Status Reports

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  • Text here (Score:2, Funny)

    by grub ( 11606 )

    Site is already slashdotted, here's the compete text:

    June, 2004: Patient is complaining of pain in side. 4th time here this month. Hypochondria a possibility.
    July 2004: Pain is severe, admit to hospital. Recommend morphine drip.
    August 2004: Kidneys failing, urea levels high. Recommend immediate dialysis.
    September 2004: Patient delusional, calls for "grandpa AT&T"
    October 2004: Grand mal seizures, complete kidney failure. Heart and lung congestion worsen.
    November 2004: Patient in coma. Total b
    • Hmm, have something against FreeBSD?

      Well to join the fun, Dr. Netcraft has just confirmed it...the death can be attributed to poisoning from an internal source.

    • January 2005: The stone is rolled away and behold the might FreeBSD has raised from the dead.
    • "Site is already slashdotted, here's the compete text" No it isn't, besides a bsd will stay up even after death, a daemon is not a mortal beast so it can not die, tux on the other hand...
    • January 2005: Patient miraculously recovers, thanks to the Amazing Kreskin!
      February 2005: PROFIT!!

    • Re:Text here (Score:3, Informative)

      by sremick ( 91371 )
      Right. Because obviously it was SO funny the other 10 million times we saw it last month, your using it has got to be even funnier. As well as the 1000 or so encores of the same we'll see on this thread.

      *yawn*

      Considering that the lame "joke" has no basis in reality [netcraft.com], I wonder just why the people who continue to toss it around do so. Desperation? Jealousy? Do they feel threatened? Who knows.

      Either way, it's a badge of lameness. Too bad the people using it can't figure that out.

      • Re:Text here (Score:3, Insightful)

        by grub ( 11606 )
        I'm a big BSD user (Free and Open), it just happens that I can take and make a joke. Lighten up.

      • Re:Text here (Score:3, Insightful)

        by EvilAlien ( 133134 )
        I think the joke will continue until either of two things happens:
        1. BSD actually dies ;)
        2. BSD fans stop reacting so defensively

        I don't get defensive when someone attacks BSD, but I have to admit I get a little defensive when Solaris bigots attack Linux.

        I tried to have a conversation with someone today about why they thought "OpenBSD sucks!", and actually got to some rational reasons while others were whining about stopping yet another OS holy war discussion. Everybody needs to stop looking at operating

        • > Everybody needs to stop looking at operating systems as a religious issue and discuss things rationally

          Could not agree more.

          And when igniting a holy war we need to do so tactfully and with respect for the opinions of others.

          And when we are done we should embrace in the spirit of brotherly love and agree that both sides benefit from such discourse.
    • Could some kind soul explain me the joke?
      I tried - and really bad! - to figure it out, but I really didn't get it. [slashdot.org] ;)
      --
      Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

  • Nice overview, although the wording may have been chosen with some more thought, take for example this entry on ifconfig:

    The ifconfig program used to configure network interfaces

    OMG, but now it's been relegated to kitchen duty?! ifconfig dishwasher0? How will I configure network interfaces now?

    was overhauled.

    *whew* Damn you for scaring me like that!

    • -2 Overuse of Sarcasm

      Come on, cut them some slack, a even improving the little things is still helpful
    • Those of us who can actually read to the end of a sentence without having to stop to take a breath had no problem with it at all.

      • Those of us who can actually read to the end of a sentence without having to stop to take a breath had no problem with it at all.

        That's only because you read out loud. Everyone in your office heard you read that as "used to" as in "I used to read out loud when I was a child."

        • Everyone in your office heard you read that as "used to"...

          That's "used to" as in "you-zd two" (present tense), and not "you-st two" (past tense). See the difference? Taken in context it's clear that the present tense is meant.

          • That's "used to" as in "you-zd two" (present tense), and not "you-st two" (past tense). See the difference? Taken in context it's clear that the present tense is meant.

            The ifconfig program used to... - that alone is not enough to be able to tell the difference, you have to read the entire sentence to see what was meant. That was my point. Inserting 'which is' or putting a comma between program and used would have solved the ambiguity.

            • that alone is not enough to be able to tell the difference, you have to read the entire sentence to see what was meant.

              Which was my entire point. Most of us CAN read all the way to the end of that ten word sentence. In fact, most of us go through life reading every sentence all the way to the end to see what was meant. It's a normal way we read. We don't stop to ponder what the author meant until we hit the period.

              • Which was my entire point. Most of us CAN read all the way to the end of that ten word sentence.

                You don't first read the whole sentence, then buffer it, semantically decipher it (and decide how to pronounce used to) and then pronounce the processed sentence, that's not how humans read out loud, pronunciation decisions are made in a very localized context that is no bigger than a few words. Besides, you are taking my humorous post way too seriously.

  • Wow, this is really great! (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I wish they released status reports more frequently, the stuff in there is really neat. I follow the FreeBSD mailing lists once in a while and sometimes it's hard to get "the big picture" from the details. As someone who follows the Linux kernel mailing list, I guess the same problem exists there. Have they considered doing something like the lkml summaries? That might help get the word out about some of the cool stuff that's going on.
    • There is now a weekly cvs-src summary that is sent to the lists and available on the web [xl0.org] in HTML, text, and RSS. I find it very useful for catching up with the lists when I've been away.

    • Re:Wow, this is really great! (Score:4, Interesting)

      by parc ( 25467 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:47PM (#11397360)
      There's a weekly summary of -current activity posted by Mike Joihnston, mirrored in HTML at http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/ [xl0.org] and available as an RSS feed at http://excel.xl0.org/cgi-bin/rss.py. While it's not as exhaustive as Kerneltrap, it's very good.
    • One of the big differences between 5 and 6 will be a substantially shorter release cycle. According to this report, 6.0R should be available in August:

      For the 6-CURRENT development branch as well as all future development and stable branches, we are planning to move to a schedule with fixed timelines that move away from the uncertainty and wild schedule fluctuations of the previous 5.x releases. This means that major branches will happen at 18 month intervals, and releases from those branches will happen

    • Yeah, at least a bi-montlhly status report would be great, although this one is pretty huge and a very interesting read. My random favorite parts: (for those who find the report too long to read)

      Thanks to Michael Johnson, the FreeBSD GNOME team has recently been given permission to use the Firefox and Thunderbird names , official icons, and to produce officially branded builds. Mozilla has also been very interested in merging our local patches back into the official source tree. This should greatly improve

  • netcraft (Score:5, Insightful)

    by millahtime ( 710421 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:34PM (#11397178) Homepage Journal
    poking around netcraft you'll find that freebsd is growing at a decent rate. forget death, it's getting bigger having grown at a very high percentage rate in the past year.
    • Not only that, but the irony of the "Netcraft" jokes is Netcraft actually runs FreeBSD themselves [netcraft.com].
      • Not only that but this is what Mike Prettejohn (of Netcraft) wrote when asked about FreeBSD:

        Initially [early 1995], we opted for FreeBSD because it was similar to SunOS, which we knew and liked.

        We felt safer with FreeBSD because we were quite conscious of the security implications of the Internet. We wanted to run an operating system for which source was available in the expectation that fixes for security vulnerabilities or other serious bugs would become available more quickly, and if needed we would h

  • BSD vs. Linux (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @01:43PM (#11397302)
    For Linux users like me, take a look at this to see how BSD compares to Linux from a BSD point of view.

    http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4l in ux/bsd4linux1.php

  • Why don't I use *BSD? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by mcrbids ( 148650 )
    I'm a heavy Linux user. Why don't I use BSD? I've considered it heavily, and revisit my decision from time to time:

    1) BSD makes a lousy desktop. I would thus want to use something different on my laptop, like Fedora Core. This increases administration overhead.

    2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully.

    3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux - most interesting packages are developed on Linux, and "maintained" elsewhere.

    4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system fo
    • > 1) BSD makes a lousy desktop.

      What makes it a lousy desktop? It's not like it won't run KDE and Gnome on X with all extensions and the same fonts. From the graphical environment alone, I defy you to tell me the difference. In fact, BSD as a desktop used to be a lot snappier than Linux, down to less pointer lag and all. More recent linuxes have caught up with the low-latency patches, but once they run into swap, they still bog -- because Linux's VM system is still bolted on and degrades very poorly.
    • Congradulations, your an idiot.

      1) BSD makes a lousy desktop
      It can use the same Windowing system you use on Fedora

      2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully
      Chances are FreeBSD will handle SMP better then Linux will, and it has for some time

      3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux
      It has a dedicated team of people that develop the system as a whole and i386 has over 10,000 ports that have been verified to work

      4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration
      Ya learning things sucks

      • Why didnt you just say you dont use it because you don't want to instead of making up some 'insightfull' points that show you don't know what your talking about.

        Simple. Because this is Slashdot and the moderators in a topic on FreeBSD don't know or care if the poster was insightful. He used insightful sounding words.

        Bash Windows. Bash FreeBSD. Winge about Macs. Tin-foil hats. 'Yay Linux' and PHP seem to be the order of the day. All other stuff is either offtopic, troll, or overrated.

        Me, I'll stic

    • BSD makes a lousy desktop.

      I assume you mean relative to Linux. If so, in what way?

      Is Gnome on BSD different than Gnome on Linux? KDE? XFCE? Any number of other WMs or DEs?

      If so, how so? If not, what are you talking about?

    • Re:Why don't I use *BSD? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @03:06PM (#11398392) Homepage Journal
      1) BSD makes a lousy desktop.

      It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems.

      2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully.

      First, it does do SMP just fine. Second, you probably don't even have an SMP machine on your desktop anyway. People don't need SMP on their destkop. And yes, you're talking about the desktop, because that's what your very first question was about. For some servers SMP is important. Good news is that FreeBSD supports it just fine.

      3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux

      So what? Linux doesn't have the mindshare of Windows, so why aren't you using Windows? All the popular stylish people are using Windows, why don't you to?

      4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management.

      This is a stupid argument. Replace "BSD" with the name of any Linux distribution. "Oh poor me! I can't use [Debian|Slackware|SuSE|Mandrake] because I would have to learn a new adminstration system. Oh boo hoo!"

      5) As of Redhat 7.x, Linux is "good enough"(tm) and getting better fast.

      Some of us don't want "good enough." Some of us prefer "damned fine and strutting like she knows it!" Far be it for me to stick up for Linux, but she deserves a lot more respect from you than merely "good enough". Sheesh. ...apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.

      Side note: telnet is disabled by default in FreeBSD. It comes secure out of the box. It's not perfect, but for a tenth the work you would have to do on a telnet-by-default distro you could have FreeBSD locked down as tight as anything.

      6) BSD has much more limited hardware compatability, and drivers for "cool stuff" can be hard to find.

      If you want "cool stuff", then stick with Windows. I understand it has drivers for ALL the "cool stuff". On the other hand, if you want drivers for all the boring stuff you use every day, then FreeBSD will have them.

      In fact, I was not initially able to install Linux on my current home system, because at the time I built it (18 months ago) there were no Linux distros that supported SATA out of the box. But FreeBSD did. It wasn't until about six months ago that some Linux distros started shipping with SATA on by default. Many still don't.
      • It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems.

        And what did you have to do to achieve this? What did you have to compile?

        First, it does do SMP just fine. Second, you probably don't even have an SMP machine on your desktop anyway.

        I misspoke. OpenBSD doesn't do SMP. I don't have SMP on my desktop, but I DO like having as similar an environment as possible from Desktop to Server, thus this is an issue.

        Linux doe
        • OpenBSD does support SMP.

          http://www.openbsd.org/smp.html [openbsd.org]
          • As of June, 2004, SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessor) support has been merged into the main OpenBSD development branch. At this time, the i386 and amd64 platforms supports SMP, but hopefully others, including macppc, sparc, and sparc64 will ultimately support SMP.

            Did you read the link you posted? It's "in development"...

            Looking at http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html

            Starting with OpenBSD 3.6, OpenBSD/amd64 supports most SMP (Symmetrical MultiProcessor) systems. To support SMP operation, a separate SMP kernel (
        • > I misspoke. OpenBSD doesn't do SMP

          As of version 3.6, it actually does support SMP [openbsd.org]

        • ...but I DO like having as similar an environment as possible from Desktop to Server, thus this is an issue.

          While this sounds fine on the surface, on closer inspection you'll find that the needs of the server and desktop are so different, that they might as well be different. My desktop is going to have a full blown desktop, but my server won't even have a video card installed (let along Xorg).

          I can either do XYZ and make paying customers happy, or take a performance hit while I get used to a new enviro

        • Re:Why don't I use *BSD? (Score:4, Informative)

          by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar@gm a i l . com> on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @04:00AM (#11405904) Homepage Journal
          It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems. And what did you have to do to achieve this? What did you have to compile?

          Well, I don't think grandparent was a troll, but it was (is still) -5 uninformed. What you have to do to run kde is install it from the first CD (takes 5 minutes). Or, you can: pkg_add -r kde. AND you have a choice to install it from ports, compiling it for your specific hardware with optimizations. All it takes is one command: portinstall kde - if you want everything but the kitchen sync, or if you want a streamlined kde: portinstall kde-light.

          learn more [kde.org]... it's not that difficult.

        • And what did you have to do to achieve this?

          I chose "KDE" as my desktop during installation. Duh!

      • Re:Why don't I use *BSD? (Score:4, Interesting)

        by sp0rk173 ( 609022 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @08:54PM (#11403456)
        In fact, I was not initially able to install Linux on my current home system, because at the time I built it (18 months ago) there were no Linux distros that supported SATA out of the box. But FreeBSD did. It wasn't until about six months ago that some Linux distros started shipping with SATA on by default. Many still don't.

        Very good point. I have two 120 gig sata drives in a raid array. First I tried windows...it worked, but was a pain in the ass to set up (why the hell doesn't Windows XP x64 have sata support out of the box yet? Ugh). Then I tried Gentoo, because windows got boring. It detected by sata drives individually, but the array? Nope. In order for that to work I'd have to install it on a smaller ata drive, then build a kernel to recognize my particular hardware raid chip, then copy over the base system onto the array and boot from it. "Fuck that!" I said. Then I tried ubuntu...and same thing. So i finally gave up and decided to just say fuck it and install FreeBSD. It detected two identical drives and set them up as individual devices (ad0, ad1) and a raid 0 array device (ar0) - so i could pick if i wanted to use them as individual drives or as an array. Linux may have more hardware support than FreeBSD...but the hardware support FreeBSD has is done correctly and Just Works. Once again, FreeBSD won my heart over...even after I slammed it for not being as technically sound as DragonFly. Regardless, until DFly comes out with 1.0-STABLE, My box will be a FreeBSD box. Less headaches, hastle, and bullshit. It just works.

      • Re: SMP on the desktop (Score:4, Interesting)

        by caveat ( 26803 ) on Wednesday January 19, 2005 @10:24AM (#11407530)
        I beg to differ with your "people dont' need SMP on the desktop" statement; I have a dual G4 and I absolutely love it - it never ever gets hung on a single proc-hungry task; sure, it's probably not as absolutely fast as a P4, but the overall responsiveness of the system is unmatched, at least in my limited experience (and a nice shiny new dual G5 should make up in the speed department, just need to get that mortgage :D).

        Now, that rant done with, what about Darwin's SMP code? It seems to be pretty efficient [of course I've never run any other BSD on this box, so I can't say how well it stacks up against them, but I do hear the "BSD SMP sux0rz" line a lot], at least for 2 chips; has anybody considered trying to reuse it in the other BSDs? AFAIK the APSL isn't incompatible with this sort of idea...
        • While SMP is certainly nice on the desktop, it is not necessary. Millions of people use single CPU systems on their desktop every day. And I dare say the vast majority wouldn't see a benefit to SMP if it were given to them.

          To most Linux advocates SMP is merely a checkbox. It's something to brag about even though they don't use it. Let's face it, *EVERY* OS out there (but for a few embedded variants) has SMP. All of the BSDs do. Bragging about SMP is like a corporation bragging about their ISO 9000 status.
    • 4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management

      Actually that's sort of funny because when Redhat dumped support on me I had to do just that. It was hard enough getting my boss onboard to implement some of that "Linux" stuff, but the price was reasonable for up2date. Then no more 7x updates after about what 1 year, 2 years?

      I looked at various Linux distributors but tended to be wary of commercial vendors. Debian loo
      • Me Too!
        I was in the same boat with RH and decided after trying a number of dists to go with FreeBSD. I haven't been disapointed. Granted these were all server machines but since then I've installed it on my teenager's computers, the kitchen laptop, my laptop.

        Happy Me!
    • I'm a heavy Linux user. Why don't I use BSD?

      I have a better question, as I don't care why you don't use FreeBSD: why do you feel obligated to tell us why you don't use it? If Linux works for you, great. Quite honestly all of your points are moot from my point for view for the following reasons:

      1) This depends on your definition of a "desktop." To me, a Laptop is not a Desktop. If they were the same thing, why would they have different prefixes, Desk- and Lap-? I've used Fedora Core and I think

      • 4) ... /etc/rc.conf controls base-system-level startup scripts with a simple binary switch (i.e. sshd_enable="YES"). User-installed programs with startup scripts are controled by their own files in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. To activate these, generally you just move prog_name.sh.sample to prog_name.sh. The system will then start it up the next time you reboot. The scripts are also startable from the commandline by root, without need for a reboot.

        Just a small correction. Renaming prog_name.sh.sample to prog_n

    • 1) BSD makes a lousy desktop. I would thus want to use something different on my laptop, like Fedora Core. This increases administration overhead.

      FC has better laptop support?

      Funny... that's why I switched [blogspot.com] from Fedora Core 3 to FreeBSD.

      As always, your mileage may vary.
  • /usr/ports/security/portaudit - instead of tracking your apps and their vunerabilities you just you this gadget and it tells you. This is hot++

    FreeBSD might be dying, but its a pretty corpse :-)

  • Oh... for a second I thought... (Score:3, Funny)

    by eno2001 ( 527078 ) on Tuesday January 18, 2005 @02:24PM (#11397863) Homepage Journal
    ... they were refering to some kind of twisted BSD based romance chick flick. You know what I mean, the whole May-December romance plot. Oh... you don't? I should have figured. ;P

  • Today, (Score:2, Funny)

    by AtariAmarok ( 451306 )
    Today, I booted up my FreeBSD install and received a system message that Netcraft was dying.
  • and contrary too what many believes, it actually does happen. FreeBSD has now imported CARP and the dhcp client from OpenBSD. The OpenBSD packet filter is also updated on FreeBSD. Just in this status report.

    OpenBSD has imported the 802.11 wireless network infrastructure from FreeBSD, as well as the Atheros driver, among other things last year. Now, OpenBSD is reverse-engingeering the binary HAL part of the Atheros driver, so I wonder if FreeBSD will dith "their" HAL when this is completed.

    And, not to fo

  • to the Finux crowd (Score:2, Informative)

    by JDizzy ( 85499 )
    A few reasons I use fbsd:

    I don't have to mess with dependencies with RPM's, or deb's, or whatever flavor of package.

    The system installer is better than what Slackware had in 1997 (when I moved to BSD).

    FreeBSD is not controlled by a dictatorship (Linus, RMS, et'all).

    The GPL has a major restriction that what it links with must also be GPL, and that sucks. BSD is way more altruistic to the notion of "no strings attached" open source.

    The same people working on the kernel also work on the C/C++ librar

    • "Updating a freebsd system (3rd party packages) is much easier with the ports system, and it is FRee. You dont' have to pay a subscription to use up2date, or have a local satellite server."

      As a BSD and Linux user, I think apt-get and ports are pretty evenly matched. apt-get is more automated, ports is more deterministic.

      Some of the Linuxes are 31337 and unreliable (Gentoo), some are more stable than BSD (By stable I mean no major changes for long periods of time.) (Debian-stable).

      It's a mistake to paint
  • What's the status of the Java port/package(s)? Nothing in the report about it.

    • 1.5 is available for the brave and adventurous.

      1.4 and 1.3 seem pretty stable.

      Only 1.3 is available as a binary due to Sun's restrictive licenses.

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