What's New In FreeBSD 7.0 103
blackbearnh writes "FreeBSD is about to release the much-anticipated version 7, and as usual there's a comprehensive interview with over two dozen of the major contributors over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers to discuss all the details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."
no nvidia on amd64 yet (Score:2, Interesting)
I have to ask... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would I choose FreeBSD over, say, Solaris x86 or Linux?
Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:4, Interesting)
Web serving and mail filtering, here. But it's nothing I couldn't use Linux for. It is all the same software, really. Honestly, the only reason I don't use LInux is because FreeBSD is what was here when I got here and I figured I should at least take the time to learn it. Also, if it ain't broke...
-matthew
Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Interesting)
what for?
Better performance than Linux, that degrades under load much more predictably than Linux (as does Solaris, but FreeBSD is better on commodity hardware). A better written C library (just look at the source code to glibc - it's shockingly bad, unreadable macro soup as though its maintainer hates C). A better documented userland than Linux with complete and accurate manpages.
FreeBSD is popular amongst hosting companies (the tools for security are easier to use and more mature than Linux), and is also used by companies like Yahoo! because of it's reliability and performance. Linux has outperformed FreeBSD for a while, as the fine grained locking introduced in version 5 matured, but the pain getting it right is beginnng to pay off now.
Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
I was toying around with Freebsd 7.0 RC3 just a few days ago, well actually I was testing it to see if ZFS was really working as claimed. A very basic installation to a 40gb disk went pretty quick (5 to 10 minutes). Rebooted into the installed system and everything was fine. Took an old 1.6gb drive I had and plugged it right in, recognized as /dev/da1 or whatever. Ran "zpool create tank da1" and BAM! /tank already mounted and ready to go. No stupid fdisk, no stupid format command, no fstab nonsense.
Now I wouldn't run out and switch everything to freebsd 7 and zfs because work isn't finished. For example there's no ACL support since ZFS supports NFSv4 ACLs while freebsd only supports Posix1e. My next test will involve getting samba working and this may be a little tricky since there are some reports of issues with running samba on ZFS. But all of the available reports are quite old (half a year or older). I don't really care about the ACLs because I just intend to use the system as a single user and a convenient area to dump my files on a bunch of disks that all conveniently appear as one along with some redundancy (better than just a bunch of disks and raid5).
Some interesting info on jemalloc (Score:4, Interesting)
http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/beta-3.html [blogspot.com]
More info on jemalloc:
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html [sharanet.org] (near the bottom, under "Userland enhancements")
http://people.freebsd.org/~jasone/jemalloc/bsdcan2006/jemalloc.pdf [freebsd.org]
Re:I have to ask... (Score:3, Interesting)
I will definitely try it out of curiosity (Score:1, Interesting)
So I started off with Caldera Open Linux (ew), dual boot... then went to Red Hat for a few weeks, and finally stayed with FreeBSD for many years. The ease of software install was what made the difference (although having to recompile a kernel to get sound working was a strange experience since I didn't know what "compile" meant, but, it was easy to do with directions). I could network install it off of a floppy or two. The online directions worked, and that's what mattered to me. FreeBSD had a great online community back then, not sure about today, since I wouldn't know...
But then I met apt, and everything changed. Many years of Debian... and now Ubuntu. I know I will be hated for saying it, but I don't program, don't really know my way around the terminal, and don't really care. I need a free awesome desktop OS, and that's it.
FreeBSD was very easy to use and install for newbie like me. I remember my CS friends telling me it was meant to be a server, but it completely worked for my purposes. I'm sure it's still like that. I will definitely give this new release a try just to see.
What about DragonFly? (Score:1, Interesting)
I know this is /. and all but ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux Vs BSD is a moot argument, I have my preference, and I'm not going to change because yours differs. Similarly, no amount of bible bashing is going to convince me that man and dinosaurs walked together 2000 years ago!
To get on topic... (no I am not new here)
I am running RC1 ATM, and will upgrade to the final as soon as it is out. I'd like to know if anyone has successfully implemented RAID-z yet, and if so, what should I be aware of that is not documented.
Also, can anyone confirm the increased performance claimed by the upgraded TCP handling?
Perhaps an unbiased, or at least well reasoned comparison of Linux Vs FreeBSDs' Multi-thread handling? I would be very interested to know the details here.
Opinions on STCP Vs TCP?
If you must, be all 'Linux it t3h gr34t357', I would love to know what upgrades in TFA are old hat to Linux users.
peas
Re:Some interesting info on jemalloc (Score:2, Interesting)
I couldn't play Starcraft D:. I hear WoW works with it though.
Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 (Score:4, Interesting)