FreeBSD 7.0 Release Now Available 229
cperciva writes "The first release from the new 7-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. FreeBSD 7.0 brings with it many new features including support for ZFS, journaled filesystems, and SCTP, as well as dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
Just use the default geometry (Score:5, Informative)
ZFS Support (Score:5, Informative)
Re:ZFS? (Score:5, Informative)
Solaris still offers better support, but the ZFS support offered by FreeBSD is production quality.
Re:Still hard to install? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Just use the default geometry (Score:1, Informative)
Re:ZFS Support (Score:5, Informative)
Good developer interview at onlamp (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2008/02/26/whats-new-in-freebsd-70.html?page=1 [onlamp.com]
Re:STABLE (Score:5, Informative)
"7-STABLE" is FreeBSD-speak for "this implements the FreeBSD 7 API/ABI, and any program you write or compile for an earlier release will work just fine on a later release". In other words, the Application Programming/Binary Interfaces won't change in incompatible ways.
This is in contrast to Linux, where updating to a new kernel (belonging to the same "stable" kernel branch, or even applying security patches) can make programs break until you recompile them.
Re:ZFS Support (Score:5, Informative)
We're using FreeBSD 7.2 RC2 ZFS in a production environment on Amd64. It's getting hammered, and holding up fine.
1) ZFS has *solved* our storage problems.
2) ZFS needs 2GB of RAM
3) You should run it on a dual core processor if you're going to use compression.
4) Research glabel so you can move drives around from cable to cable and still use the same device name.*
*more info: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=glabel&sektion=8 [freebsd.org]
Re:Still hard to install? (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using FreeBSD since version 2.2.7. I've been using Linux and other OSs even longer. Operating systems that have been around as long as these weren't just created from the start to be a breeze to install. Linux used to require a lot more manual configuration than it does now... just because something like Ubuntu makes it easy doesn't mean it always was. Linux has progressed in this area, and so has FreeBSD, and so have most other mature operating systems.
Also, FreeBSD is not targeted at the same audience as something like Ubuntu. A better comparison would be PC-BSD and Ubuntu, as they are targeted at desktop users. I guess maybe FreeBSD could be compared to the server or alternate editions of Ubuntu, in which case the install process (using text screens) is fairly similar.
Re:ZFS Support (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still hard to install? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Still hard to install? (Score:5, Informative)
Press "A" for auto partitioning and then "A" in the disk layout section for auto-defaults.
As it has been since at least FreeBSD 4.0.
Re:Still hard to install? (Score:4, Informative)
I had no problem using the clearly labeled "boot with USB keyboard" menu option.
It's a moot point -- with the at mux that came in I believe halfway through the 6-series, you can have as many keyboards as you feel like.
Re:how's the wifi support for proprietary cards? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Still hard to install? (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pcbsd.org/ [pcbsd.org]
http://www.desktopbsd.net/ [desktopbsd.net]
Disk Geometry trolling isn't funny or have you confused this with partitioning. So, are you trolling or are you stating that you don't like to partition drives. If it is partitioning then you may want to check out the above links; if you're trolling, then continue with what you're doing
More good summaries of kernel development (Score:5, Informative)
GREAT article - it is interesting for a non-programmer to read this type of technical detail, presented in an understandable way. For me, right at the edge of my theoretical-only knowledge. A detailed summary, I guess. (oxymoron)
Similar article on NetBSD: Waving the flag: NetBSD developers speak about version 4.0 [arstechnica.com] (1/30/2008)
Linux focused links:
Current discussion:
LWN: Kernel [lwn.net]
KernelTrap [kerneltrap.org]
KernelNewbies: Summary of Linux Changes [kernelnewbies.org]
---
The Wonderful World of Linux series are excellent history - in-depth for outsiders:
WWOL 2.2 [kniggit.net]
WWOL 2.4 [kniggit.net]
WWOL 2.6 [kniggit.net]
---
Towards Linux 2.6 - A look into the workings of the next new kernel [ibm.com](2003)
Kernel Comparison: Linux (2.6.22) versus Windows (Vista) [pbwiki.com](2007)
Re:ZFS Support (Score:3, Informative)
As I posted up in the thread, pata_via incorrectly detects my 80 wire cables as 40 wires, but the whole switch over from
Turning off all EXPERIMENTAL kernel options leaves you with a system that really is only good for i386, not the i686 and better.
Funnily enough, the devices connected to the HighPoint chip are using the same cables, so it is just a detection routine, and dropping from ATA133 to ATA33 is a PITA, but not a killer when you're using that damned XP for playing games. Linux is still limited by the 2Mbps internet when torrenting so its not really a killer when you don't expect uber-speed from your desktop. I would trade speed for security any day of the week, but I know a fix is right around the corner (/me prays).
Re:ZFS? (Score:4, Informative)
No, but if it is available it will certainly use it. The upside of ZFS using more memory is that disk IO will be lower so better overall performance.
Re:ZFS? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Upgrading HOWTO? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:STABLE (Score:4, Informative)
You underestimate my capacity for wrongness.
How's that? I mean, I'd rather not have to fsck my terabyte RAIDs, but if I have to, at least the system can be running live and undegraded while the loose ends get cleaned up.
If you're just journaling metadata, then you're not getting the full benefit of journaling (and definitely not anything more than softupdates offers, as it's basically an in-memory ordered journal of metadata transactions to be committed). As far as the battery-backed RAM: that's like saying cats are better than dogs because you can give them medicine if they get ringworm. BTW, with FreeBSD's GEOM system, you could journal to an encrypted RAID on a remote host if you wanted to. You might have already known that; others might not.
Wrong. gjournal is a generic journaling provider. You can use it to wrap any other GEOM component. From it's own man page:
Pretty neat, huh? You can wrap it around your RAID to make it crashproof. If you think background fscks are bad, then you've probably never watched a few terabytes of mirror resync itself. Anyway, what you misunderstood is that filesystems have to be altered to interact meaningfully with the underlying journal. UFS has been so modified. That doesn't mean that other filesystems won't work on top of it (which would be silly because a gjournal looks just like any other block device), but that they're not optimized for it.
Re:Journaled filesystems? (Score:5, Informative)
No, you read that right. The reason is mainly that FreeBSD users have been enjoying something called "softupdates" for the last decade or so, which is sort of like an in-memory journaling. Rather than writing metadata directly to disk, it's queued in memory, grouped into an efficient order, then transactionally committed to the underlying drive. The disk is never in an inconsistent state, even without a journal to fall back on. If the system crashes, a special fsck that can run while a filesystem is mounted read-write comes along and deallocates any space that's no longer used but hasn't yet been marked as empty.
Because of that, there hasn't been much need or real drive to get journaling into FreeBSD. The solution they're going with is actually nicely abstracted, in that you configure a journal for a whole device through GEOM (which is kind of like a Lego set for building drive setups). Although you'd probably never want this, you could theoretically have two "drives" that reside on remote machines (via ggate) bound together with RAID1 (via gmirror), encrypted (via geli), and with a local journal (via gjournal).
Do it! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm still running FreeBSD 6.3 on my server, and I will upgrade to 7 soon, but I found PC-BSD to be the better desktop system (DesktopBSD had strange quirks, and wasn't as polished).
PC-BSD uses the "stable" FreeBSD as it's base, so although it's currently FreeBSD 6.3 based, that'll no doubt change to 7.0 soon. PC-BSD also uses KDE as it's desktop environment, so you'll have no trouble with your apps.
Good luck!
Re:ZFS? (Score:2, Informative)
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems [freebsd.org]
The "this is experimental" tag should remain until all of the issues on the ZFSKnownProblems page are addressed.
Re:Does it work with MySQL yet? (Score:2, Informative)
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html [freebsd.org]
Re:ZFS Support (Score:1, Informative)
Judging your skill by your comments on this story, please roll out to production
Re:Considering switching. (Score:3, Informative)
I upgraded from 6.2 to 7.0-PRERELEASE by doing the following:
It's a convolouted process, but I wanted to follow FreeBSD 7 development. It's easier when you do it from a binary CD. Basically you restart from the CD and upgrade and it's automated.
Start by updating my system source:
$ sed -e 's/RELENG_6/RELENG_7/'
$ csup -h cvsup6.freebsd.org
Now the source is updated. So we build:
$ cd
$ make buildworld buildkernel
Now the system is built from source, ready to go into my temporary directory. Back up
$ mergemaster -p
Now my
$ make installkernel
$ reboot
Now I start up in single user mode. Install new system just build from source.
$ mount -a
$ cd
$ make installworld
The binaries are all installed. Merge new
$ mergemaster
Now the machine is up to date.
As for installing packages, you have several choices. I prefer to build from source, but you can use packages. Packages are usually a little behind the ports tree. So for example, to install KDE the way I would do it:
$ cd
$ make install
And several hours later you have KDE 3, Xorg, and a host of other apps that aren't included with the base install that KDE3 needs.
Take a look here [freebsd.org] for more info about FreeBSD's package management. The main repository of FreeBSD packages is at ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/packages [freebsd.org].
Installing from CD is easy, but it's all text based so don't be shocked. I recommend installing the "X-Developer" package and the ports tree. That should include all the base system and developer tools.
Re:Considering switching. (Score:3, Informative)
# make quicksearch name=whatever
Re:What *I* found in Freebsd 7.0 (Score:3, Informative)
What's the problem, does sysinstall not work for you? I've never had a problem with it. If you fear the sight of plain text, then FreeBSD will not be for you. While FreeBSD makes a damned awesome desktop system, that is not its goal. It is not designed for Aunt Tillie.
That is because that's how X.org comes. Talk to the X.org developers about a better configuration tool. It's not FreeBSD's job to fix their shortcomings. I agree with you that this is a pain, but from FreeBSD's perspective, X.org is just another third party software project.
You DO have an option to install KDE/GNOME during installation, if you continue on to the post-install configuration page of sysinstall.
p.s. It's about this time in your complaint list when most people start telling you about PC-BSD...
Talk to NVidia. They're the ones who insist on a proprietary binary blob and top secret chip specs. I can't run FreeBSD on my laptop because of an ATI driver with no (workable) Open Source driver available(*). If we ever get together, we can have a beer and curse the bastard proprietary video card manufacturers.
Got no clue. Never seen that one before. Even when I had an NVidia card (curse them!), I still had a mouse pointer. I bet there's some weird ass hardware mouse option in your xorg.conf file.
(*) Actually, I can use the VESA driver, and it's damned fast and snappy. But it without multi-head support, it is a major pain doing presentations on the laptop.