FreeBSD 7.1 Released 324
Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:
The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
A significant improvement on a crappy OS is still a crappy OS.
I respectfully disagree. At its first release Linux was probably a crappy OS but each subsequent release grew better and better until it wasn't crappy. Who knows, maybe even Windows 7 will live up to the price they ask for it?
No flame intended, but really... who uses FreeBSD anymore?
I certainly don't. But I like the idea of another free operating system for me out there. What would have happened if the courts had screwed Linux and SCO had won and successfully shut down anyone using the Linux kernel? Well, I'd tell you what I would have done: switched all my machines to FreeBSD and recompiled the packages on all the software I used for it. Luckily (and rightfully), I don't have to do this.
... if they want to continue with their operating system, I say let them! Who knows what it could become one day? I wish the FreeBSD team the best of luck and am certain I have inadvertently gained from them in some way and therefore appreciate all their hard work and efforts.
You don't mean to flame but what other reason is there for you to ask who uses FreeBSD? Leave the community alone, there are very few fanboys and annoyances about it
Re:Did they fix the atheros driver? (Score:1, Insightful)
Check for yourself and see....
If not, then feel free to have at it. Sounds like a nice contribution that you could make.
And that is the best niche for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
As a lover of FreeBSD, I hope the guys in charge never try to "win the desktop". They'd never win and they'd stop paying attention to the stuff that makes it so good for servers. FreeBSD, and the other BSD's for that matter, belong in the data center. I'd argue the same for Linux, but that might get me slaughtered in these parts...
Re:Dont forget documentation (Score:4, Insightful)
*And* FreeBSD easily beats linux in the networking speeds and firewalling departments. Of course they're lagging behind in hardware support.
Linux is becoming the new windows
At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code". In fact, better they do. The BSD licence makes it easy for those companies to contribute because they can use FreeBSD and contribute only the parts that aren't special-sauce. Companies *want* to merge their changes in with the mainline, it is expensive to apply patches to every version of FreeBSD. The BSD licence lets paid employees of these companies send in bug-fixes and patches without ensnaring the companies IP in a legal mess. Other licences have a tendancy to be all-or-nothing--either you hold on to your bug-fixes and merge them in for every version or you release your entire codebase to the world. BSD lets you pick and choose what bits can go into the world. Very flexible.
Bottom line... if Apple wants to use BSD code, who cares. Code is code. It isn't like it has feelings.
True (Score:5, Insightful)
So I'll revise my statement and say this will be the year that more big-name vendors officially support FreeBSD. By "vendor" I mean hardware guys like Dell, IBM or HP, not just software vendors.
I think while it isn't discussed much, GPLv3 made a lot of vendors think twice about Linux. My gut tells me that you'll quietly see more and more vendors back BSD based systems. There won't be much fanfare about it (the BSD world is pretty chill), but it will just slowly inch forward until most servers wind up running FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of $RANDOM_COLLECTION_OF_CODE.
Just a hunch. Times are changing, and I could be wrong...
Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
There are more important things in the world then how well an operating system does in some assholes random benchmark. If you are standardizing your servers around an operating system based solely on "speed", I question your abilities as a server dude.
I'll just name one thing, out of many, that are vastly more important than "speed". Stability. No, not "never blue-screens". I'm "does the maintainers of the system make major changes in every single release and then stop supporting older releases". Under this definition of stable, FreeBSD wins over linux hands down. Especially after the "we can't be bothered to maintain a stable branch of the linux kernel, so we will add new shit in with the old all the time". You might get a dozen exciting new bugs and security fixes when you "upgrade" between 2.6.1114492 and 2.6.1114493. In fact, this was one of the major reasons for me dumping linux in the first place. The 2.4.x kernels are the last stable linux kernels out there.
That is just one example of something more important than "passes 4*10^30 fps in WoW" benchmark.
As for security? Which is easier to audit and verify? A random pool of code and libraries distributed across hundreds of websites and maintainers, or a cohesive operating system whos entire codebase is in exactly one place [freebsd.org]?
Man pages are not a quality control technique! (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who both enjoyed discovering GNU Info (as it was about the only part of the GNU platform I could run on a 2MB Amiga 1200), and also enjoyed discovering the quality of FreeBSD's man pages, let me give another perspective:
There's absolutely no reason not to use HTML for documentation these days. There are plenty of lightweight text-mode browsers that would suffice in emergencies or during ssh sessions, but also nice desktop apps that would let new users browse them and feel at home. More importantly, it supports modern features, like links to the actual organisations online who support a particular app, or where bugs can be reported, links to email, diagrams, unicode for multilingual support, screenreader support, etc.
Yes, manpages can be nice, and coherent, quality documentation is important. GNU's horrible info browser is certainly not up to it. BUT... let's get with the times. There's no point advocating man pages in the modern world. If you want good docs, argue for good docs in modern formats, not old formats that happen to sometimes have instances of good docs.
Re:At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code".
Oh yes, what a charming little statement. Absolutely nobody from BSD land cares if companies like Cisco run away with BSD's code and never give anything back in return. Not a single grudge at all. Well, except from people like Theo de Raadt. From a Theo de Raadt interview from 2006: [linux.com]
That does sound like somebody in the BSD camp does give a shit. In fact, it sounds like the BSD camp does get right out pissed off from the lack of contributions. So, care to retract your statement?
Benchmarks?!??!!!!11one!!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Benchmarks between competing free software projects? Don't be silly! Next thing, you'll be advocating some sort of sane system, like choosing the best of breed technology based stats like benchmarks, and uniting behind it! Think what kind of chaos Free Software would be in, if everyone decided that OpenGL was THE low-level graphics layer, that gstreamer was THE codec API, that Vala was THE high-level language, that Git was THE modern version control system, or that FUSE was THE place to develop filesystem stuff. Why, you'd have a straightforward stack, with very little bloat, and tons of people honing a single implementation.
Pandemonium, I tell you.
No (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference between "You guys aren't playing fair..." and "our operating system is your religion, either embrace it or go away".
If somebody like $VENDOR_X takes and takes but never contributes even minor shit like bug-fixes to kernel code, they should be called out. But unlike other, more political organizations, you will never see an Anti-$VENDOR_X clause added to a BSD license. That is the important bit.
BTW, one big peeve in BSD land is when the GPL guys will take BSD code like drivers. The GPL license will "infect" any modifications and prevent those changes from being send back to the original BSD code. Kind of a tease, don't you think?
Re:At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... maybe I read it wrong, but he was disgruntled that Sun didn't offer to pay for accommodations... not code. It's pretty fair for him to ask Sun to foot a bill here or there to enable interoperability for their own products. It doesn't sound disgruntling at all really. More of a "shame on you Sun" post as he ended that quote.
Of course, people read whatever they want to read into things.
Re:Man pages are not a quality control technique! (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd really happily build window manager dependencies into Gnu/Linux? I mean, you could use lynx, but the presentation would be a lot worse than the current man / info pages...
Re:Benchmarks?!??!!!!11one!!? (Score:3, Insightful)
Diversity in ideas, yes. Diversity in attempts to improve those ideas, and test implementations, yes. Diversity in implementations of the same concept? That's as silly as encouraging everyone to try to build a suspension bridge in their own wacky way.
Re:*Finally* DVD media (Score:3, Insightful)
People use CDs other than CD 1 and the live cd? :-)