FreeBSD 8.1 Released 46
hsn and other readers pointed out that FreeBSD 8.1 has been released. "This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: zfsloader added; zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14; NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities; UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support; SMP support in PowerPC G5; BIND 9.6.2-P2..." ... and much more. See the release notes summary and the details.
That's nice, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
It's nice to see they've got zfsloader in there by default, now. It was otherwise a huge pain to get ZFS to be booted from - you basically had to build your own installer and set up everything manually. Quite the time consuming task.
Unfortunately, I don't see any mention of these changes:
* "improved stability for ZFS". Sure, it supports pool version 14! What the fuck does that mean, really, when "bare minimum 4GB RAM" was a requirement for 8.0 to get it even remotely stable (some tuning required)? I don't care if it runs for months without locking the system. It's still locking the system.
* "decreased memory use for ZFS". It's not even doing deduplication in 8.0 RELEASE yet using 3GB of RAM at an idle load is not unheard of.
* Why so quiet on the USB front? Nice to see they got ralink devices added, but that does little for the fact that USB is almost completely unreliable in 8.x. Just take a look at the USB mailing list - problem after problem that's the same (USB has many, many timing/boot/detection issues in 8.x), with the seeming consensus being "we don't care, it works for me".
FreeBSD needs to fix those things or forever be relegated to amateur hour. Seems "quality things that work" gets relegated to "superior design". That's all fine and good, but if you've got to rape an ape just to get the damn thing to work as designed due to implementation flaws, it's essentially worthless.
ZFS reliability on 32-bit (Score:3, Interesting)