FreeBSD 4.2 Reviewed

Patrick Mullen writes "There are a lot of users out there looking to switch to *BSD or simply upgrade to the latest FreeBSD but have no idea exactly how it looks compared to the older releases or Linux. I have just posted a review of FreeBSD 4.2 which compares it to Linux, as well as its predecessor, 4.1.1."

Re:Review

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

RE: ext2 support unstable

I read it in the LINT kernel config file. Lot of stuff in there, a lot of stuff undocumented.

Re:Review

[Van Halen]

I read it in the LINT kernel config file. Lot of stuff in there, a lot of stuff undocumented

Ah, so there it is. I don't remember reading that part, so I must have just added the ext2fs option without checking that section of LINT. This in particular worries me:

(and even mounting read only could result in panics.)

Converting my /home (13gig) to UFS should be no real problem - I have enough room on my 30gig mp3 drive to back it up to a tar file over there while I reformat and then restore. The problem is gonna be the mp3 drive, which is also ext2. I was planning on mounting it read-only since I rarely make changes to it (only when I get a new CD to rip), but it sounds like that's out of the question too. Hmpf. Perhaps I can live with playing audio CDs for awhile til I make sure I want to stick with FreeBSD... ;-)

ext2fs

[dcs]

ext2fs is *NOT* experimental. It's not experimental on 4.2, nor was it experimental in 3.x, nor even on 2.x.

What happens is Linux have been adding features to ext2fs, which FreeBSD, obviously, always lag behind.

Review

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Wow, no posts, rare for a BSD thread.

Dunno, this review is riddled with little niggling errors (I hate people that say medias, It's already plural). He also starts off as a handholding session, then drops it with "UNIX folks can handle this" when he doesn't want to dive in.
And he doesn't list UFS as a filesystem type? BTW: ext2 in 4.1 is experimental. Idunno if they improved it greatly in 4.2, but likely also to be in that state. List it as unstable.

Barely any comparison to 4.1 or 4.0 (encryption, kernel accept filters might help speed up web servers and other daemons), nor how easy it is to upgrade from an old install.

Hmm, grouchy, must be nap time. Night night.

Re:Review

[IronChef]

I wish the BSD section was more active. Maybe I should drop FreeBSD for Linux so I can feel like I have a bigger community. ;)

Re:Review

[Van Halen]

BTW: ext2 in 4.1 is experimental. Idunno if they improved it greatly in 4.2, but likely also to be in that state. List it as unstable.

Wow, I hadn't seen any information stating this on the FreeBSD site or discussion groups (it's probably there somewhere, but buried). Last week I switched from Linux to FreeBSD (after 7 years of loyal Linux use) hoping to get rid of some relatively frequent crashes once and for all. In the last week I've had 1 spontaneous reboot and one hard lockup with lots of resulting ext2fs errors on my /home partition. I had pretty much decided it was a hardware problem since both Linux and FreeBSD were having trouble. But maybe there's hope - I'll try to convert my ext2 partitions to UFS and see how that goes.

Thanks, and wish me luck! ;-)