FreeBSD Project Updates

Joe Wanker writes: "Robert Watson, of FreeBSD-core and TrustedBSD fame, compiled and publicized a FreeBSD status report. The idea is to take advantage of FreeBSD's more centralized "committer" development model, in order to produce an ongoing report that shows the public what's happening with FreeBSD in a singular location. Take a look!"

Which are the new fetaures of 5.X ?

[guilherme]

Some link for what's being developed in 5.0 ?

Tnx !

*BSD is dying

[elbuddha]

*BSD is dying. How else could they get the plush Beastie dolls that vibrant shade of red? Lets look at the facts. FreeBSD leader Jordan K. Hubbard, a natural brunette, recently showed up at a Bay Area BSD Users Group meeting sporting a platinum blonde hairdo. Draw your own conclusions. Need more proof that *BSD is dying? Theo de Raadt has been quoted as admitting that he doesn't even remember what his normal hair color used to be. *BSD has always been dying, just look to its history. BSD was originally developed in Berkeley, home of - you guessed it - tiedyed tshirts. Yes, *BSD is dying, has always been dying, and will continue to dye.

FreeBSD 5.0

[cpeterso]

Here's a page that discusses FreeBSD's SMP plans for 5.0. The page also claims that the target release date is Decemeber 2001.

FreeBSD SMP Project (SMPng) [freebsd.org]

Re:*BSD is dying

[slashtop]

your tallback is so weakness, you can not provide a strong reason that *BSD is dying. FreeBSD is a very active centralized project, whole source code from kernel to userland and package system are under CVS control, this is a great project, unlike Linux, it is scratched by some nastly kernel hackers, there is no centralized source repository, no manager,only a kernel source code controlled by Linus, sigh, I suspect why Linux is popular, it must will die in several years. follow up Linux is a great risk!

Re:SPARC, ppc, and alpha ports

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD was never really intended for x86 per se. FreeBSD was intended to bring high-power servers and workstations action to the masses. To provide the equivelent of something like Solaris or DEC UNIX for free, on commodity hardware. It just happened that x86 was the obvious choice at the time. Now, it's not so obvious. With SPARC64 hardware available at a reasonable price, that looks like a pretty good platform to port to (side note: SMPng and SPARC64 appear to mix very well :). Porting to the IA-64 is a no-brainer given Intel's ability to hype. No one knows if that chip will catch on, but if it does, we'll be there. The Alpha port started almost as an experiment, but it's doing pretty well. Of course, the G3/G4 chips are pretty popular, and strong performers as well. Also, FreeBSD is used in several not-general-computing places, such as Juniper products. The PowerPC chips are popular for packet processing. I can tell you from first hand knowledge that a number of folks are quite eager to jump all over FreeBSD/PPC with SMPng.

With the lowering prices of hardware, and the increase of power in FreeBSD's technology, consumer hardware is starting to approach enterprise computing. I think we're going to start to see clusters of x86, PowerPC, and Alpha machines actually threatening things like the Sun e10k. This is similar to what we're seeing with IDE vs SCSI at the moment. A quality RAID board like 3ware, and a couple of good ATA disks like those from IBM produces a killer price-point performer. The same will be the case for FreeBSD solutions. We're not Solaris, and we're not trying to be. However, we can approach Solaris for a fraction of the cost.

OK, I got off on a tangent. To summerize, we run on popular and easily available hardware. That hardware is a moving target. Our goals have not changed one bit.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Lazaru5]

Looks like *someone* didn't put on their thinking cap today.

--

Can't wait

[Arandir]

I can't wait for some of this stuff!

Binary Updater Project: Let's get rid of this "one size fits all" mode that all other systems impose.

Diskcheckd: A must for the massive drives nowadays.

libh: I can have my text mode installer and gui configuration at the same time!

Re:Can't wait

[Anonymous Coward]

Binary Updater Project: Let's get rid of this "one size fits all" mode that all other systems impose.

Actually, that's my baby...
Got input, or even better, some time and code to contribute? Please contact updater at osd dot bsdi dot com - we're setting up a real FreeBSD.org mailing list some day, but this will do for now.

Re:FreeBSD 5.0

[guilherme]

It's a good article.

I have read one from Hubburd that he was trying to implement a new form of packages.

Do you know something ?

Tnx !

Permanent URL for this article

[Anonymous Coward]

Since micheal is too lazy to fix the now-broken URL for the report, please see this location [freebsd.org] for the actual news item.