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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed One Year 264

Posted by timothy from the measure-twice-cut-once dept.
Satai writes: "FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE has been delayed a full year, until November of 2002. The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."
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FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed One Year More

FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed One Year

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  • Whew! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I thought it said FreeBSD 1.0 delayed for five years! What a relief!

    "Where's my peanuts?" said the parakeet.

  • 15 to 1 ? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by AftanGustur ( 7715 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @08:12AM (#2238405) Homepage

    Can somebody, who knows what happened, explain to the rest of us why so many developers left the boat ?

    15:1 is way above what can be regarded as "bad luck".

    • had to get paying jobs or had to take on more billable hours (lower contracting rates b/c of the downturn), would be my guess. either that or Linus took a hypnotism course and snuck into the last *bsd developer conclave, heh.

      • Re:15 to 1 ? (Score:2, Funny)

        by Steeltoe ( 98226 )
        Really? Personally, I lean to the hypothesis that the BSD-folks got abducted by aliens. Surely, their talent and philosophies can be better appreciated in a more developed society.

        - Steeltoe

    • Re:15 to 1 ? (Score:2, Insightful)

      by hda1 ( 23417 )
      15 -1 only refers to one feature, SMPng.

      I applaud the BSD leadership for working toward a realistic goal. That's good project management.

      Would we prefer they strip out everything that isn't ready, and released 5.0 in two months?

      • Re:15 to 1 ? (Score:4, Funny)

        by tmark ( 230091 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @10:02AM (#2238815)
        Would we prefer they strip out everything that isn't ready, and released 5.0 in two months?
        Then we could call it RedHat 8.0.

      • realism (Score:3, Insightful)

        by benedict ( 9959 )
        About a week ago, I saw the latest FreeBSD Development Report, compiled by Robert Watson. It's a simple report, including a paragraph or two on the state of all the major projects.

        After reading the report, I decided to be a little bit scared of 5.0, because there were a lot of ambitious projects slated for inclusion therein.

        This move strikes me as a recognition of a reality: it's going to take a lot of time to integrate all those projects and turn the result into something worthy of being called FreeBSD-RELEASE.
    • The drop from 15 to 1 -- by the way, that one wasn't even part of the initial 15 -- is a result of the "tech slump". Companies which once had employees assigned to working on FreeBSD, seeing a need to "tighten their belts", redirected those people to other more directly profitable tasks. Hopefully this delay will spur developers into joining the SMPng project.
    • Maybe they got hired by Apple. Heh, really I don't know. But after OSX, you'd think people with some BSD experience would be more marketable, even if the economy is taking a downturn.

      Anyway, as a FreeBSD 4.4, I see this as a good move. If I feel like upgrading my OS every two months, I'd be using Linux right? Nice that they're going to be porting FreeBSD to PowerPPC as well, since I just bought a Quicksilver, and would rather go with the BSD I know than with NetBSD (or just Darwin for that matter).

      • On the subject of how rushing to finish a job can mess something up, in my haste I neglected to preview my shoddy HTML skills.
      • I dunno... might be the second step of a slippery slope leading to some kind of unification between Darwin and FreeBSD (Jordan Hubbard going to Apple being the first). I'm not saying it's in the works -- I've nothing but my own guesswork saying this -- but it seems very possible.

        /brian
      • > Maybe they got hired by Apple.


        Actually, the message says that it's only one *not counting Apple*.


        So it's not quite as bad as it sounds.


        hawk

    • Re:15 to 1 ? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by imp ( 7585 )
      15:1 is way above what can be regarded as "bad luck".
      First, the 15 developers haven't departed the FreeBSD project. They are just unable to devote significant time to SNMng. There's a big difference between that and what is implied by this comment.

      Actually, it is abouit right for every single free software project that I've been involved in. You get a lot of interest from people that want to see something done. Then you get about a 5 to 1 "disappearing into the woodwork" once people have begun work. Lots of people want to volunteer to help, but often times they don't have the time or fully understand what they volunteered for. You get another 3-5 to 1 attrition over the next year as people need to make money in their various fields over the next year. Or as their free time patterns change, etc.

      Finally, although there's only one full time developer on SMPng, there are several people that are contributing to SMPng on an irregular basis.

      So it isn't all that unusual. I'm sure many examples in the Linux world could be found as well.

      Warner

      • OK, with you little illustration you've accounted for between 8 to 10 people leaving. You forgot the other half or third


        Statistical fluke? Maybe. Sign of something else? At least equally likely.

    • I really don't know, though my guess is that it has to do a lot with WindRiver's buyout of BSDi because the SMP stuff really only got rolling because of BSDi's involvement with FreeBSD.

      Maybe somebody knows how well WindRiver is doing at this moment.

  • developer fall-off (Score:4, Interesting)

    by TechnoVooDooDaddy ( 470187 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @08:15AM (#2238412) Homepage
    As a follower/lurker to BSD-Hackers, I offered to do some device driver development, apparently not to the liking of some of the leaders on there

    *cough*TIM*cough*

    anyway, at least the bsd-hackers forum can be quite hostile, and i've seen it keep more than a couple people away..

    • Re:developer fall-off (Score:5, Interesting)

      by duffbeer703 ( 177751 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @08:24AM (#2238439)
      The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies. Linux and FreeBSD are targetted towards different segments of users, why can't we just accept that? Take a look at a typical posting from a Linux user on the freebsd-newbies list. We're talking two different worlds here.
      I am relatively young to the scene myself, but let's take a walk down memory lane say six years ago. Back in those days the Linux Howto's, especially the Installation Howto, were essentially Slackware Howto's. (The book I used to figure out how to install Linux was essentially the Howto's printed out.) My PC's BIOS from that era did not support booting from an ATAPI CD Rom drive. Hard drives were much smaller but the EIDE ones were coming up against a succession of limits, limits in where a kernel could be located and still be seen by a bootloader. For Linux there was a well-defined path introducing newbies: you installed and created a custom bootdisk. Linux installation instructions also told how to edit the kernel for the bootdisk floppy to change the root partition location.

      From my newbie perspective, this was installation Nirvana! I didn't have to worry about LILO if I didn't want to. From the perspective of other people sharing the PC I used, other than taking up hard drive space, they didn't have to know Linux existed. And Linux could be installed in an extended partition not just a primary partition. Keep in mind that hard drives were a lot smaller then, so for dual-boot setups it was nice to be able to dedicate some more room for the Windows C: drive. And not only that but since everyone did the custom bootdisk compiling as a rite of passage, people could compile bootdisks to help others if the default floppy didn't have the right drivers.

      Now from what I have read of the FreeBSD community's thoughts, they couldn't care less about such concerns. The ISP I used back then was hosted on a collection of FreeBSD boxes, abandoning a more monolothic solution with an SGI server, because the ISP's lead technical person knew how to do it. FreeBSD is more like an industrial consortium as far as the core developers go, and at least at that time there was a huge emphasis on stuff related to running ISPs. From their perspective it was laughable to devote much effort to support the most unreliable medium of all, a floppy, for custom booting a machine. And someone like an ISP wouldn't be using EIDE, they'd be using SCSI. 528MB limit, "get some real hardware, kid" I'd imagine they'd think. And they'd have their internal network and their own procedures for mass replicating setups to many machines.

      Six years later I think we can see everyone got what they wanted. The Linux community developed critical mass and got wildly popular with newbies. The FreeBSD community was left alone by the newbies they didn't want to deal with.

      • Re:developer fall-off (Score:2, Insightful)

        by nabucco ( 24057 )
        I have to say that I've had the totally opposite experience. FreeBSD had a very easy root/boot floppy disk procedure and network install (ie. install over the Internet), whereas slackware, had a much more complicated procedure, with many, many floppy disks needed.

        A few months ago I wanted to install Red Hat on a CD-less machine I have at home, over a 56K modem. I was going to download the files to my Sun box and then NFS mount them locally. Red Hat doesn't go out of their way to advertise that they have a network install of Red Hat but a friend of mine pointed it out to me. Harkening back to the good old days, my NE-2000 compatible card didn't have the proper drivers (for RH Linux, there was no problem when it had Windows 95), and enabling/disabling Plug-and-Play, changing the IRQ and all that jazz didn't help. I hadn't done an install of FreeBSD for a while but at wit's end I did that. Imagine my surprise when I saw that it was able to install over the Internet via a modem!

        Frankly, it's my opinion that FreeBSD has always been one step ahead of Linux in ease of installation for the past 5 years. I am speaking of the most popular Linux distributions, since I almost always install what the most popular dist is (although I have used Debian and so forth). The only thing Linux ever sometimes surpassed FreeBSD on was NIC cards - sometimes Linux would work with a cheap NIC card that FreeBSD wouldn't. And frankly, Windows always killed both of them in working with virtually every network card.

        In terms of being memetic, ease of installation is more important than even ease of use. If you get totally stuck on installation, who cares who user-friendly GNOME is?
        • ugh, i'm not trying to INSTALL IT.. installation was cake, as you pointed out... I WAS OFFERING TO HELP CODE, trying to figure out where to plug in at..

          The response i got was basically "whatever"
          • Do you know how to write modern FreeBSD device drivers? Have you tried before? You must not know the many, many hours of work it takes for someone to learn the APIs, even if it's someone else spending HIS own hours teaching him.

            It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do. Writing drivers involves intimate familiarity with the system, especially with a system where the kernel API has been in a constant state of flux in the long-running development branch.

            That said, intelligent questions about an arbitrary topic with non-obvious answers are USUALLY responded to politely. You can't just say, though, "I'd like to write some drivers. Can you tell me how?" or anything even moderately like that.
            • having coded device drivers as part of my job, and being a C and C++ programmer for about 10 years now, I think I'm good to go..

              The questions i had were more of the lines of "What needs to be done", not "How do i do this"
              • Well, a simple search would have given you quite a bit of information..

                I mean no flame, but if you're as knowledgeable as you claim to be... the current available docs would be enough. I mean, there's even a sample device driver to start yourself on.

                When you email technical lists, with very vague questions, you get bad answers...

                'tis the nature of geeks :)

            • Re:developer fall-off (Score:1, Insightful)

              by Anonymous Coward
              "its easier for existing developers to write a new driver than teach someone how to do it". yeah. brilliant. thats the thinking that leads to a 15:1 reduction in developers. congratulations.
              teaching someone to write a driver is about the most important thing a free software developer can do. its the ONLY way that linux has been able to get so many developers on board. EVERYONE including torvalds encourages newbies to write drivers because the newbies tend to write several drivers not just one after learning how to write a single driver. read the lkml sometime and learn why FreeBSD's on a death spiral, apple or not.
              • read the lkml sometime and learn why FreeBSD's on a death spiral, apple or not.

                Ever hear of the BSD is Dying Troll? Altough this story seems to indicate that it is, this is premature for now.

                Netcraft's numbers indicate that Linux is hurting BSD in the web server market, but it is hurting Solaris, Tru64, and others worse. BSD has suffered marketshare greatly at the hands of proprietary Unices, and its experience was what the GPL sought to avoid (ok, so they are ideologically different, but anyway).

                I think that the hardware market will continue to slow for sometime and that this will KILL proprietary OS's. If this happens, Linux and BSD will compete more as equals than they are today. I think actually, that Linux's rise may be a very good thing for BSD.

                However, regarding your main point:

                teaching someone to write a driver is about the most important thing a free software developer can do. its the ONLY way that linux has been able to get so many developers on board. EVERYONE including torvalds encourages newbies to write drivers because the newbies tend to write several drivers not just one after learning how to write a single driver.

                You are absolutely right. Developer mindshare is not everything, but it is close. Encouraging participation is a good long-term strategy, and it has helped Linux tremendously. I think that the BSD community could learn some things from it.

                Also note that Apache, whose license is based on the BSD license, has generally encouraged newbies to help development. This is important and has no doubt helped Apache rise to the top, regarding marketshare. Sure right now Apache has continued to lose market-share for two straight months, but this is explained by a closer look at the numbers :)

            • Re:developer fall-off (Score:1, Interesting)

              by ethereal ( 13958 )
              It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do.

              That's an easy way to write that device driver. That's not the best way to get a whole lot of device drivers written, or to get a whole lot of new developers. Which is fine if you don't want a lot of new developers; but then people shouldn't complain when your next release gets pushed back a year :)

            • Re:developer fall-off (Score:1, Interesting)

              by Anonymous Coward
              I am a Professor who has been following FreeBSD and thinks that many features of FreeBSD are superior (the Man pages are the best I've ever seen, and the centralized packages/ports administration is good stuff too). However, it is not easy to teach its internals to my students, which means my research will probably wind up happening in a Linux environment due to the fact that they know it and can get stuff done there.

              Writing device drivers is by FAR the most common kernel modification, and having a large number of device drivers GREATLY enhances the utility of an operating system. It is unfortunate that the FreeBSD community has limited documentation on this (although I've noticed some work in this area last time I looked). However, FreeBSD has a long way to go in providing adequate resources for someone who is knowledgeable in programming outside the kernel to learn to program in the kernel. What is needed is a tutorial in device driver writing, however, I had hoped at one point that an outsider could develop this, but the task is perhaps too daunting for anyone other than an insider who really knows what is going on. I hope the situation improves, it might lead to interesting projects for some students in kernel level programming, and more committers.
            • I don't know why VooDooDaddy got the response he got. My experience with FreeBSD development has always been good; when I wanted to learn there was always a developer willing to help, on either a mailing list, a newsgroup, or #BSDCode on EFnet. *shrug*

              Maybe we're not hearing the whole story.

              What's up green? :)
              • no ideas what's up szomb.. I wanted to write a 3d-enabled device driver for the i81X chipset.. so i started in, got it kinda working, then found the bsd-hackers forum, asked if there were any similar efforts going on, and got a rash of very rude answers..

                My persuit for collaboration turned into flamefest, so i discontinued my active participation...

                I'm having fun with my little driver, but it's not getting checked into any publicly available builds, as I don't wish to fight to get it there.
                • 3D enabled driver for the i81x?

                  Perhaps you were flamed off because 3D stuff belongs in XFree86, not in FreeBSD?

                  Just a thought from a FreeBSD user who very much likes the system, and doesen't work with Linux anymore.
                  • Perhaps you were flamed off because 3D stuff belongs in XFree86, not in FreeBSD?

                    Except that if it's a port of the Linux 3D DRI driver for that chipset (as the other 3D DRI drivers under FreeBSD are), it still requires a kernel driver.

                    Dinivin
            • I guess this is precisely the attitude that TVDDaddy was talking about.

              If someone wants to write device drivers for your OSS, you don't rail against him and question his skills beforehand.

              No wonder most of the people i encounter in #freebsd on undernet or efnet are such jerks.
              • No wonder most of the people i encounter in #freebsd on undernet or efnet are such jerks.

                After all, most people on IRC are really sweet and kind.

                The hostile, immature and flamebait aspects of the free software and open source communities are certainly among their greatest barriers to success.

                Tim

            • Brilliant attitude! Hence, the reason the developers are falling off instead of picking up a steady stream of replacements or even gaining in number.


              VERY parochial.

              Helpful and optimistic new guy: "Hey guys, I'd like to help. I could code up a driver or two."

              Nasty, self-stabbing *BSD coder: "Who the FUCK are YOU?! Piss off, we don't want nor need you codeboy."

            • It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do. Writing drivers involves intimate familiarity with the system, especially with a system where the kernel API has been in a constant state of flux in the long-running development branch.

              OMG, no wonder FreeBSD is having trouble sustaining its engineering pool. What you are basically saying is that newbie driver hackers are not welcome because the existing 'established' developers, no matter how swamped they already are, can do it better and faster?! That's just silly.

              -adnans
            • It's, quite frankly, more than a little bit easier for existing FreeBSD developers to write a given driver than it is for them to teach someone what to do. Writing drivers involves intimate familiarity with the system, especially with a system where the kernel API has been in a constant state of flux in the long-running development branch.

              Quite frankly, that sounds like a very poor design. If you are changing your internal APIs so often and don't have a good abstraction layer in place for basic driver work, then you're shooting yourself in the foot. The internal APIs being in a "constant state of flux" shows that you need to get your heads out of the implementation detail, step back, and do some actual design work first.

              A good OS should have clean interfaces for writing drivers that anyone can support. You should be ashamed that it requires an "expert" in the system to write one of the most commmonly needed contributions to the system.

              I've written Linux device drivers as part of a class, including block and character devices with full /dev support and /proc filesystem support for configuring the devices. The Linux device driver model is so simple and easy to use that you can teach a class with a new, more complex driver as a biweekly assignment. It was basically a trivial task once you read through a little documentation. What is so wrong with FreeBSD that you can't simply do that?

              That said, intelligent questions about an arbitrary topic with non-obvious answers are USUALLY responded to politely. You can't just say, though, "I'd like to write some drivers. Can you tell me how?" or anything even moderately like that.

              Funny, if it wasn't an elite "boys club" on the list and if the kernel APIs were well designed, then you should be able to politely point someone to a HOWTO, FAQ, or book. Instead, snobbery and insults fly when it's really your own shoddy workmanship that is at fault.

              Drivers are import to system adoption. Driver writing should be the low-level entry to kernel hacking for your OS. It's a good way to see who can code well and to enhance your system. Of course, if neither of these are your goal, then don't be whine when the supposedly "inferior" Linux kernel leads them to a higher mindshare in the developer community.

              • Quite frankly, that sounds like a very poor design. If you are changing your internal APIs so often and don't have a good abstraction layer in place for basic driver work, then you're shooting yourself in the foot. The internal APIs being in a "constant state of flux" shows that you need to get your heads out of the implementation detail, step back, and do some actual design work first.
                There do exist [daemonnews.org] instructions on how to construct drivers. One can even run shell scripts located in /usr/share/examples/drivers which creates working skeleton drivers. Then there exist the option of reading manual pages. Driver(9) might be a good place to start.

                As for the kernel API being in a constant state of flux, I believe that the poster didn't mean it that litterally. Sure, some things do change over time, but I find most of the stuff to be very clear and well documented (note, I'm not a FreeBSD kernel hacker/developer). I also find the newbus [freebsd.org] scheme a very compelling infrastructure for driver development.

                • It seems that this newbus bit may add a level of nice abstraction like that of the Linux kernel. It's good to see steps being taken in this direction. Hopefully, there will be more open-minded people willing to assist interested parties learn this interface.

                  What bothered me was the usual snobbery about it not being their "place" to help newbies learn how to write drivers. The whole API being in flux issue is mostly a red herring since they could simply request that the person submit their drivers against a frozen architecture, such as the FreeBSD 4.X branches -- unless these too are in a "constant state of flux." I mean, big deal -- the Linux driver models were quite different between 1.2 & 2.0 and between 2.0 and 2.2. That doesn't mean that people were turned away from submitting new drivers under the older stable tree during the 1.3 & 2.1 development cycles.

                  If they have a good interface, then they should really have documentation to help people add system support for the stable branches. I mean, really, the main "expert" developers shouldn't be bothering themselves with device driver writing. For one thing, it requires them to take time away from their usual projects to learn the interface for a new piece of hardware -- which should be the hardest part of writing a driver under a good architecture. Device driver writing is exactly what newbies should be doing. The kernel interfaces should be a trivial matter -- let the newbies worry about learning the actual hardware while the main developers work on more important core issues.

                  As for the kernel API being in a constant state of flux, I believe that the poster didn't mean it that litterally. Sure, some things do change over time, but I find most of the stuff to be very clear and well documented (note, I'm not a FreeBSD kernel hacker/developer).

                  What bothers me is that this guy is. You can see his name all over FreeBSD mailing lists and code fixes. A quick search turns up that he's been a committer to the FreeBSD source tree since June 1999. This guy is in on things, and he's displaying this level of snobbery towards new developers. What a great way to gain mindshare! They're squandering a great resource.

                  • This guy is in on things, and he's displaying this level of snobbery towards new developers.

                    Don't take it too seriously -- as a regular reader of freebsd-current, I can say that he sometimes displays the same level of snobbery to old developers, too.

                    FreeBSD doesn't vet its developers on the basis of their personalities, but rather on their ability to contribute. Truth to tell, Feldman isn't the only one who sometimes takes a condescending attitude, but most of the FreeBSD folks I've encountered take a considerably more helpful attitude than what Feldman's post displays. He most assuredly doesn't speak for FreeBSD; he's not in the core group, and even core generally lets Jordan Hubbard be the only one who speaks for FreeBSD.

                    I might also mention that a few days spent reading the Linux Kernel Mailing List will turn up similar attitudes; they don't vet developers on the basis of personality, either. Even the Great Penguin Himself takes an attitude now and then.

                    As other posters have pointed out, reports of extreme difficulty in writing FreeBSD drivers are greatly exaggerated. But like most open-source projects, you are generally going to have to "show them the code" to have your questions on writing drivers taken credibly. If you aren't able to hunt down the docs that are part of the system (they aren't hidden), model your efforts after existing drivers, and at least have the framework built before asking questions, you aren't going to get much of a response.

                    Once again, this is true in the Linux world as well, though by the law of large numbers you have a greater chance of getting lucky and finding a competent mentor if you don't know how to get started. But don't expect it.

                    -Ed
          • There is a hierarchy of development. At the top is the core team. Below them are the contributors. As a newbie, no matter how experienced in writing drivers for Linux, Solaris or even OpenBSD, you will have to work your way up. Even if Bill Joy decided to join in FreeBSD development, he would have to start at the bottom like everyone else.

            But it can be done. Just because they won't except a driver from someone they never heard of doesn't mean that they don't want drivers. If your driver is fully tested, then send it to one of the contributors lower on the rungs, and maybe he or she will bounce it up higher.
      • The policy of FreeBSD's developers is not to cater to newbies

        Okay, I've asked this question once before of someone spouting this same line. Just where exactly is this "policy"? In talking to a number of developers on the various FreeBSD lists I have never gotten that impression. They're busy folks, and they can be rather short and to the point with comments, but certainly no more so than on Linux lists.

        As someone coming from the world of Windows, I started out with RedHat. I was totally convinced at that time that everything I had heard about Unix being too damn hard to learn was true. Fate stepped in and crashed my drive, which is when I decided to try out FreeBSD. Never looked back! As a relative newbie to Unix, I found it FAR simpler to use.

        Then I got to looking to put a *nix onto a laptop I've got here. Thought I'd try out Mandrake on it just to see. Very pretty installer, but it didn't know how to talk to my NIC. So I bought a new NIC it did know how to talk to. Then I was having all kinds of weird problems with the GUI network settings. Kept reseting my IP to something different. I decided to have a look at the config files themselves to see if I could edit them manually. Oh God, talk about a sea with no bottom! Mandrake off, FreeBSD on.

        FreeBSD was able to talk just fine to the NIC card that Mandrake wasn't. I was able to install more up to date software through the ports tree than I was through that god awful slow RPM database. Lastly, the system config files were short, to the point, and readable by a human without a 3 inch thick book next to me.

        In all fairness I did have some problems with recent changes to the pccard code that went into the STABLE branch. That code has mostly been fixed up now, as I'm typing this on the very laptop in question. The fact that I'm up and running now was largely due to direct help from one of the FreeBSD developers on the mobile mailing list.

        I want to see this mythical policy! I want to see the comments that show how FreeBSD folks aren't concerned with installation issues, helping newbies get started, or any of the other FUD you're tossing out here. Quoting from a FreeBSD 2.0 bug sheet is not backing you up.

    • I read further down that you basically asked "What needs to be done?", and you believe this to be an acceptible question to post. Not being a direct part of the FreeBSD-Hackers discussions, I can perhaps give some advice from a long time user who's done minor work on ports from time to time.


      A better approach:


      1) Find some piece of hardware that isn't supported, but you think could be useful to more than a couple people worldwide ;-)

      2) Post the question "Is anyone else working on a driver for [cool piece of hardware]?"

      3) Commence work with any answering "I am" to #2 - or on your own, referring to driver-writing documentation included in the source tree.

      4) Once working in a stable manner - post "Hey it works! Anyone want to help hammer it and make sure it's up to par?"

      5) Gain respect and appreciation for your contribution to FreeBSD.


      Simply asking "What needs to be done?" is like asking a star for a specific particle of light!

  • I'm an avid open-source supporter, using windows NT at work, 95 at home, and ME on my laptop.

    Now, this story seems quite interesting. In this day and age where we are increasing only interested how quickly we can churn out things, it's good that a developer (or rather, group) has decided to admit that things do need time, in this case a year, to be improved and have the features users want implemented to a satisfactory level.

    Look at Netscape 4 - definately a rush job, as anyone who has to get CSS and / or javascript working with it will tell you - it's pretty obvious that little testing took place on it, hence even *really* obvious bugs stick out like a sore thumb.

    Whilst users always like new features, ooh-ing and ahh-ing over them, it's no good if the features themselves are ridden with bugs. If a few more developers were to spend enough time testing and really ironing out the problems in their applications, the program would slowly come together, gaining a reputation for itself as it does so.

    The only problem with this is that in a year, people will be looking at BSD, hoping for some king of uber operating system. I really do hope that the developers live up to expectations - it would be a real shame if they didn't.
    • I don't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle. I get enough of that from some of the people I know. But I have to admit that after using several Linux distros and using FreeBSD, the choice (for me) was quite clear. That's not to say I didn't like some of the Linux distros I tried. Not at all. I really liked Storm and I fully intend to install either Debian or Slackware on an IBM I have sitting in the corner. But when it came time to choose a system of the many I tried to run my web-server off of, I had to settle on FreeBSD.

      At first I was a little wery about going with something slightly less mainstream than Linux, but good Linux binary compatibility (not to mention the Ports Collection) was a plus that won me over to FreeBSD.

      With FreeBSD the first few days were really rough because there were several major annoyances I had, and none of my Linux friends had any useful insight. But I quickly solved most of my problems on my own. I feel I have learned much more this way. Plus, when I needed quick answers, web-searches almost always provided immediate and exact answers because there is only one FreeBSD and many other users have experienced the exact same problems.

      It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much. As for my soon-to-be Linux system, that just shows that I'm not knocking Linux at all (how could I?) it's just that I made the choice based on my needs and what I like. I personally don't feel I was moving forward fast enough with any of the Linux distros, but I felt comfortable with FreeBSD very quickly.
      • If you didn't want to start a FreeBSD vs Linux battle, why on earth did you post this, which has absolutely nothing to do with the article?

        I myself don't use *BSD simply because I prefer the Sys V init, and I find myself typing ps -ef far more than ps auxw. Thats all. But I am comfortable enough with my choice not to have to post off topic messages about it*

        * Yes, the irony has been noted.
      • It's something of a shame that Storm went the way of the wind, but after I made my choice to run FreeBSD it hasn't mattered too much.

        Well, there's hope, it looks like Xandros is stepping up to fill the niche: debian-based desktop Linux distro. I wouldn't be surprised at all to see them bring some of the Storm team on board.

    • Well, it's pretty bad news if you are a manager in a company and fought for using BSD.

      Boss - "So, are we on schedule to start rolling out the 4-way file servers in July next year?"

      Me - "Um, no, that will have to wait until, maybe, Jan 2003".

      Boss - "Errr, why's that? You said to me last quarter that the new SMP stuff would be ready by the end of this year? Surely 6 months is plenty of safety margin?"

      Me - "Actually, the release date slipped by 12 months. I just found out now. I think it was due to most of the developers leaving the project."

      Boss - "What?!?!?!! They fired 14 kernel developers?! I thought you said this organisation wouldn't be affected by the economy, on account of not being an evil capitalist outfit that only cares about their quarterly results!"

      Me - "Yeah, well, no-one got fired, it's more like, they, uh, just kind of stopped doing any work. I guess maybe they got bored."

      Boss - "OK, that does it. We're going with Solaris x86, I don't care what you say."
      • Well, it's pretty bad news if you are a manager in a company and fought for using BSD.

        My answer to these people is: Maybe you should have taken the money you saved by not buying Solaris, and spent it by allocating half of one of your developer's time to the FreeBSD project?

        Supporting Open Source has to mean actually doing some coding somewhere, or there isn't any source to support. Who better to code the features than those who genuinely need to use them?

      • Re:This isn't all bad news - quite the contrary (Score:1, Interesting)

        by Anonymous Coward

        OK, that does it. We're going with Solaris x86, I don't care what you say.


        Having been a programmer for an OS Company (HP/UX), I can tell you that 12 month slips are not solely reserved for free software. About the only difference is that FreeBSD tells you up front that it's 12 months, while HP says 1 month 12 times. That being said, I'd have my company start the migration to Linux immediately.

    • it seems to me that it isn't even really about churning things out, these days. it's all about the number...if my number is higher than yours, it must be better, right? take the Slackware jump as an example, everyone else is at 7.0, so we have to be, too.

      why not back off on the numbers and start spending some time fixing the issues you already know exist....maybe the open source companies should start looking at making a stable release, then releasing stable updates at regular intervals, like Sun, IBM, Apple and others.

      it's fine now, but it seems like the marketing scheme starts to back fire as the numbers start to get higher....one would hope that when Mandrake gets to release 10(next month?), it would be an "uber operating system"....I mean they've had at least 10 tries, right? that's what the numbers are supposed say.

      and they still haven't gotten it right.

      as long as development is continuing, I see no reason to see this as a bad thing.
  • that better tested products last longer. maybe the year they now take for testing and developing will help them build a system that is competitive for 5 years or longer. perherps. i will use linux though.

  • that's too bad. I know that Free BSD 5 is actually going to be able to grow the filesystem on the fly (like AIX) and I really wanted to see how it works. Just recently I switched from Linux to Free BSD and I'm quite happy with what I already have, so I suppose waiting a year won't kill me...
    • IIRC, XFS does that too. In theory the same is possible with NTFS too, but MS chose not to implement it.
      • Actually, NTFS can "dynamically grow" by creating a volume set. It's sort of similar to a stripe set without parity, except that it's just all bundled together into a larger, single volume. No striping, no performance benefit. When you fill one physical partition, you start filling the other one.

  • Not very good news, nevertheless... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @08:41AM (#2238480) Homepage Journal
    As others have pointed out, it's good that the FreeBSD developers have decided to push the deadline by several (14) months.

    But I can't help but wonder if the FreeBSD "core" isn't trying to do too much with too little.

    SMPng is great. Porting FreeBSD to dozens of architecture may not be -- I thought NetBSD was the one group that was supposed to focus on portability? Stick with Intel CPUs, guys! =)

    Nevertheless, a magnificent OS, and one that I use very often...
    • Porting FreeBSD to dozens of architecture may not be -- I thought NetBSD was the one group that was supposed to focus on portability?

      I believe the mandate was to port FreeBSD to the most popular architectures (for ISP's?).
    • SMPng is great. Porting FreeBSD to dozens of architecture may not be -- I thought NetBSD was the one group that was supposed to focus on portability? Stick with Intel CPUs, guys! =)

      No. NetBSD's goal is to be as portable as possible, at which it succeeds greatly (the current count is 45 or 46 architectures and it's probably running on that DSL or Cable router.

      FreeBSD is not even approaching that level. FreeBSD is a server OS, however, and as such it is a worthwhile goal to have it run on the best and most commonly used server hardware. SUN4U fits into this category.
  • Though not currently running FreeBSD, it is a system I *really* like and it has a lot (ports, licence...) going for it. Unfortunately, excess developers isn't on the list, it seems.

    I hope that all that talent isn't lost forever.

    To be honest, I'd like to see some shrinkage in the number of projects going on out there, in the hope (perhaps mistakenly) we'd see quality products turned out faster, rather than just more of them.

    eg. There seems to be about a dozen HelpDesk projects out there, but none offer what our horrible old Win3.1 version did - let alone what our current crappy Win32 system does.

    But I'd hate to see FreeBSD be part of the shrinkage!

  • No, the real reason is... (Score:3, Funny)

    by jsse ( 254124 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @08:54AM (#2238513) Homepage Journal
    The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."

    You didn't take Butterfly Effect [thinkquest.org] into account.

    Failing to take into acount a butterfly flapping its wings in the country called Elbonia [dilbert.com] could cause the delay of its release up to several month, even a year.

  • Why Give A Date? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Sonicated ( 515345 )
    Why are they setting dates in the first place? Can't they just say that they will release it when feature A, B and C are implemented and stable?
    • Why are they setting dates in the first place? Can't they just say that they will release it when feature A, B and C are implemented and stable?

      Setting a date helps to ensure that the project stays on track. It gives everyone a sense of a real goal, and urges developers to complete their portions of the project on time. If you just say "We'll release it when it's done," you often end up with everyone thinking "Oh, I've got lots of time... I'll work on my code tomorrow" and nothing gets done.

      It's not setting development deadlines that's a bad thing. It's having deadlines that are cast in stone and set by people who have no appreciation for how long it takes to develop the software that is bad. I'm very glad to see that FreeBSD is setting deadlines, attempting to meet those deadlines, and adjusting those deadlines as required to ensure success of the project.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @09:33AM (#2238677)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Plus, if you read the announcement w.r.t. the delay well, new features shall be backported from 5.0 to 4.x in the meantime.

      In fact the time between 4.0 and 5.0 won't be that exceptional. 2.0 to 3.0 took 4 years (1994 to 1998). See this page [freebsd.org] for a nice overview of past releases. Note that 4.0 -> 5.0 will be a relatively large jump compared to past major releases.
    • Ditto. For Linux users that don't know the difference, this would be like Linus saying "3.0 is delayed a year, but 2.4 is going strong, and we'll do a 2.6 if necessary."

      The FreeBSD 5.0 branch will have some MAJOR changes to the architecture. Delaying it is a Good Thing(tm).

  • Two ways to respond to such news... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Leimy ( 6717 ) on Friday August 31, 2001 @09:38AM (#2238698)
    You can sit and whine about how its being delayed or you can get off your duff and help.

    Even taking some time to run what parts of FreeBSD 5 do exist to give some valuable feedback as to how it behaves on your system could be useful.

    I am just as dissapointed as anyone else about the news but I can't help but feel motivated to lend a hand in such bad times.

    I will probably try FBSD 5 this weekend and see what's what. Too bad I don't have SMP...

    • You can sit and whine about how its being delayed or you can get off your duff and help.


      I was a FreeBSD advocate since 1995 or so. I started to lose interest back when Jordan Hubbard left the project to work for Apple. I imagine a lot of others did too. With this announcement I'm completely moving away from FreeBSD. I've already switched my workstation to Linux, and I now plan to switch all my servers over too, and won't deploy any new FreeBSD servers. I guess the GPL really did beat the BSD license. It's too bad, really, FreeBSD was a much cleaner solution, IMHO.

      • Oops! Here goes my Karma! - Oh well...

        Fact: Jordan Hubbard did not leave the project - he simply changed employers. He is still the FreeBSD Release Engineer, and still active member of the CORE team.

        Fact: FreeBSD-Current (5.x branch) has so many changes that pushing back the switch of Current to Stable does not mean that features from Current won't be MFC'd back to Stable during the course of the year. It just means the whole of it won't.

        Assuming this is some sort of "writing on the wall" of FreeBSD's demise is incredibly short-sighted. If you truly have been involved in FreeBSD for 6 years, I would expect you to know better. The 4.x branch was delayed many times due to the amount of changes to various subsystems - some of which were then MFC'd to the then 3.x-Stable branch.

        Passing FUD about the GPL beating BSD is just further evidence of your troll.

        • I am aware that Jordan Hubbard merely changed employers, which is precisely why I compared it to Linus working for Transmeta. The fact of the matter is that Jordan no longer has time to work on FreeBSD in ways that it does not further the goals of Apple, and is not even required to provide his work to the community at all. While that wasn't enough for me to jump off the FreeBSD bandwagon, reading this announcement was.


          The push back in the schedule is not the kicker, although the fact that it was by a whole year is disturbing. That 14 of the 15 people working on SMPng have not been active in the project in 6 months is writing on the wall.



          Finally, I hope that the developers working on 5.0-CURRENT don't take this as an excuse to down tools and take a few months off since that will only ensure that we slip again. We've taken on some truly significant challenges with 5.0 and it will take everyone working as hard as they can to both meet this new deadline and release something
          that lives up to everyone's expectations.

          You know that's exactly what the developers are going to do. No one wants to contribute to a sinking ship, at least not without getting paid for it. If the November 2002 date requires everyone working as hard as they can then I guarantee you that date will not be met.


          By "involved in FreeBSD for 6 years", I don't mean to imply that I contributed any code. I used the software for every server I had control over, and convinced my employer to use it for some as well.


          This wasn't meant to be a troll, just an honest opinion as to my particular guess as to where the FreeBSD project is going, and the fact that they have lost me as a user. Perhaps others feel the same way (at least 14 others apparently do). Maybe not. Personally I've decided to spend my time and energy on Linux from now on. While the demise of FreeBSD is by no means certain, it has become a reasonable possibility and I guarantee you that Linux will survive longer than FreeBSD.

          • Please stop trolling.

            #1) Jordan is as active as he's ever been in FreeBSD despite the move in his daytime job to Apple. He's even paid to work on FreeBSD during the week. The fact of the matter is that Jordan isn't an active developer anyway, he's more of a publicist and manager. If you're choosing to move away from FreeBSD because you think the PR spokesman is no longer dedicated to his job, well, that seems like a misguided decision to make.

            #2) The "14 developers who haven't been working on SMPng" have NOT left FreeBSD and continue to do their work in the other areas of the system they work on. The announcement merely stated the lack of current developer activity on the SMPng project within FreeBSD. These people have not left FreeBSD and there certainly hasn't been any massive behind-the-scenes "rift" in the developer community, as some of the replies to this thread seem to be assuming.

            FreeBSD developer activity continues to increase, and in fact has probably never been better in the history of the project

  • 13-Mar-2000 FreeBSD 4.0 has been released

    hmm... so a little over a year and a half for another major labeled release..

    wow, most corporate software would be GREEN with envy. No pressure guys, you're still outperforming Microsoft and the rest of them.

  • They've probably been lured to work on Darwin, OS X's BSD base.
    I guess they'll be back right after they figure out how to fix the dual processor dialup error.
  • Hi everyone,

    Despite all those annoying trolls who claim *BSD is dead, I say it lives. I've used FreeBSD since 2.1.6 and it's so good to see all the progress, in my favourite OS.

    Even if we have a release date that is in the not-so-distant future, I'd prefer to see quality instead of quantity.

    I'd prefer a stable OS instead of something that has releases every few weeks to fix bugs... and I think a lot of users will agree with me on that. This is one of the reasons why FreeBSD is used much on servers: for it's stability.

    On the sidenote, why not give FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT a try, if you're dying to see what it looks like? It won't hurt you (much), apart from some possible problems. But why not contact the developers when your box, say, gives some core dumps? It's with our support that this product is made! We don't pay for it, so don't whine!
  • While this is obviously bad news, I'm not worried. FreeBSD still beats Linux easily.

    I like to use a system that feels like it is a cohesive whole, and not a patchwork of often incompatible packages. It is the little details that make the difference. Something like better written manpages might not make that much of a difference to a clueless newbie, but when you get to know the system they do make a difference. Man pages are just one example though... FreeBSD as a whole system (not just a kernel like linux) has an organized, well-though out design, as opposed to the messed up patchwork that is (Debian|Redhat|Suse|whatever) Linux.

    A cathedral will always be more beautiful and well-engineered than a bazaar. Even linux peasants should be able to figure that out.
    • "A cathedral will always be more beautiful and well-engineered than a bazaar. Even linux peasants should be able to figure that out."

      Nice analogy. Should we take it a bit further?
      1. A bazaar is always a better place to find open and valid information than a cathedral. Sure, you find a bit misinformation, but at least you have more than one source of it.

      2. The sheer amount of activity at a bazaar is much much more than that of a cathedral. What point is there to beautiful engineering if noone uses it?

      3. A cathedral takes ages to create. As a concrete example, the cathedral of Trondheim, "Nidarosdomen", was just finished this year, after starting in the 1400s. It took so long to build, that patchwork to make keep the current standards have been done for several hundred years before the building was actually finished.

      4. The bazaar generates a huge amount of money and trade, compared to the cathedral.
  • Economic Downturn! HA! We ALL know that's a huge load of crap..err.. what? we like BSD stuff? Damn Economic Downturn!

    Slashdolt double standard strikes again!

    Moderators: do your worst! (like you usually do.) Screw Karma.

  • My reply [vrml3d.com] to post #2239121 violated the lameness filter. Something about postsubj compression filter. That lameness filter is, well... lame.

  • I'd rather see a product delayed because it's "not how they want it" when it ships, rather than see it Rushed Out the Door.

    Classic Examples of ROD Products: Windows, Red Hat, PS2, and the Ford Pinto :-)

    Which PROVES 1 out of 4 Rushed Products "Blow up" on the consumer (pinto anyone?).

  • 15:1 developer drop isn't what it seems (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Apparently, what happened was that those
    developers worked on things other than SMPng,
    they didn't leave the project. So there are lots
    of other new things, but the SMPng work needs
    more dedication. Go figure.

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