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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 Now Available 261

Posted by michael from the five-candles-on-the-cake dept.
Dan writes "Murray Stokely of FreeBSD release engineering team announces that they're one milestone closer with the immediate availability of FreeBSD first release candidate for the i386, alpha, sparc64, and ia64 platforms. ISO images and FTP installation directories are available now from the FreeBSD FTP site."
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FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 Now Available More

FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 Now Available

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  • Murray Stokely of FreeBSD release engineering team announces that they're one milestone closer with the immediate availability of FreeBSD first release candidate for the i386, alpha, sparc64, and ia64 platforms.

    So what are you saying here? That FreeBSD has never been released before?

  • Yes... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    But does it run Linux?

    • Re:Yes... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      To spoil your joke: yes, it runs Linux. (kldload linux ; ./sick-linux-binary ; rejoice! )

      • Re:Yes... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Fweeky ( 41046 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:06AM (#4843711) Homepage
        (kldload linux ;./sick-linux-binary ; rejoice! )

        Don't forget to brandelf it too, if said sick-linux-binary happens to have a broken elf header which says it's a Solaris binary or whatever, i.e:
        brandelf -t Linux sick-linux-binary
        Since while FreeBSD will use the elf header to make things like Linux emulation work, Linux just ignores it, meaning a lot of tools like to produce incorrect headers. Tsk :)

        • Re:Yes... (Score:2, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Ofcourse I have 'kern.fallback_elf_brand=3' before even starting to think about running sick-linux-binary without brandelf ;)

    • Re:Yes... (Score:5, Informative)

      by drdink ( 77 ) <smkelly+slashdot@zombie.org> on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:54AM (#4843620) Homepage
      FreeBSD does have a Linux ABI which allows it to run Linux binaries. In fact, I have an entire Linux base system in /usr/compat/linux for that reason. Using VMWare, it is also possible to run Linux on FreeBSD.

      For more information about the Linux ABI, see this manpage [freebsd.org].

    • Re:Yes... - And well, finally. (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      As a note to the curious, the Linux compatibility improved "greatly" in the latter half of the 4.x series. It's more likely that one or two simple functions were fixed (I haven't followed closely, and it's been a while), but this means that previously tempermental software- the Amiga/Elate SDK, for one example- now runs flawlessly as of 4.5 or so.

      Loki games should be no problem, not that they were before. ;)

    • Re:Yes... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Well, FreeBSD can run linux binaries. Observe:

      bash# uname -a
      FreeBSD abox.some.dom 4.7-STABLE FreeBSD 4.7-STABLE: Sun Dec. 8 19:28:39 EDT 2002
      root@abox.some.dom:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/abox i386

      bash-2.05b# chroot /compat/linux

      %uname -a
      Linux linuxbox.some.dom 2.4.2 FreeBSD 4.7-STABLE: Sun Dec. 8 19:28:39 EDT 2002
      user@abox i386 unknown

      So, does it run linux? Of course. It can also run SCO unix. "Does linux run FreeBSD or SCO?" is a better question. There's an effort [advogato.org] to provide similar capabilities in linux, but it looks like they've just started. Help 'em out, ok?

  • Not Dead (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:36AM (#4843513)
    Look it moves... It must be alive!

  • uhh... (Score:5, Funny)

    by vorovsky ( 413068 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:40AM (#4843534)
    great, I just installed 4.7 last night...

    • Re:uhh... (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      I wouldn't worry about it. Stick with 4.7 (or move to 4.8 when it's available) until 5.2 is released for anything important. My experience with releases is that a system runs much more reliably once a release has had time to mature. Of course, if it is a home machine or test box, I kinda understand, except why not follow -CURRENT if you want the latest-greatest of gizmos, gadgets, features, and shiny new toys?

      • Urhmmm... (Score:3, Interesting)

        by cjsnell ( 5825 )

        Actually, I've had no problems with x.0-RELEASEs. We installed 3.0-RELEASE on our machines the day it was released. We were waiting for it because we needed support for our SCSI card. This was before I knew about -SNAPSHOTs. Anyway, we installed it and ended up running it for like two years without a reboot. I remember a few security issues that could be patched while the machine was running but I don't remember any showstopper stability issues or system corruption issues. In fact, in all the releases that I've installed since 2.something-really-low, I don't think I've ever seen an unstable or dangerous -RELEASE.

        • Re:Urhmmm... (Score:2, Informative)

          by essdodson ( 466448 )
          This won't be the case with 5.0. Its a well know fact that the maintainers of the project have said that 5.0 is not going to be ready for production or other machines that are critical. They've asked people to hold off and wait for 5.1 or even 5.2.

  • I swirched to FreeBSD... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:41AM (#4843537)
    ...because those Linux folks started to get to culty--kinda like the Mac people.

    • Re:I swirched to FreeBSD... (Score:4, Funny)

      by Nevermore-Spoon ( 610798 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:43AM (#4843548)
      and FreeBSD'ers aren't culty at all...riiiight

      • Re:I swirched to FreeBSD... (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Jace of Fuse! ( 72042 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:34AM (#4843865) Homepage
        Actually, what I've noticed about FreeBSD people is that they are mostly very utilitarian. Ussually they aren't religious about FreeBSD. The ones I know use whatever works to get the job done in whatever fashion they consider to be most appropriate for that specific situation. Sometimes FreeBSD is the best solution, sometimes it is not. I doubt any FreeBSD user would argue against this point.

        Linux users will religiously try to force Linux to do everything even when other options are easier, better, faster, or "more free". Mac users are the same way. Even Windows-Exclusive users are like this at times.

        So in some sense, I suppose you could say the FreeBSD people truely are the least religious. After all, they DO have a little devil as their mascot.

        *VERY EVIL GRIN*

      • Re:I swirched to FreeBSD... (Score:5, Insightful)

        by jo42 ( 227475 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @03:46PM (#4846328) Homepage
        Linux is for people who hate Windows, BSD is for people who love UNIX about sums it up.

    • Re:I swirched to FreeBSD... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by callipygian-showsyst ( 631222 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:19AM (#4843780) Homepage
      You have to admit--the zeal of the "Linux" folks can get a bit annoying. In fact, a lot of good applications for Linux aren't being realized because Big Corporations (like one I'm currently consulting for) doesn't consider it professional enough. They'll use FreeBSD, but not Linux.

      I think the "University Connection" with BSD helps a bit, along with the standard distributions. Face it, a lot of the people going around promoting Linux are doing it for the wrong reasons: a hatred of Microsoft, as opposed to a true understanding of the advantages of Linux, and Un*x-based operating systems in general.

      (I, too, prefer FreeBSD to Linux, and I can certainly empathize with your sentiment that the Linux community is cult-like.)

    • Yes, I once felt the same way you did, but ever since I drank that Red (Hat) Kool-Aid, everything's O.K. ...
    • mod + 5 funny.
  • I have 4.6 running in our office, never had any problems, but with all the talk of the improvements, I'm tempted to upgrade.

    Is this stuff ready for "prime time?"

    • Re:Good enough for production use? (Score:4, Funny)

      by __past__ ( 542467 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:51AM (#4843593)
      Why do you think they call it a "release candidate"?

    • Re:Good enough for production use? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You are not smart enough to be determining what it is used in a "production environment." I hereby revoke your status of geek. Sorry.

    • Re:Good enough for production use? (Score:5, Informative)

      by drdink ( 77 ) <smkelly+slashdot@zombie.org> on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:01AM (#4843669) Homepage
      NO. Do not use it in a production environment. For specific details on this issue, see this page [freebsd.org]. Specifically:
      (FreeBSD 5.0 suffers from what has been described as a ``chicken and egg'' problem. The entire project has a goal of producing a 5.0-RELEASE that is as stable and reliable as possible. This stability and reliability requires widespread testing, particularly of the system's newer features. However, getting a large number of users to test the system, in a practical sense, means building and distributing a release first!)
      I would suggest you wait until at least 5.1-RELEASE before adopting it on a real production system. That said, I am using 5.0-RC on my desktop system and have been using -CURRENT on it for a while now. It is all about how much time you want to put into helping smash little bugs when they pop up.

    • Re:Good enough for production use? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Definitely not. Please stick with 4.x.x line for a while yet, and your satisfaction (from the POV of production use) will be greater.

      Due to massive changes ans some binary incompatibilities, you should wait with using 5.x line for any serious production until x >= 1.

      However, if you want to test it in a light and inconsequential scenario, by all means you should do it, to reduce the shock later on, and to play with some really cool stuff... Things like native kernel threads, GEOM disk abstraction layer, background fsck and a lot of others make 5.x line a distinct flavor...

  • So what can we expect that will follow? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:46AM (#4843561)
    BSD is dead?

    BSD sux, Linux rocks!

    "I switched to FreeBSD and was amazed..."

    "I tried FreeBSD and it sucked..."

    "Not to troll, but why should I use FreeBSD instead of Linux"

    FreeBSD and SMP sucks!

    "In Soviet Russia, the RC1 releases YOU!"

    "BSD != DEAD"

    So you se my friends, no need to post further! Thank you, come again.

  • ia64 (Score:5, Funny)

    by MosesJones ( 55544 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @09:53AM (#4843615) Homepage

    Isn't it great how people can release things for hardware you wouldn't even know how to buy if you wanted to. I've often wondered how elements like the FreeBSD team and Linux get people interested in doing these things. Its not like an "itch you need to scratch" because you don't even have the body part to have the itch on!
  • I for one am very glad to hear about this.

    This release promises a whole new freebsd kernel. I hope it brings them success. Congratulations on the hard work guys.
    • FreeBSD is not just a kernel. This isn't some tarball you get from bsdkernel.org, compile and reboot with. It's a complete OS that includes the kernel and the userland together. The userland components are developed with and for the kernel by one group of people. That userland has thus evolved alongside the changing kernel in the -CURRENT CVS trunk, diverging greatly from the time that 4.0 was tagged -STABLE. When you upgrade, you get it all.

      I'm sure you meant no harm, but unless corrected, the misunderstanding of the nature of the BSDs, and how they differ from Linux, will continue to be propogated.

  • Version 5.0 Early Adopter's Guide (Score:5, Informative)

    by delfstrom ( 205488 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:00AM (#4843664)
    The Version 5.0 Early Adopter's Guide [freebsd.org] summarizes some of the new features that were not feasible to port back to the 4.x branch:

    • SMPng: The next generation support for SMP machines (work in progress). There is now partial support for multiple processors to be running in the kernel at the same time.

    • KSE: Kernel Scheduled Entities allow a single process to have multiple kernel-level threads, similar to Scheduler Activations.

    • New architectures: Support for the sparc64 and ia64 architectures, in addition to the i386, pc98, and alpha.

    • GCC: The compiler toolchain is now based on GCC 3. X , rather than GCC 2.95. X .

    • MAC: Support for extensible, loadable Mandatory Access Control policies.

    • GEOM: A flexible framework for transformations of disk I/O requests. An experimental disk encryption facility has been developed based on GEOM.

    • FFS: The FFS filesystem now supports background fsck (8) [freebsd.org] operations (for faster crash recovery) and filesystem snapshots.

    • UFS2: A new UFS2 on-disk format has been added, which supports extended per-file attributes and larger file sizes.

    • Cardbus: Support for Cardbus devices.

  • Debian should adopt new NetBSD/FreeBSD init (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Florian ( 2471 ) <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:08AM (#4843720) Homepage
    A major improvement in FreeBSD 5.x over 4.x is the new modular init. Instead of one monolithic script (classical BSD) or several scripts in a symlink farm with manual sorting and dependency resolution (SysV / Debian, RedHat, SuSE...), it uses an internal automatic sorting and dependency resolution comparable to apt-get or modprobe on GNU/Linux. I would like to see mainstream adoption of this in the GNU/Linux world of this. To date, Gentoo Linux is the only distribution offering and supporting this excellent feature.

    • Take a look at this [fremlin.de]... my favourite part is this:

      In March, Wichert Akkerman (Debian project leader) was in town for the Linux conference and Expo, which was our chance to sell the idea to the Debian project. Wichert liked the idea (in fact he'd once tried something similar, but never got it fully working), but wanted the addition of the provide(8) feature. This required more work, and thus the project stalled, since on my return from Sydney I had a large backlog of work to deal with.

      So maybe in ten years or so we'll see jinit or a similar need/provide system in Debian!

      By the way, I think Mac OS X has had the system FreeBSD 5 implements since inception... so maybe it dates back to NeXTSTEP or earlier?

      • Darwin and Mac OS X have a startup script system
        that is structurally similar to the one used by
        NetBSD and now FreeBSD. However, it is a different
        implementation. It is new with Mac OS X -- NeXTStep
        used a traditional BSD-style init.

  • Future news! (Score:5, Funny)

    by leomekenkamp ( 566309 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:12AM (#4843743)

    02-12-09 14:33 BSD: FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 Now Available

    My monitor sometimes thinks it is a crystal ball; using it I can predict future /. headlines. Here goes:

    03-01-06 9:25 BSD: FreeBSD 5.0-RC2 Now Available
    03-01-14 9:25 BSD: FreeBSD 5.0-RC3 Now Available
    03-01-25 9:25 BSD: FreeBSD 5.0-RC4 Now Available
    03-02-02 9:25 BSD: FreeBSD 5.0-RC5 Now Available
    03-02-17 9:25 BSD: FreeBSD 5.0 Released
    03-02-19 9:25 BSD: FreeBSD 5.0.1 Released

    Funny thing though, apart from the different version numbers the discussion is always exactly the same...

  • vinum and its replacement? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by lyapunov ( 241045 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @10:22AM (#4843798)
    Vinum has not been mantained at a high level for some time and I have heard that there is a replacement in 5.0 that emulates the IBM AIX volume manager (which kicks ass in my opinion).

    Any word on this?
  • I tried to get DP-2 working in Virtual PC but networking seemed to get stuck. Anyone have luck with getting FreeBSD to work in Virtual PC? Are there patches that need to be applied?

  • Don't just it there (Score:4, Funny)

    by karmawarrior ( 311177 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @11:19AM (#4844102) Journal
    FreeBSD, as an operating system, would not exist if it wasn't for an army of volunteers who are willing to put the time in to make things happen. It's very easy to just talk about this kind of thing on Slashdot, but without your help, FreeBSD is never going to grow.

    You can help by getting off your rear and writing to your congressman [house.gov] or senator [senate.gov]. Tell them FreeBSD is important to you. Tell them that without FreeBSD, you would have to find less managable and intelligently designed alternatives. Let them know that this is an issue that effects YOU directly, that YOU vote, and that your vote will be influenced, indeed dependent, on his or her policy on FreeBSD.

    You CAN make a difference. Don't treat voting as a right, treat it as a duty. Keep informed, keep your political representatives informed on how you feel. And, most importantly of all, vote.

  • the forgotten smaller machines (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MORTAR_COMBAT! ( 589963 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @11:22AM (#4844120)
    FreeBSD has grown larger and larger -- back in the 3.x days I could run it easily. The 4.x series have consumed much more memory, even when the kernel is compiled to use the same features. I had heard that one of the 5.x trees goals was to regain some of that "thin" nature which IMHO is one of FreeBSD's biggest draws. Anyone know how that is coming along?
    • Well, they moved perl and games out of the base
      system, and they took i386 support out of the
      default kernel build. I don't know how it is
      over-all, but those are steps in the right
      direction.
    • Much more memory? The install takes a whopping 16 MB to run, and you can run the OS itself on 5 MB if need be. I really don't think this is too much to ask in this day.
      • The base install should allow for boot scripts, minimal drivers, and system binaries. Try using the FreeBSD installer to install a system onto a 64 MB flash IDE drive, for instance -- you can't, because the base system takes up too much space. RAM really isn't the issue, although "whopping" 16 MB is fairly whopping considering the target audience.
    • I don't think there's anything stopping you from still using the older code. From what I hear, there's stil the occasional update to the 2.x series still. FreeBSD 3.5.1 is still available from the ftp server [freebsd.org]. It's not a dead codebase, and nothing stopping you from using it. Granted, none of the new features will be in there, but there will always be a features/space trade-off.
    • What about the multi-gigabyte bloat of RedHat, SuSE, etc., eh?

      Don't Steal - The Government Hates Competition

      PS. Google on "PicoBSD".

  • Is there a release roadmap, guessing when 5.0 final and 5.1 will come out? I haven't seen it on the FreeBSD site.

    • Re:Roadmap? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      You can get the schedule here [freebsd.org]
      • You can get the schedule here [freebsd.org]

        Thanks. Looks like they have a month of slippage on 5.0, so Jan maybe. With normal last second bug fixes, maybe end of Jan. No estimate on 5.1 though, sucks.

  • Better OS X Cardbus support now? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by York the Mysterious ( 556824 ) on Monday December 09, 2002 @01:37PM (#4845225) Homepage
    Now that FreeBSD has cardbus support can we expect Apple to grab some code and improve their cardbus support. While Apple's CardBus support does the basics there are many drivers that I have heard could not be written simply because the API support did not exist. Is this something Apple can grab. I'm not funny up to date on what Apple grabs from which various BSD projects. -Tim
  • Under FreeBSD 5.0 PD2 the new xconfigurator will not respond properly with usb mice and keyboards. This makes the tool almost useless. I did get my Microsoft USB keyboard recognizes by running the XF86Config script but I never had any luck with my logitech mouse and no sysinstall could not find my mouse.

    FreeBSD 4.5 works fine with both my mouse and keyboard so I know its a bug.

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