FreeBSD 5.2.1 Released 110
Kalev writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE. This is intended to address several bugs and vulnerabilities discovered in the FreeBSD 5.2 release. See the Release Notes. The release is now available for downloading. If you are currently running FreeBSD 5.x, you can easily cvsup to it or use binary upgrade feature of sysinstall."
Point point releases? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Informative)
That is usually the problem, 5.1 ran so well that people didn't want to test the RC's, thus some bugs didn't get ironed out for _their_ hardware.
The thing is, if these people had downloaded the livecd of RC2 and sendpr'ed this release wouldn't be needed.
You should blame people for their lack of will to test but strong will to always complain.
Re:Point point releases? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Informative)
You're right. The only other one was 4.6.2-RELEASE. (I'm not counting the 2.2.x releases -- 2.2 was a major version number
Almost seems like 5.2 was a bit of a rush job.
5.2 was right on the boundary between "experimental" and "stable". As such, lots of people started using it once it was released, but few people actually participated in testing it. I believe that 5.2 had one of the longest ever periods between code freeze and release.
Re:Point point releases? (Score:3, Insightful)
Can't have been the "only" other one, since it implies a 4.6.1-RELEASE before that :) And
there was a 3.5.1-RELEASE too.
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Informative)
FreeBSD 4.1.1 existed also, and was tagged. However, it was a branch off of RELENG_4 instead of RELENG_4_1 and turned into a disaster. But yes, ever since 3.0, we've had few point releases.
Re:Point point releases? (Score:2)
Umm. I knew that. I even used FreeBSD 4.1.1. Sigh...
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:3, Funny)
A "bad" release of FreeBSD is pretty good even compared to a "good" RedHat release.
(In my defense re: forgetting about 4.1.1, I was thinking about point-releases-due-to-problems, not point-releases-due-to-added-features.)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:1)
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Informative)
You would have noticed that 4.1.1 was the first point point release in almost two years after the decision that they were unneccesary extra work.
For 4.1.1 it was decided it was worth it because of the expiring of the RSA patents, it allowed the security pieces to be more easily merged in for US users.
Re:Point point releases? (Score:5, Informative)
As Colin pointed out in a peer post here, 5.2 had quite a long release cycle. If you look at the 5.2 release schedule [freebsd.org] you'll note that we spent almost 2 months on it. Add in that 5.1 was released in June of 2003, and you have quite a long dev cycle. We did the best that we could to manage risks in the 5.2 cycle, but shortly afterward it became apparent that there were some significant bugs in certain modules that didn't gain much attention until after the release was made.
FTP mirrors [FreeBSD 5.2.1] (Score:1)
FTP site:
planetmirror.com
remote directory:
Happy Unixin'
Cool! (Score:5, Interesting)
production branch, we've been running it on
all our development machines and servers for
6+ months now. Apparently the FreeBSD
release engineering team has pretty high
standards! We're really looking forward to
FreeBSD 5.3, which has M:N threading and
the new O(1) scheduler as the default.
Thread creation in our application is
blindingly fast *and* runs on many CPUs at
once. After getting off the poor Linux 2.2
and 2.4 threading, there was no turning back.
Re:Cool! (Score:5, Informative)
The release engineering team certainly does have high standards. Trying to live up to the stability reputation. But keep in mind that 5.x still is considered in testing and major changes can still be afoot that can cause instabilities. So please still keep in mind what -current means, http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/
5.x will get better and better as it approaches 5.3R, so while some of the problems running a -current release are lessened, one should still be aware of all this and the higher standard for fixing one's own problems when running 5.x. RTFM is not an insult when running 5.x, its simply a price of entry to a great OS.
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Interesting)
I downloaded this yesterday, and for the life of me, I could not get it to install on my laptop. It would either kernel panic while extracting packages - or shortly after, I was multitasking
I believe I had FreeBSD 5.1 on this laptop before so I don't know what's up. I just had OpenBSD 3.3 on that slice earlier, and it looks like I'll give OpenBSD 3.4 a shot now.
And yes, I'll most likely be a bad person and not spend the time necessary to submit
Re:Cool! (Score:1)
Re:Cool! (Score:4, Interesting)
I just did a buildkernel/buildworld for 5.2.1. Here's hoping it is better, cause if it's not, I will have to roll back to 4.8 or heaven forbid, gentoo.
Re:Cool! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unfortunately (Score:5, Funny)
Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. (Score:5, Informative)
In order to provide an easy update path for i386 systems from
FreeBSD 5.2 to FreeBSD 5.2.1, FreeBSD Update will now update
systems running FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. To take
advantage of these updates, install and run FreeBSD Update, and
reboot into the new kernel:
# cd
# cp
#
#
# shutdown -r now
If you have recompiled any files locally, FreeBSD Update may
not be able to update them automatically (it will complain).
With the latest version of FreeBSD Update (version 1.5), you
can use one of the following commands:
#
or
#
depending upon whether you installed the "crypto" distribution,
to force files to be updated. (If you're not sure if you
installed the "crypto" distribution, you almost certainly did).
FreeBSD Update will update a 5.2-RELEASE system to the exact
binaries distributed with 5.2.1-RELEASE, with the following
exceptions:
1. Files under the following directories will not be updated:
The ports and src trees can be updated using cvsup; the files
in
automatically.
2. FreeBSD binaries include, in their headers, the value of
__FreeBSD_version on the machine where they were compiled.
This value was bumped from 502000 to 502010 as part of the
release engineering process; binaries for which this is the
ONLY change will not be updated.
As always, this is something I'm providing personally; it is
in no way endorsed by the Security Officer, Release Engineering
team, or the project as a whole.
Colin Percival
Re:Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. (Score:4, Insightful)
Thanks for offering it, by the way. It is both technically interesting and good to have (even if I personally don't use it).
Re:Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. (Score:5, Interesting)
Yes. Around 100 systems per day; in total, somewhere around 2500 systems have been patched.
Are there any plans to make it an "official" offering of the FreeBSD project?
Yes. I recently joined the FreeBSD security team, and now that 5.2.1 is out of the way, I'll be pushing to get the integration underway.
Re:What a shame (Score:2, Funny)
Repeat after me, "BSD creates, Linux leaches, Microsoft profits"
I feel pretty secure with FreeBSD, given that since the 5.2 release on January 12th eight people have committed as contributors, 1 to documentation, 1 to ports and 6 to src. During which only one member resigned. Indication that FreeBSD is growing, not dying.
FreeBSD will chug right along as it has for over ten years. Linux on the otherhand will bloat, splinter, and im
Re:What a shame (Score:1)
If there were a real need for 512 CPUs then you could get FreeBSD working with it if you wanted to compile it and modify it for that specific architecture, considering that architecture is not i386.
Yes sir, FreeBSD is really creating a big steaming pile of shit since branching FreeBSD 5 oh, about 5 years ago. Yep, they've basically been going backwards in terms of speed and scalability and s
How's FBSD on AMD64? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:How's FBSD on AMD64? (Score:5, Informative)
Current Tier 1 platforms are i386, Sparc64, AMD64, PC98, and Alpha.
Current Tier 2 platforms are PowerPC and ia64.
Current Tier 3 platforms are S/390(R).
All systems not otherwise classified into a support tier are Tier 4 systems.
All information lifted verbatim from the FreeBSD website most of it from Section 10 of the Committer's Guide, Support for Multiple Architectures [freebsd.org]
So expect as much support for AMD64 as you would for the standard PC version, the only thing keeping AMD64 back is it's not a widely distributed and therefore not as well tested.
Re:How's FBSD on AMD64? (Score:5, Informative)
It works, except for the kernel modules. Currently, you need to compile everything you need into the kernel. kldload-ing does not work yet.
The 32-bit emulation is supported and turned on by default, although some 32-bit binaries, may have problems controlling some hardware with ioctl-s, because the sizes of structures are often different.
I wouldn't recommend it as a workstation, because too much stuff out there (open source and not) is poorly written and thus unportable and will break during compile time (at best) or at run-time (at worst). Think about all the foolish assumptions, that sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) and shudder.... I don't think NVidia offers their drivers for amd64 either, and so on.
Makes a (very) nice server, though...
Re:Thank Apple (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Fuck Apple. (Score:1)
Well, if I remember correctly then the work IBM and MS did together was based upon Mach so OS/2 is based upon Mach. However, that work did not carry into the NT-kernel as MS modelled the kernel "after" VMS when they broke the collaboration with IBM on OS/2.
Re:Fuck Apple. (Score:5, Informative)
Mach is from Carnegie Mellon, by way of NeXT.
Windows NT / 2000 / XP runs on a variant of the Mach kernel.
XP does not run on Mach. It was a microkernel, made with a lot of input from DEC VAX guys. Over the years it has shed a lot of Microkernel attributes and become more of a macro style kernel.
Mach is a fairly standard, well documented design principal.
Microkernels are a fairly standard, well documented, design principal. Mach is an instance of them.
I actually agree with some of your other statements, your parent poster was an uninformed fanboy. Apple has contributed to BSD though, check out the BSD project list and see where.
Re:Thank Apple (Score:4, Interesting)
Hint: "The advanced VM and SMP code that allows Mac OS X to run so efficiently is the very same code that finally put FreeBSD on the level with Linux" is sheer nonsense. But I'll let you humor me and come with some example commits. Links to cvsweb or something would be nice.
Re:Thank Apple (err correction) (Score:2)
What is it about (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What is it about (Score:1)
Seriously though, I find the BSD trolls to be quite amusing. Regardless of their association one can hardly dispute the fact that they have unmitigated social issues and I derive some kind of cold satisfaction from that.
Simply question (Score:3, Interesting)
Will there be a point where the FreeBSD team says "go for it" or is it going to be a judgement call as it is with a Linux kernel?
Re:Simply question (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'm confused... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'm confused... (Score:1)
IPSEC still broken (Score:4, Informative)
see here [google.com].
BSD Starting (Score:2, Interesting)
I feel that it will better help my knowledge in UNIX to learn it. I don't want to dualboot.
FreeBSD 4.5, February 2002... (Score:4, Interesting)
...was the last release of FreeBSD that I've purchased. I got the 6-disk toolkit to go with it -- tons of apps, it made for a great installation. I have no idea if 4.5 is considered a "good" release relative to the other releases, but it made me (mostly) happy. However, I did have one system -- an old laptop with a panel that needed WD drivers -- that just seemed to miss the FreeBSD sweet spot. It used a PCMCIA card to connect to my LAN, but FreeBSD 4.5 had only "early" PCMCIA tools then (which seemed weird, considering it was only a couple years ago). So I couldn't ever get the network up and running. Later releases had better PCMCIA, but they also used Xfree86 4, which couldn't handle my old LCD with its Western Digital chipset.
Soooo... now I'm wondering. The new 5.2.1 is surely excellent at PCMCIA. But does it have Xfree86 version 3 as an install option? If not, does Xfree86 4 have support for the WD chipset now? I'd really like to get FreeBSD running on my old laptop(s), but it seems that just as the PCMCIA started getting good, Xfree86 went modern and left a bunch of systems in the dust.
A prediction. (Score:1, Funny)