FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE Available

noackjr pastes "'The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Legacy development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE in May 2004 we have made conservative updates to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known security issues, and made many bugfixes.' See the release, hardware and installation notes for more information. Currently there are no errata. FreeBSD 4.11 is available via BitTorrent or one of the many mirrors."

Nice, but 5.x is nice for new installations

[Just Some Guy]

I think it's great that they're maintaining the 4.x branch for a little while longer for those who can't afford to upgrade today. Still, if you're on 4.x and haven't made the jump because you're nervous about it, this is an excellent time to do so. I'm running it on several production servers, and it's at least as fast for everything I've thrown at it (and quite a bit faster at some things).

Fast on older h/w?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is 5.x on seriously old h/w? Say a 486/66 with 20MB of RAM (not running X!)? Or a K6-233 with 64MB? Both are uniprocessor, if that's not obvious.

Is 5.x as fast as 4.x in those situations? How's the support for the old NIC cards?

The impression I get is that upgrading those from 4.10 to 5.3 will not be an improvement. I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.

Re:Fast on older h/w?

[archen]

I've found 5x to be... well hard to predict. On a K6-400 I found an improvement in performance, although I have absolutely no idea why. On my first computer (P166/192Mb RAM) I found the performance to be rather poor. I suppose it depends on what you run as well. I'm runing Apache2 (with random CGI), Postgresql, with a Music Player Daemon playing ogg/mp3 at times. But maybe I just idealize how fast I expect the machine to run, since I recall only being able to run Paint Shop Pro 5, Netscape and Winamp (

Re:Fast on older h/w?

[Just Some Guy]

On a K6-400 I found an improvement in performance, although I have absolutely no idea why.

One big reason may be that 5.x uses GCC 3.4.2, which has much better optimization than GCC 2.9.5 in 4.x. I upgraded some pretty unusual hardware (an older Alpha) and saw tremendous speed increases (several hundred percent) in a few areas, like running "openssl speed".

Please Support FreeBSD

[wikinerd]

Please don't download FreeBSD but prefer to buy it on CDROM, preferably from FreeBSDmall.com [freebsdmall.com], which is linked from FreeBSD "Getting [freebsd.org]" page. This way you can support FreeBSD. Another way to help the project is to donate money [freebsd.org].

Re:Please Support FreeBSD

[Brandybuck]

Do what I do and do both! I'm on the subscription, so I get every release in a nice Walnut Creek style jewelcase, and I also download the ISOs (or upgrade from cvsup) so I can install immediately without having to wait for the mailman.

When you give a copy to a friend to try out, they'll be much more impressed if they see a professional jewelcase instead of something you burned and wrote on with an old sharpie. They won't think you're trying to shove off some cheapass warez on them.

BitTorrent

[wikinerd]

If you want to download FreeBSD, prefer using BitTorrent [slashdot.org]">BitTorrent.

BitTorrent (the right link)

[wikinerd]

Please help to save bandwidth by using BitTorrent [freebsd.org] to download FreeBSD.

Re:BitTorrent (the right link)

[innosent]

Mod Parent Up! Wow, nice tracker, I'm hitting 360KB/sec, thanks.

Re:*BSD is Dead!

[evil_one666]

Dude- the only thing sadder than the inevitable/predictable "bsd is dead" comment, is the utterly inevitable/predictable way that a 'BSDer will rise to the bait without any sense of humour or irony _EVERY_ _SINGLE_ _TIME_!!!!!! Just let the trolls be and they will go away...

Re:No Errata?

[ve]

info about bugfixes would have gone into the release notes. errata paper contains info about bugs/problems that were discovered late in the release cycle and not yet fixed. they state it pretty clearly in the beginning of both papers:
4.11R errata [freebsd.org]
4.11R relnotes [freebsd.org]

Re:FreeBSD==hard power off and DEAD! Journal ME!

[setagllib]

Help the effort to port LFS to FreeBSD (or run NetBSD to begin with); it's even more complete than journalling. In performance it still falls short of ReiserFS, but at least there's no fscking. Works as a good /var.

Re:FreeBSD==hard power off and DEAD! Journal ME!

[codemachine]

Indeed, if anyone can help with the LFS work on NetBSD, it'd be greatly appreciated. Right now there are basically 2 people who look at that code, and it hasn't really seen any work since the summer.

From what I hear, LFS combined with kernel RaidFrame is a killer combination. But until LFS is stablized, nobody will get to see the benefits of this.

Re:FreeBSD==hard power off and DEAD! Journal ME!

[setagllib]

Is it still unstable? I heard it's now very stable in 2.0, and I used it without problems for some time. It has been used for self-hosted world builds (where LFS was for the sources and output) with good results.

Maybe it's another story with RaidFrame. I have heard it is very slow serving NFS, but haven't heard an update on this lately. Should check the mailing list archives.

Re:FreeBSD==hard power off and DEAD! Journal ME!

[codemachine]

Last I heard it was stable under normal workloads, but could be thrown off by extreme conditions, such as edge conditions when working with 99% full drives and very high workloads.

So in filesystem terms it is considered unstable, but it does indeed work right now. It just doesn't provide assurances and reliability necessary to be part of a mature OS.

Re:FreeBSD==hard power off and DEAD! Journal ME!

[DashEvil]

Hey, bub.

Put NetBSD 2.0 on my 25Mhz sparcstation 1. I've never really had that much of a chance to work with NetBSD before, and I've been hearing all sorts of good things about it; it's always been held with high regard in my mind. Anyway, yeah, I've never seen that machine fly so fast before. I even gave my friend a shell account on it because he kept claiming that it was unusable and that "ssh is unbearably slow". That was with Linux/sparc of course, so I want him to personally get blown away by how fast