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Google Operating Systems Businesses The Internet BSD

FreeBSD Status Report for 2005 Q2 145

Posted by Zonk
koinu writes "FreeBSD Status Report for the second quarter 2005 has been published by Scott Long. It gives a more precise description of what is being done on the 18 Summer Of Code projects." From the post: "The Google Summer of Code project has also generated quite a bit of excitement. FreeBSD has been granted 18 funded mentorship spots, the fourth most of all of participating organizations. Projects being worked on range from UFS Journalling to porting the new BSDInstaller to redesigning the venerable www.FreeBSD.org website."
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FreeBSD Status Report for 2005 Q2 More

FreeBSD Status Report for 2005 Q2

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  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:5.4 - 6? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday July 24, 2005 @09:51PM (#13153391)
      Did you not read it?

      "The purpose of
      quickly jumping from 5.x to 6.0 is to reduce the amount of transition
      pain that most users and developers felt when switching from 4-STABLE
      to 5.x. 6.0 will feature improved performance and stability over 5.x,
      experimental PowerPC support, and many new WiFi/802.11 features. The
      5.x series will continue for at least one more release this fall, and
      will then be supported by the security team for at least 2 years after
      that. We encourage everyone to give the 6.0-BETA snapshots a try and
      help us make it ready for production. We hope to release FreeBSD 6.0
      by the end of August."

      • Re:5.4 - 6? (Score:5, Funny)

        by jericho4.0 ( 565125 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @10:11PM (#13153479)
        I see...Less pain, more often.
      • Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • It doesn't require a complete reinstall to migrate from 4.x to 5.x, and I'm sure going from 5.x to 6.x won't require one either.

          I've upgraded about 20 machines from 4.x to 5.x all without any problems.

          Instrustions are near the bottom of /usr/src/UPDATING once you've cvsup'd the RELENG_5_4 branch.
          • Yes, if you have PHYSICAL access to a machine its POSSIBLE to upgrade from 4.x to 5.x. Its also strongly discouraged.

            I've actually tested several times doing an upgrade from source using ssh on two machines here to see if it would be possible on a 4.x production server I have colocated. Its not possible in the least bit with 5.4 release from 4.10. I followed /usr/src/UPDATING.

            Now if you were to have serial/console access and could go into single user remotely, then maybe it would be fine.

            I'd love to u
            • No wonder you got into troubles if you didn't drop into single user mode before installing the kernel and the userland binaries. It might be worth reading the handbook too, not just UPDATING. And where does the FreeBSD organization strongly discourage upgrading from 4.x to 5.x?
              • Prior to 5.4 it was often said on freebsd-questions and a few times on freebsd-hackers. I'm on both mailing lists. I've read the handbook and was told several times its usually safe to do an install kernel and mergemaster -p. If the kernel boots ok, you can do an installworld and mergemaster and then reboot again safely.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
          Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:5.4 - 6? (Score:1, Funny)

      by Seumas ( 6865 ) *
      Does it even really matter?

      FreeBSD is DYYYYYYYYIIIIIIIIIINNNNNNGGG!

      (Queue the dramatic music).

  • Holy crap... (Score:4, Funny)

    by shadowmatter ( 734276 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @09:58PM (#13153417)
    The first guy on the list, Anders Persson, works in the same lab as I do and I had no idea he had a SoC project.

    I need to get outside my cubicle more...

    - shadowmatter

  • Allah... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    ...Akbar!

    *pushes detonator*

  • Soft updates (Score:3, Insightful)

    by fsterman ( 519061 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @10:38PM (#13153601) Homepage
    I though soft updates made journaling unneeded and everything slower?

    Please enlighten.
    • Uh-oh. I didn't really know what soft updates were, the stuff I had been reading was a little too high level. From my latest googleing I am afraid I may have started a flame war, I apologize in advance.

    • Re:Soft updates (Score:5, Informative)

      by Mr.Ned ( 79679 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @11:06PM (#13153689)
      Soft updates are an alternative to journaling, but they still require a fsck on an unclean unmount. Although this fsck can be done in the background (with snapshots) after the filesystem has been mounted and is otherwise available for normal use, the fsck still takes significant time and system load - neither of which are an issue with an unclean unmount of a journalled filesystem. I believe one of the primary motivations behind adding journaling to UFS is to remove this drawback relative to journaled filesystems.
      • The only thing a fsck will do for you with softupdates is free up some space that didn't get properly free'd before a crash. You can completely skip the fsck if you want though and everything will still work fine, you'll just have some space that's unaccounted for.

    • Re:Soft updates (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward
      When Aesop wrote his fable of the Fox and the Grapes he could have been thinking about FreeBSD.

      It seems that mangy old fox was trotting along a dusty lane when he came upon a grape arbor. Those juicy grapes hanging up there looked mighty tempting to that old fox. So he leaped and he jumped. Try as he might, that fox could not jump high enough to reach those prize grapes. After awhile that old fox was left panting and thirsty. His big red tongue was hanging out, swollen and dry. Finally he said to himself

      • I call BS (Score:5, Informative)

        by bluGill ( 862 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @10:04AM (#13156366)

        I can't recall FreeBSD saying anything bad about shared libraries. Care to provide some proof?

        FreeBSD did not disparage journalled file systems. They said soft updates gave most of the advantages without the cost, and may be faster. For some workloads soft updates are better, for some they are not, but until FreeBSD implemented them nobody knew.

        FreeBSD was never against ELF. They just had no need - ELF solved some very real problems in the early versions of Linux, and because it was the standard when the linux developers went to fix those problems (back when linux was only a few years old) they went with ELF at the same time. FreeBSD did linking differently, and didn't have the problems early Linux did. The only reason FreeBSD now uses ELF is the GNU tools support ELF better. Otherwise the old FreeBSD a.out is just as good.

        IDE disk drives are still bad. However they are cheap so everyone uses them. (the advantages of SCSI are rarely seen on home machines. High end servers still use SCSI for good reason)

        I don't know where you got the idea that FreeBSD ever said anything against X.org, because they never did. The position is We don't care about what X server you run, but the X.org people seem like they might be more responsive to users, and that is a win, so we are going with X.org for all new versions. Because they are conservative about changes in general, they maintain XFree86 for old versions.

        • "The only reason FreeBSD now uses ELF is the GNU tools support ELF better. Otherwise the old FreeBSD a.out is just as good."

          GNU tools don't support a.out well? They've had, what, 30 years to work on it? a.out didn't support dynamically loaded libraries. ELF appeared before and independently of linux to solve the problem (mid 80s?).

          Please add "freebsd pr machine" to your sig. You have earned the label.

          • Re:I call BS (Score:3, Informative)

            by bluGill ( 862 )

            Most of the GNU developers were using linux, with ELF. They were letting the a.out support get out of date. It was easier in the long run to switch to ELF (which was in general a good thing and the way forward, but not required for any technical reasons) than to keep maintaining a.out in the GNU tools along with the other FreeBSD changes.

            FreeBSD supported dynamically loaded libraries in a.out.

            I never implied that ELF was developed by Linux. The linux developers could have solved their shared library pr

    • that's close to the truth (Score:5, Informative)

      by r00t ( 33219 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @11:18PM (#13153732) Journal
      There are many types of journalling. The ext3 filesystem alone supports three! You can journal all data (extreme), you can journal metadata prior to writing plain data, or you can just journal the metadata.

      There is softupdates, which orders things a bit. After a crash, there should be (knock on wood) only a few minor errors related to free space not being marked free.

      There is sync, the traditional and fairly slow way. This generally provides unneeded determinism for directory operations. Normally we want as many pre-crash changes as possible, not just ones that can be made in perfect order. Some very unportable BSD software relys on sync behavior.

      There is async, which plays fast and loose with everything. This works rather poorly on FreeBSD. It is likely that fsck will make a mess on boot, and illogically an async mount is slower than a softupdates mount. Linux has a nearly-true async, the default for ext2, that is very fast. (if an app explicitly requests a sync, the request is not ignored) The ext2 fsck is also extremely reliable, allowing for recovery of async filesystems that would be unheard of in the BSD world.

      So that is:

      • async
      • sync
      • soft updates
      • full data journalling
      • ordered data journalling
      • metadata journalling
      (and the patented obsolete delayed ordered writes from SysV, if I remember right)

      The really strange thing is that sometimes heavy-duty journalling can be fastest. This is often the case with mail servers which explicitly sync data to disk. A full-data journalling filesystem (as ext3 can be) may legitimately report completion as soon as the data hits the log, which is a nice big linear disk write. Other filesystems, though faster for normal use, will have to seek all over the disk before they can legitimately report completion.

      Modern hardware screws all of this up horribly though. As the XFS developers discovered to their horror, power loss will corrupt data in memory or in transit to the disk before it stops the disk from operating. (yes, even when using appropriate fence or flush operations) Uh oh...

      • hah Evil Write Cache tm
        • It's not just the write cache. In fact, it's not
          that at all, because I stated that appropriate
          fence or flush operations are being used.

          Power is cut. The motherboard chips start to
          suffer a bit, corrupting data as it moves over
          the various busses. Meanwhile, the disk is doing
          just fine. Corrupt data arrives at the disk, and
          is stored as it arrives.

          Ouch. Bummer. What are you going to do? Cry?

          Really fancy filesystems tend to fall apart
          when they get corrupted a bit. Filesystems
          with less imaginative designs may b
    • I though soft updates made journaling unneeded and everything slower?

      Not even close. Soft Updates, background writes, and background fsck do not protect against data loss and corruption like journalling. The only thing you ever need to worry about on journalling filesystems is a hardware error, and that mainly on non-SCSI drives without RAID.

      Also, journalling tends to speed up more types of writes than it slows. On busy filesystems it is almost universally faster.

      A journalling filesystem should bring
      • Actually, the lack of journalling drove me from FreeBSD a few months ago. My "mail server" runs on an old box I got out of the garage, so I'm not really interested in spending money on a UPS. The power went out, and when it came back on the boot loader couldn't find the kernel. Fairly easy to fix, but I remember thinking that this wouldn't have happened with ext3.

        Unfortunately, I find the performance to be quite a bit slower with Linux now. I realize that a different choice of distro might have helped,
  • I think it's not fair to mark this as Google.

    Sure google's doing a lot to *many* OSS projects out theres - but the news article was about BSD, should be marked the reliable 'red' devil (uh.. daemon).

    I guess half the comments would be about this :)

    -1: Redundant

  • Tired of obligatory *BSD is dying comments (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Zweideutig ( 900045 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @11:31PM (#13153773)
    I think I speak for the rest of the Slashdot community when I say I am tired of the "*BSD sucks" and "*BSD is dying" posts I see. I view at -1 threshold because I don't care for someone else deciding what I should read, but I get annoyed when I see Anonymous Cowards posting these obligatory trolls. Netcraft confirms that *BSD is not dead. Some of the sites with the highest uptimes are running *BSD. I run NetBSD and OpenBSD on servers/firewall, and Gentoo Linux on my desktops, so I am not a *BSD elitest either.

    • Lighten Up... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Saeed al-Sahaf ( 665390 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @11:54PM (#13153858) Homepage
      Oh come on. It's no more annoying than any of the many other trolls and LAME jokes here at Slashdot, and certainly LESS annoying than the Gay Nigger thing (and certainly less offensive). It's also less annoying than all the questionable "editing" that goes on here, what with all the dupes and crap stories. Learn to mentally filter out trolls and none of them will bother you, your blood pressure will be lower, and your quality of life will in general be higher. Just let it go, that's the price you pay for surfing a public forum.

    • Re:Tired of obligatory *BSD is dying comments (Score:5, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 25, 2005 @12:00AM (#13153872)

      Sir, this post is to warn you that we Anonymous Cowards do not value your opinion regarding the status of "BSD is dying" posts. Frankly, since Netcraft confirms that BSD is dying, it is clear that BSD is dying. This makes "BSD is dying" posts on topic in the context of an official FreeBSD status report. Now, sir, I suggest you do your part to help the BSD family of operating systems die gracefully by

      1. Grounding yourself in the fact that BSD is dying.
      2. Stop complaining about the fact that BSD is dying.
      3. Removing NetBSD and OpenBSD from your servers/firewall.
      4. Installing any VMS derivative operating system you'd like on your servers/firewall.

      We Anonymous Cowards understand your frustration. The BSD family was a wonderful group of operating systems, but the time has come for them to finally rest. You have our sympathy.

    • I don't think anyone who posts those messages actually thinks that BSD is dying. They are just posting to keep up a traditional joke.

    • Re:Tired of obligatory *BSD is dying comments (Score:4, Funny)

      by bnitsua ( 72438 ) on Monday July 25, 2005 @12:29AM (#13153955)
      oddly enough, netcraft runs FreeBSD... does that mean netcraft is dying?
    • What you're really saying is that you don't trust the Moderators on Slashdot, but you also don't want to see useless posts/spam? You can't have it both ways, you need to either accept someone else's opinions or you need to sift through all of the chaff yourself. There is no magical anti-spam faery that will do your work for you exactly the same way you would. Either invest some trust in the moderators, or stop complaining.
      • That gives me an interesting, absolutely absurd idea. Would it be conceivably possible to hack a GreaseMonkey plugin that gave you a pseudo-moderation dropdown for every post, and used that info to train a Bayesian filter that would automatically hide or show posts based on inference from your past, personal moderation? There are a number of obvious issues, but it seems like it could potentially be a cool idea...

  • launchd and PowerPC (Score:3, Interesting)

    by ArbitraryConstant ( 763964 ) on Sunday July 24, 2005 @11:42PM (#13153808) Homepage
    So far progress has been slow, the autoconf build system has been removed from all of the launchd(8) code, and launchctl(1) is building and semi-functional on FreeBSD-CURRENT (i.e. CoreFoundation hooks have been removed)

    I'm currently working on porting "liblaunch" which is the core backend to both launchd(8) (the actual daemon) and launchctl(1), there are some mach/xnu specific hooks and calls that need to be remove and either reimplemented or worked around.

    We're also waiting on a response from Apple on a possible BSD-licensed version of the code (it's currently under the APSL) Progress is slow, but steady.
    Haven't worked with launchd, but there isn't an init system left that I don't hate so any hope of improvement is welcome.

    also...
    Florent Thoumie has updated the massively out-of-date platform page. Work continues to creating a 6.0 release of the PowerPC port.
    With Apple giving up on it, is it really worthwhile to develop a PowerPC port? IBM and others will still sell PowerPC hardware, but it's not going to be a major desktop/small server platform anymore. Big server and embedded, sure, but the middle is going away and FreeBSD lives in the middle ground.

    • Re:launchd and PowerPC (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Macka ( 9388 )

      With Apple giving up on it, is it really worthwhile to develop a PowerPC port

      You're falling into the same trap that most of the herd seem to. Just because a vendor announces platform retirement doesn't mean its dead the moment they announce it.

      Alpha retirement was announced years ago, yet I still work on projects that are putting new Tru64 Alpha's in. Albeit not for much longer I'm sure. Same with Apple PowerPC. They will be selling new PowerPC systems for a couple of years yet, and then after tha
    • Launchd is a fairly sane init system. The real block to its adoption is the license which has some rather nasty clauses about IP in it (i.e. you use our software, we are free to steal all of your IP). If they can persuade Apple to release it under a BSD license then it could well become the new standard (although Solaris won't use it because they've only just migrated to their new SMF system).
      • I really don't think that it will become any kind of standard for Unix-likes.

        The idea behind Unix has always been to have small parts that do their own job, not some giant monster that does everything.

        It would probably become the common with Linux distributions pretty quickly if it worked well on FreeBSD and Apple allowed for the code to be relicensed under BSD terms - but I don't think that the operating systems that are trying to be Unix-like will adopt it.

    • It was asked on the freebsd-ppc list why they are still doing the port. The main guy, Peter Graham (sp?) said the plan was to port it for IBM hardware to begin with. He considers that the important step. The mac stuff was a nice bonus and a way to get help with the project.
  • So....Google's secret OS is going to be based off of FreeBSD?
    • There's very little evidence of a Google OS beyond the speculation of Google fanboys everywhere. I love them as much as the next guy, but this is just talk.

      Additionally, Google's SoC is supporting other OSes as well, notably Fedora Core, Ubuntu Linux and NetBSD.

      A complete list [google.com].
  • Surprising in view of the pleas in TFA for funding, and acknowledgements of where some came from, that nobody here sees a link between this and the true cost of software [slashdot.org]

  • Launch.d Vs Rc.d (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Goo.cc ( 687626 ) * on Monday July 25, 2005 @06:44AM (#13154943)
    Personally, I am a little surprised that Launch.d is being ported to FreeBSD, as Luke Mewburn's rc.d is a very nice startup system. You can read more about rc.d here [mewburn.net].
    • Look at the source code for the init process some time.. you might see why they are thinking about it. Luke's code was mostly shell scripting. Its nice, but its not a rehaul on init to get it caught up to current security and style coding practices. Unfortunetely, I doubt the replacement will be all that great either. I've had a lot of problems with lauchd on my mac so far.
  • Is it just me or does this look like it's trying to implement a bunch of features on top of C for which standard C++ would be sufficient? They want an ingrained list type? Then, uh, use "list" in C++. I didn't look at it in detail, but from what I saw they could just use C++.

    Unfortunately there seems to be some fun anti-C++ sentiment among many OSS developers, especially core developers who would probably say "ZOMG BLOAT WTFLOLOLZ." Of course, any remotely legitimate complaints could be addressed just
    • ...Are you sure you typed that all at once? It doesn't make logical sense.

      Implementing kernel features in C++ requires ABI changes and extern"C" de-mangling and all kinds of hackish crap which would make the code and build processs messier, not cleaner. Writing some storage primitives to share around the kernel would (hopefully) clean it up instead.

      BSDs are known for their cleanliness. While a fully C++ kernel could conceivably be good and clean, it adds little real value since the interface between ker
      • Implementing kernel features in C++ requires ABI changes and extern"C" de-mangling and all kinds of hackish crap which would make the code and build processs messier, not cleaner.

        "Extra work? We'd rather think in the short term!"

        BSDs are known for their cleanliness.

        No, they are most definitely not. Have you taken a look at the kernel code? It's already ugly as hell with all kinds of macros and ugly hacks. That's not to mention absolutely horrible single-letter variable naming conventions. So many basic

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