What's New In FreeBSD 7.0 103
blackbearnh writes "FreeBSD is about to release the much-anticipated version 7, and as usual there's a comprehensive interview with over two dozen of the major contributors over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers to discuss all the details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."
no nvidia on amd64 yet (Score:2, Interesting)
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Really, if you can do one, why is the other so much more trouble that you would ignore it?
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Feel free to hire a developer to get things moving.
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Nice of them to specifically tell us what needs doing, though, rather than just sticking their thumbs up their * and doing nothing - which I would have expected.
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Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Informative)
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This fully-conformant UNIX operating system--built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5--bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source products.
Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Funny)
FreeBSD is not dead (Score:2)
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Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:4, Interesting)
Web serving and mail filtering, here. But it's nothing I couldn't use Linux for. It is all the same software, really. Honestly, the only reason I don't use LInux is because FreeBSD is what was here when I got here and I figured I should at least take the time to learn it. Also, if it ain't broke...
-matthew
Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Interesting)
what for?
Better performance than Linux, that degrades under load much more predictably than Linux (as does Solaris, but FreeBSD is better on commodity hardware). A better written C library (just look at the source code to glibc - it's shockingly bad, unreadable macro soup as though its maintainer hates C). A better documented userland than Linux with complete and accurate manpages.
FreeBSD is popular amongst hosting companies (the tools for security are easier to use and more mature than Linux), and is also used by companies like Yahoo! because of it's reliability and performance. Linux has outperformed FreeBSD for a while, as the fine grained locking introduced in version 5 matured, but the pain getting it right is beginnng to pay off now.
Re:people still use freebsd? (Score:5, Funny)
Heh, don't get cocky
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The other reasons are not very convincing. Personally, I like GNU userland better ("screen" - I love you!), for example. Glibc may not nice, but it works fine (I only looked at its sources when I needed to build a cross-platform toolchain).
Oh, and Linux has much better hardware support.
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But it's not present in the 'native' FreeBSD userland.
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GNU screen is the equivalent of window(1), which has been in the BSD userland since the mid 1980's. Glibc is something I detest, as its footprint is huge, its maintainer is a notorious jerk and compared to porting from a BSD to Solaris I find myself having to sprinkle my code with a lot of #ifdefs to port to Linux. The bloat of glibc may not be an issue for desktop or server machines, but is a pain in the backside for the embedded stuff I've worked on.
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But hey, BSD is dead, netcraft confirms it.
I just hope 7 gives me the same speed increase over 6 as 6 did over 5.
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I have never used another OS that was as stable as FreeBSD 4.11.
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I've found 6.x to be almost stable as 4.x on the hardware I run it on, the only problems I've had have been on a couple of occasions where it didn't like USB hardware on a desktop machine getting disconnected without warning which seemed to lock up everything USB-related.
I have never used another OS that was as stable as Fr
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No Xen Support? (Score:2, Redundant)
* Did they fix ZFS RAID-Z2 (double parity) support yet?
* Is KDE 4 is ports yet?
* What version of X.Org are they using, did they fix the dri/drm problems with ATI cards yet?
Re:No Xen Support? (Score:4, Informative)
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I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7.0 (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
I was toying around with Freebsd 7.0 RC3 just a few days ago, well actually I was testing it to see if ZFS was really working as claimed. A very basic installation to a 40gb disk went pretty quick (5 to 10 minutes). Rebooted into the installed system and everything was fine. Took an old 1.6gb drive I had and plugged it right in, recognized as /dev/da1 or whatever. Ran "zpool create tank da1" and BAM! /tank already mounted and ready to go. No stupid fdisk, no stupid format command, no fstab nonsense.
Now I wouldn't run out and switch everything to freebsd 7 and zfs because work isn't finished. For example there's no ACL support since ZFS supports NFSv4 ACLs while freebsd only supports Posix1e. My next test will involve getting samba working and this may be a little tricky since there are some reports of issues with running samba on ZFS. But all of the available reports are quite old (half a year or older). I don't really care about the ACLs because I just intend to use the system as a single user and a convenient area to dump my files on a bunch of disks that all conveniently appear as one along with some redundancy (better than just a bunch of disks and raid5).
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Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 (Score:1, Offtopic)
I switched from Gentoo Linux on my server to FreeBSD solely for ZFS.
Yes, I'm running FreeBSD on a SPARC for ZFS. Not Solaris. LONG story; nothing against Solaris.
-:sigma.SB
Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
I have to ask... (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would I choose FreeBSD over, say, Solaris x86 or Linux?
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You probably wouldn't unless you were one of those people who gets all excited about the difference between GPL an BSD licensing.
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So many things I could say, but ...
This sounds more like a user issue. The idea of a minimal install (OS independant) is that you can build the box exactly how you want it, rather than dropping some stinking great GUI lump on it. If you want a desktop in FreeBSD, start with minimal, then pkg_add CTWM, OO, Mplayer, Firefox, and Thunderbird, keeping in mind that any deps are automatically matched
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If you say so. I just know that I have setup my share of Linux and FreeBSD servers and quite frankly, they feel more or less like different distributions of the same OS to me. I mean, they all run the exact same software (Postfix, Apache, Lighttpd, Rails, PHP, etc) The only thing that differs
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Some people don't look beneath the surface, so unless something has massive obvious user-side difference
Re:I have to ask... (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually, in most other cases it's even easier, because there often is an industry standard - e.g. half (warning: that's an educated guess, that is, a number pulled out of my, er, back pocket, representing something close to reality in a simplified, but suitable way) of the banks and other financial institutions tend to use Solaris a lot (the other half using IBM stuff) just because a tried way of doing things for them and there's no point in changing that.
And if you want an OS for personal use, feel free to choose on any basis you like, from the license to the number of lines of code to the project founder's hair color - just be careful not to become a brainwashed zealot...
Re:I have to ask... (Score:4, Informative)
I work for a company that solely employs FreeBSD at financial institutions across the US (and one site in Hyderabad, India). Here's the run-down (warning, these statistics were compiled in less than an hour, solely for this post; I just did a quick head-count via our named DNS records):
3,483 FreeBSD systems employed by Bank of America
1,544 for PNC
872 for Wells Fargo
around 100 or so for Mellon
around 500 or so for JPMorgan Chase
I'm forgetting a few... but you get the point.
Seems to be a big hit in the financial institutions. BTW, all systems mentioned are used for check processing in wholesale lockbox sites.
(crossing my fingers that this information isn't confidential, lol)
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For example, your "two commands" could just be one command, `portupgrade -R gnome2`, after which it'll figure out what else needs to be installed that you don't have and take care of it all.
Do you use cvsup or cvsup-without-gui [slashdot.org]? I'd hope so....
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Why would I choose FreeBSD over, say, Solaris x86 or Linux?
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Netcraft confirms it.
FreeBSD Rant (Score:1)
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Either way, the answer to both is "Yes". I've run almost every conceivable version of FreeBSD in both VMware ESX and GSX and they also make vmware-tools to be installed (via the fake CD-ROM that you can mount via the menu bar) so that you can get better resolutions of video etc. etc.
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Re:FreeBSD Rant (Score:4, Informative)
According to the Guest OS compatibility table, FreeBSD 6.2 is supported on VMWare Workstation 6.0.2 and VMWare ACE 2.0.2
Having said that, VMWare guest is running on a fairly standard sort of virtualised platform. With VMWare ESX 3.5 you can use a Buslogic virtual scsi controller or an LSI virtual scsi controller. So you may have to do some fiddling to get FreeBSD to load the appropriate device driver (don't ask me how, I've only ever done generic installs of FreeBSD)
VMWare ESX Server 3.5 will (officially) support:
* Ubuntu Linux 7.04
* Solaris 10 for x86
* Suze Linux Enterprise Server 10
* Redhat Enterprise Linux 5
and various other OSs...
I've been using ESX 3.5 on an HP DL385 G2 with dual core Opterons and 8GB of RAM, I wonder if that is powerful enough to run Vista as a guest OS...
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That's the good thing about the BSD, three separate project with three separate desi
Some interesting info on jemalloc (Score:4, Interesting)
http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/beta-3.html [blogspot.com]
More info on jemalloc:
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html [sharanet.org] (near the bottom, under "Userland enhancements")
http://people.freebsd.org/~jasone/jemalloc/bsdcan2006/jemalloc.pdf [freebsd.org]
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I couldn't play Starcraft D:. I hear WoW works with it though.
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The Wine breakage is most likely down to how Linux implements pthreads - there are some grey areas in the POSIX threads spec, where things could be more strictly enforced such as double locking or freeing of mutexes. Linux takes a less stringent approach than FreeBSD and NetBSD, accepting such common coding mistakes, whereas the kernel and libc threading code in the BSD's will print an error and dump core. Being a fan of such things as rigidly type safe languages and compilers that offer a high degree of wa
I will definitely try it out of curiosity (Score:1, Interesting)
So I started off with Caldera Open Linux (ew), dual boot... then went to Red Hat for a few weeks, and finally stayed with FreeBSD for many years. The ease of software install was what made the difference (although having to recompile a kernel to get sound working was a strange experience since I didn't kn
What about DragonFly? (Score:1, Interesting)
I know this is /. and all but ... (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux Vs BSD is a moot argument, I have my preference, and I'm not going to change because yours differs. Similarly, no amount of bible bashing is going to convince me that man and dinosaurs walked together 2000 years ago!
To get on topic... (no I am not new here)
I am running RC1 ATM, and will upgrade to the final as soon as it is out. I'd like to know if anyone has successfully implemented RAID-z yet, and
what upgrades in TFA are old hat (Score:2)
I'm shocked to see FreeBSD claiming to be the reference implementation of SCTP. It's been in Linux for years.
Performance monitoring is of course old hat.
Heh. A "large number of CPUs" is 8+ to you. Linux is struggling to handle 16384. (yes, SMP-style NUMA with 1 OS image)
Tmpfs is way old.
ARM architecture is of course way old. Niagra is old too.
Wow, "(as seen in Solaris & others)" for the fine-grained permissions stuff. Can't ment
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I must say, when I saw the details in your reply, I was glad that someone had read my post and taken it seriously. But, I noticed quite quickly that very few of your comments seemed relevant. To the point that I think you read a different article (?).
Performance monitoring, of course is old hat to all (?) OS's. The specifics, as discussed in TFA are way over my head, but I don't mind trying to understand for the sake of conversation. I don't mean to be argumentative when I say that the inte
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there were a few articles (Score:2)
Performance monitoring in this case means taking advantage of CPU-specific monitoring ability. (the Pentium 4 needs a different driver from the Core architecture, which in turn needs a different one from AMD's stuff) It's nice, but old hat to Linux. (with oprofile being the standard Linux interface and perfmon being an alternate)
"Wow" is an expression of amazement. The author was happy to announce
wrong article (Score:2)
FreeBSD didn't beat Linux to a shipping kernel for SCTP. There are more Linux distributions than you can count. Also, let me introduce you to Gentoo and Linux From Scratch.
I used quotation marks for a direct quote. The article's author thought that 8+ was large. For some time now, you could get 8 CPUs in an totally standard consumer-targeted Apple machine.
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I'm shocked to see FreeBSD claiming to be the reference implementation of SCTP. It's been in Linux for years.
With a quick glance I don't see where Randall claims FreeBSD to be the reference implementation for SCTP but notice that Randall's name is also on the RFC's for the protocol.
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SCTP.
It appears to be loved by Telecom people, so a fair guess is that it sucks. The Wikipedia article references horrors like the OSI model, the SS7 protocols and Diameter -- not encouraging.
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Why FreeBSD??? (Score:4, Insightful)
FreeBSD is just plain ol' Unix. No bells, no whistles (except ZFS--Fancy!), just Unix as it always was. And sometimes, that's exactly the right answer to a problem.
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Who really cares? (Score:3, Funny)
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FreeBSD 7.0 Released (not offical) (Score:1)
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Contrary to popular belief, it is this parasitic nature that actually ends up profoundly improving the operating system and proliferating it. Think of the following hypothetical scenario:
1. CEO sees product XYZ and thinks to himself "Wow, we can compete with that!"
2. CTO responds to CEO with "We need to research viable means to penetrate this [new] vertical-market with a high profit margin." This all means "I'll get back to you with the cheapest possible implementation after I consult our developers."
3
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Since everyone can use BSD code by just leaving the copyright statement in, the BSD license and its relatives help promote standards and interoperability. There is BSD code in the heart of the Microsoft TCP/IP stack, and several useless command line programs in Windows.