FreeBSD 6.4 Released

hmallett writes "FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE, the fifth release from the 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, is now available. In addition to being hosted at many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."

Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity

[Ded Bob]

Actually, stability-conscious people will be running either RELENG_6_4 or RELENG_7_1 (once 7.1 is complete). You may call them the super-stability-conscious people. :) -STABLE branches just refer to the ABI being stable, but they are still development branches. They do tend to be more stable then CURRENT since the code must survive CURRENT for an amount of time before being merged into STABLE.

Personally, I run 7-STABLE (RELENG_7) on all my systems with HEAD in a VM or two.

Re:Where is VMware host support?

[Just Some Guy]

However, without a good virtualization solution there is no way.

This doesn't directly address your problem with VMWare, but FreeBSD's self-virtualization (aka "jails") is outstanding. Our standard deployment now is to build a beefy server with a minimal install, then use jails (via "ezjail") to carve it into multiple production servers. When the system starts to slow, we shuffle the jails around to different hardware as appropriate.

The only thing I dislike about jails today, in practice, is that each can only be assigned one IPv4 address. The new virtualized network stack should allow multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses per jail but it's not available on -STABLE yet. Once that's in place, FreeBSD jails will be the perfect virtual server arrangement for our workload.

Again, that doesn't help you if you're needing to run Windows or Linux VMs (although you can make a jail based on, say, Debian running on the native FreeBSD kernel's emulation layer), but it's extremely useful for consolidating multiple servers onto a machine.

Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity

[Drinking Bleach]

KQEMU has had a FreeBSD port for a long time. There's even an OpenBSD port now.

Re:Get your facts right first.

[kace]

6.4 included official DVD images! (For i386 and amd64.) See the release announcement [freebsd.org]. You can get them via ftp. Or some torrents are here [gotbsd.net].
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