FreeBSD 8.0 Released 235
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights:
Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here. You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release."
Re:Jumping the gun... (Score:5, Informative)
I should also add that one link the submitter didn't include was instructions for upgrading to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from a previous release: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-07-11-freebsd-update-to-8.0-beta1.html [daemonology.net] (obviously, apply s/8.0-BETA1/8.0-RELEASE/ to the instructions).
Before anyone asks, yes, that link is on my personal website -- but no, I'm not just posting it here to drive traffic in my direction. That link is going to be in the official release announcement too.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:4, Informative)
FreeBSD is a very nice, clean system which is a pure joy to use as a server or desktop -- especially if you like to build your own software. But to each her own. :)
For quite a few years now we've had the ability to run linux binaries via a kernel module called the linuxulator. Handy for flash and a few other things.
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:5, Informative)
Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer.
Wow - your impeccable logic has convinced me! Where do I sign up?
Right here! [freebsd.org]
Re:wpa_supplicant replacement? (Score:4, Informative)
Are you running into the "need to create wlan0 instead of using the wifi device directly in 8.0" change? This has tripped up a lot of people.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:5, Informative)
Sound works. That's why I switched for FreeBSD. Back in the 4.x days (around 2001) multiple applications could write to /dev/dsp (back then they needed to have /dev/dsp.1 and so on, but that was fixed with FreeBSD 5), and all could play sound even though my cheap AC97 on-board sound didn't support mixing in hardware. On Linux, apps needed to be rewritten with ALSA to take advantage of mixing, or needed to use sound daemons which gave horrific latency. Meanwhile, I was playing music with XMMS, getting sound effects in BZFlag, and having my mail and IM clients go bing in the background when I got a message. FreeBSD 8 improves this with a full OSSv4 implementation, including per-application volume channels. Unlike the 4Front OSS implementation, there are some hacks that let apps that use the old OSS 3 API (and ABI) use these by faking a mixer device for each app. It also has the highest-performance mixing algorithm around and supports a few things like encoded digital pass through (for AC3 and similar on an external decoder) without disabling the in-kernel mixing.
ZFS is pretty useful to a desktop user. Run hourly / daily snapshots as cron jobs to guard against accidental deletion and then use zfs send to transmit them to your backup server.
The ULE scheduler originally provided better performance on latency-sensitive workloads (a typical desktop) at the cost of throughput. As a result, it wasn't enabled by default. With FreeBSD 8, it's been improved and now does better on all workloads (including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks) and scales linearly to 8 cores (I've not seen tests beyond that).
Jails probably aren't useful to most desktop users, but they are to power users. With ZFS, creating a new fail filesystem is just a matter of cloning a fresh install, which is an O(1) operation (and very fast) and that gives you an isolated install to work with. Great for running untested or untrusted apps; just install them in a jail and they can't get out. With FreeBSD 8, you can now assign a CPU to a jail and each jail has a complete virtualised instance of the network stack, so FreeBSD jails are effectively very lightweight VMs.
DTrace, again, is more useful to developers than end users. It lets you insert probes into running applications (using binary rewriting tricks, where function prologs are replaced with unconditional jumps to JIT-compiled code that does the profiling). This is by far the most powerful profiling and debugging framework I've come across.
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)
FreeBSD has ported pf from OpenBSD.
Pf is nice.
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Informative)
Gentoo fills the same niche with the Linux kernel. And since when is Slackware not a complete distro? Perhaps you meant “Linux From Scratch”...
P.S.: Please get your spelling right. It’s “niche”, “distros”, “BSDs” (second one only), and “develop for their developers”. Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^
Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?! (Score:2, Informative)
Given that any sysadmin worth his salt knows that Linux and FreeBSD offer different tradeoffs between "completeness" and "rigorous quality", it's not unreasonable for him to point out that FreeBSD has a "higher quality", even if the actual words he uses are subjective. Everyone familiar with FreeBSD and several Linux distros would know what he's saying and agree.
Unfortunately, I can't say that your "nuh-uh" also resounds with common experience in this way, so I disagree with your contention that it is a valid response under these circumstances.
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Informative)
I used to use Linux, but found FreeBSD to be easier to configure from the command line, more consistent in its filesystem layout, more responsive under load, and generally "smoother" in terms of process scheduling. I gave up linux desktop use (for FreeBSD, and later, OS X) after having been a linux desktop user for about 5 years.
The fact that the userland tools are shared with MacOS X is a bonus.
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:4, Informative)
The maintainer of the freebsd port of pf is the same person as the openbsd author. FreeBSD current usually lags a few weeks in patchset from openbsd in regards to pf, and in either release you're generally running the same version.
Re:No XFS support (Score:3, Informative)
Re:if only... (Score:3, Informative)
Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.
Works for me.
Live UFS dump is broken.
Works for me.
USB mass storage support is broken.
Wine is not supported;
And this is FreeBSD's fault why?
http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64 [winehq.org]
ZFS in double parity mode is broken
Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.
MTRR for older ATI cards is broken
If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.
Re:Awesome! (Score:0, Informative)
I disagree.
*BSD is so much behind the current state, that it's almost useless as a modern desktop system. No inotify support in the kernel, etc.
I think *BSD doesn't have any developers left which can rewrite the kernel to support a modern desktop environment. Bugs like http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-net@freebsd.org/msg28806.html [mail-archive.com] don't get fixed for more than three years, even though this ack delay can be fixed easily (see John Nagle's comment here on slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174457&cid=14515105 [slashdot.org]).
The BSD licence is the root of this problem. Look at how much code RedHat, Oracle, etc *must* contribute to linux and compare that with the code contributed to *BSD (by Apple for example)
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Awesome! (Score:3, Informative)
It's not quite true to say that there is no corporate backing for FreeBSD. There are no major companies that heavily back the project, but Yahoo! used to employ six developers full time to work on the kernel (not sure if they employ anyone now - do they have any money left?), Apple's Darwin team often contributes code, Juniper sends patches back, and a few other companies contribute financially. You may remember a couple of years ago that the FreeBSD foundation was in danger of losing its non-profit status because too high a proportion of the donations came from corporate entities, rather than individuals.
OpenBSD, on the other hand, gets very little corporate support, in spite of the fact that everyone ships OpenSSH.
Re:Awesome! (Score:1, Informative)
> (in 10 years of using BSD, both in an ISP and a 13 site international company, i've never encountered or heard of it).
Most ISPs have migrated to Linux anyway. Even *BSD-friendly companies move away from it because features which most users expect simply don't work right.
Example: Zend, the PHP company doesn't support FreeBSD anymore. The reason is simple, instead of fixing the bugs in the FreeBSD kernel, the FreeBSD maintainers forced the Zend engeneers to invent workarounds for kernel bugs in FreeBSD.
In PHP you can't switch off the Nagle Algorithm "NDELAY", so fragmented packets are *VERY* slow if you use the streams API.
Response from the FreeBSD maintainers: "Use unix domain sockets." -- Bleh! unix domain sockets are not available on Windows. Instead of dropping windows support, they have removed FreeBSD builds and moved to Solaris.
> As far as BSD being useless as a modern desktop system, apple don't seem to think so
BS! Apple uses Mach with a tiny BSD personality layer and a mixture of BSD and GNU userland. The GUI is proprietary anyway.
OSX is neither BSD nor based on it.