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Operating Systems Data Storage Unix BSD

FreeBSD 8.4 Released 80

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
kthreadd writes "The FreeBSD project has released version 8.4 of the free operating system with the same name. Highlights of this version include GNOME 2.32.1, KDE 4.10.1. In this release, focus has been put on improving stability and storage capability. The ZFS filesystem has been updated to support feature flags for ZFS pools, asynchronous destruction of ZFS datasets, LZ4 compression and ZIO NOP-write optimization. Also, support has been added for all shipping LSI storage controllers."
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FreeBSD 8.4 Released More

FreeBSD 8.4 Released

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  • last (Score:0)

    by drwho ( 4190 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @12:54PM (#43938817) Homepage Journal

    last post

    • Re:last (Score:2)

      by Guspaz ( 556486 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @12:56PM (#43938855)

      No, me!

      More seriously, as a ZFS user (first on Solaris, now on Linux), I'm happy that ZFS outgrew Oracle and lives on as a community opensource project. I greatly prefer it to btrfs, if only on a management level. And ironically, ZFS is now completely free of Oracle influence, while btrfs isn't.

    • Netcraft? (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @03:06PM (#43940255)

      Amazing that this was posted several hours ago and there's no "Netcraft Confirms" postings...

      Seriously. FreeBSD rocks.

  • Most desktop users won't want to install this release. FreeBSD 9.1 was released in December 2012, and is the most recent stable release. This 8.4 release is a point release in the still-maintained 8.x series, intended for people currently running 8.3 who for one reason or another don't wish to upgrade to 9.x yet, but who do want an incremental upgrade.

  • FP (Score:-1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @12:56PM (#43938849)

    First Post

  • Legacy Release (Score:4, Informative)

    by eecue ( 605228 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @12:57PM (#43938873) Homepage
    It's probably worth pointing out that this is a legacy release and the current production branch is 9.X, currently at 9.1-p3

  • Desktop environments (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:07PM (#43938985)

    If memory serves OpenBSD 5.3 was released with GNOME 3 and KDE 3.5. Here we see FreeBSD 8.4 released with GNOME 2 and KDE 4. Can anyone shed some light on why one BSD operating system has a modern KDE and outdated GNOME desktop while the other has the reverse?

  • Please if some FreeBSD dev sees this... (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:16PM (#43939083)

    could you please guys implement some anti exploitation technologies such as ASLR out of the box ? Or maybe dedicate a manpage explaining the dev team views over such matters.

    I've been a long time user of FreeBSD and i can't help but to feel it keeps dragging behind in this field.

    Or please someone explain me why i shouldn't be worrying about that.

    • could you please guys implement some anti exploitation technologies such as ASLR out of the box ? Or maybe dedicate a manpage explaining the dev team views over such matters.

      I've been a long time user of FreeBSD and i can't help but to feel it keeps dragging behind in this field.

      Or please someone explain me why i shouldn't be worrying about that.

      Explanation: You're running BSD. What gains is ASLR supposed to provide you, the end user? Protecting you against a custom crafted process injection attack on your specific BSD distro written by someone who could have made more profit creating a bogus kickstarter campaign or by attempting to mine bitcoins?

      (I kid... there's enough stuff running FreeBSD that no ASLR by default is a bit odd... but it sure makes debugging easier)

      • Re:Please if some FreeBSD dev sees this... (Score:0)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:56PM (#43939523)

        Thank you for your answer. I can't decide on which side of irony you stand. I'd prefer if your stance was the one between parenthesis.

        As for the first part that was a legitimate question, i don't use FreeBSD as a desktop, i run a server which got through all the upgrades since FreeBSD 5.2, it has a few jails and paranoid setup. And most of all i use FreeBSD because i expect it to be relatively on par with OpenBSD for security.

        And as an ROP mindfuck lover myself i was really disappointed when the Intel SysRET vulnerability came out and the exploit for freeBSD was a straightforward piece of cake compared to the Windows7 flavor. Thus some pretty random guy could just have owned my whole installation more easily then a desktop Microsoft product, bypassing the jails and everything at the same time, i almost shat myself.

        Well if anyone involved reads this, please try to make the situation better if it deserves to be :p

        • Re:Please if some FreeBSD dev sees this... (Score:0)

          by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @02:36PM (#43939981)

          There are diminishing returns for things like chroot, jails, and all the crap that Linux has. Most kernel exploits will bypass all of it, and of course the more complex "security" features you have, the more kernel code required and the more opportunity for exploitable bugs to creep in.

          This is why OpenBSD has rejected all of these things. Existing capabilities, such as chroot, are good enough. FreeBSD is not much secure than Linux. Both platforms have many features, and continually keep piling more on top. While Linux kernel exploits are a semi-monthly occurrence, FreeBSD has at least one or two every year. Compare that to OpenBSD, which averages significantly less than 1 per year.

          OpenBSD isn't more secure because it has better developers, it's more secure because it has fewer developers committing fewer features, and they're very conservative about new code. Even though everybody thinks OpenSMTP is hot shit, it'll still be several releases before it becomes the default mailer.

          • ASLR [wikipedia.org] has been usefully complicating enough vulnerabilities to have proven it's worthwhile. At this point it's quite near being an industry standard for any system that follows good security practices. It's really not credible to reject it anymore as too complicated to risk bothering with. Yes, some of the issues can be addressed more deeply, too, but security should be layered and redundant.

            A major cause for why there are less exploits on the *BSD kernels is that the rate of innovation is so low. New and rapidly changing code is where a lot of security bugs come from. If Linux kernel development did a lot less work each year and has a smaller feature base, they could spend a lot more time on hardening too. The *BSD approach isn't a bad one, but it's a trade-off with good and bad sides to it.

            • Re:Please if some FreeBSD dev sees this... (Score:0)

              by Anonymous Coward on Monday June 10, 2013 @01:32PM (#43964657)
              But the Linux crowd spends a large amount of time reinventing the wheel instead of improving projects that already exist. There are few ways to do a project correctly and many ways to do it wrong. Do it right the first time, then have everyone work on it together instead of making lots of half-done projects that compete with each other, but none done well.

    • Re:Please if some FreeBSD dev sees this... (Score:3)

      by bussdriver ( 620565 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @04:03PM (#43940755)

      If you read about ASLR and I recommend the OpenBSD paper on the topic (I think they implemented it 1st) the technique only makes it more difficult, it doesn't SOLVE the problem. If you benefit from ASLR, then you have a security problem already. I'm not sure I like the idea of losing entropy and slowing down malloc for something that does little to stop attacks from rogue processes (which can be compromised by other methods.)

      Sure, I might prefer you DoS some process by crashing it repeatedly instead of taking control over it... but I would prefer you not corrupt or crash it at all and I would want more effort put into better jails and damage control. Removing strcpy and other common trouble makers like OpenBSD does would be nice. ASLR adds to the level of complacency (except on OpenBSD where paranoia is expected.)

      The goals should be what they always were. New buzzwords be dammed.

      NOTE: I'm years behind on my BSD.
      I'm not convinced we shouldn't be moving towards microkernel hybrids like Darwin and towards a full microkernel. We took a big speed loss going to protected memory management which was accelerated in hardware and new CPUs made the transition almost unnoticeable. Maybe we should be aiming for something similar? (just isolating most drivers would help; you could leave the FS and HD within the kernel.) I also hate to think of how cool it could have been in Multics was used in place of unix... every unix has been more bloated for decades and I would love to swap RAM, CPUs, etc without rebooting. I find netBSD's work on including an interpreter in the kernel to be interesting in a shocking kind of way. Anyhow, the point is that ASLR is just a niche band-aid and not the most important feature we "must have" to continue living... and we've survived for decades without it. Such complaints sound more like an IT person speaking.

  • tcsh (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:26PM (#43939183)

    I'm boycotting FreeBSD until such time as they change the default root shell to ksh or something Bourne compatible. There's just nothing more frustrating then tcsh.

    • Re:tcsh (Score:3)

      by X0563511 ( 793323 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:38PM (#43939353) Homepage Journal

      Seems a stupid reason, because it takes all of 5 minutes to "fix."

      • Re:tcsh (Score:0)

        by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:43PM (#43939401)

        I have not checked lately, but it used to be the case that a lot of things broke if you changed the root shell. Maybe they have fixed that.

        As long as it's not bash I'm happy. Bash is terrible, why would you ever use that?

        • Re:tcsh (Score:2)

          by unixisc ( 2429386 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @02:51PM (#43940127)
          Do any of the BSDs now use bash, particularly since the latter is GPL3? But there are a plethora/bonanza of shells out there for Unix other than bash, tsh, tcsh, csh. Maybe FBSD could use ksh or zsh?

          • Re:tcsh (Score:1)

            by Pricetx ( 1986510 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @05:35PM (#43941525)

            The ports tree has Bash 4.2.45, i'm not sure how up-to-date this is compared to linux.

            As for a list of shells, the Ports tree reports 49 different shells, although some of them are just tools: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/shells.html [freebsd.org]

            As for your question, FreeBSD does has KSH and ZSH.

            • Re:tcsh (Score:1)

              by Pricetx ( 1986510 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @05:44PM (#43941617)

              As an addition to my previous comment. Upon further investigation (by which I mean I discovered bash --version), I found that the version of Bash in the ports tree is indeed a GPL V3 version of Bash. I assume this means that whilst the FreeBSD project can not use any GPL V3 code in the operating system itself (I believe by FreeBSD 10 they want to have removed all GPL code full stop), there is no restriction on the licencing used by software in the ports tree (within reason).

              Also, I quickly checked my Debian Wheezy box and that runs Bash 4.2.37, and Arch is using the same version as FreeBSD. I guess it shows that depending on the package, the ports tree can be rather bleeding edge at times.

              • Re:tcsh (Score:2)

                by kthreadd ( 1558445 ) on Saturday June 08, 2013 @03:02AM (#43944535)

                That is correct. They don't want GPLv3 in the operating system, but ports is OK. FreeBSD is very different from many Linux distributions in the sense that the operating system and most third party software is managed separate from each other. In Linux you often have a single package manager that handles both the operating system and all your software, with no clear distinction between them. In FreeBSD these are completely separate.

        • Re:tcsh (Score:2)

          by David_W ( 35680 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @08:24PM (#43942867)

          I have not checked lately, but it used to be the case that a lot of things broke if you changed the root shell. Maybe they have fixed that.

          I think the "fix" for that is toor. You can change its shell to whatever you like and use it instead of root. Although I've never tried it; I just have an alias that calls sudo -i exec zsh -l, which seems to work great.

        • Re:tcsh (Score:2)

          by evilviper ( 135110 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @10:05PM (#43943395) Journal

          I have not checked lately, but it used to be the case that a lot of things broke if you changed the root shell.

          I don't believe you've checked... EVER. There's nothing TO break by changing the root user's login shell.

          All the services that start up (eg. crond) are completely ignorant of what root's shell is set to. Services don't go through the process of logging-in as root and then spawning processes... They use the setting and environment they inherited from the rc* scripts, from start-up, while the system was single-user.

          Any programs or shell scripts you run once the system is multiuser as root, will be run with whatever interpreter they're set to use with the #! line. They don't know or care what your shell is.

          In short, there's practically no way that changing root's login shell to something different could possibly break anything. Now, if you do something stupid, like replace /bin/sh with something else, you'll break the whole damn system, but that's an idiotic mistake, and not how anybody should ever change a user's preferred shell.

    • Re:tcsh (Score:5, Funny)

      by H0p313ss ( 811249 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:44PM (#43939413)

      There's just nothing more frustrating then tcsh.

      You have clearly never been forced to use Lotus Notes.

    • Re:tcsh (Score:0)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @01:48PM (#43939469)

      I'm boycotting Linuxs until such time as they change the default shells to tcsh or something csh compatible. There's just nothing more frustrating than bourne.

      -HasH @ TrYPNET.net

    • Re:tcsh (Score:2)

      by MightyYar ( 622222 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @02:24PM (#43939851)

      Huh. I change all my shells to tcsh. I set up my configuration the way I like it in 1996 or so, so it's the path of least resistance for me.

  • Should a *BSD newbie install this at home? (Score:3)

    by Saija ( 1114681 ) on Friday June 07, 2013 @02:45PM (#43940051) Journal
    Should I, as a *BSD newbie install this at my home laptop wich it's used by my wife, which only checks facebook from time on time, reads email and play some solitaire and angrybirds?

    Myself am a windows user with a basic++ linux knowledge: I know how to install and update a distro(I prefer debian based but right now am wanting to test Fedora 18), compile some packages from source, has poked some kernel compilin', made some kde translation on the past, reported some bugs on FOSS software, etc. Now I have my Dell laptop with Windows 7 and I'm planning to back it up and format it and I'm thinking to put it up Fedora 18, but the BSD world has intrigue me and I've made some test on virtual machines.

    BTW I'm primarly a Java developer how some times made some tiny personal project on my laptop and who enjoys a good Quake 3 match(for remembering my old days on the College fragging like there were no tomorrow) but who actually prefer to enjoy the time with my wife and the kids.

    Could a user like me install some BSD distro and used it regularly to this basic things I've listed? if so, which BSD do you suggest?, bonus points if lastest KDE's it's available

    Thanks for your suggestions!

  • drivers (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @06:11PM (#43941853)

    Last summer I was building a router with pfsense, only to discover that wireless drivers for 802.11 N were not included in the base BSD system? That was enough to change course entirely.

  • Please be sure to read the Release Errata! (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @06:40PM (#43942079)

    The 8.4-RELEASE Errata notes are here:

    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.4R/errata.html [freebsd.org]

    It's of the utmost importance that all those considering upgrading (or installing) to 8.4-RELEASE read this document, particularly sections (3) and (4).

    The issue with Intel NICs driven by fxp(4) is/was a very hot (heated) topic on the mailing lists [freebsd.org] (note: long thread, but very informative), and the issue described there may impact other NIC drivers as well. There is no workaround at this time other than avoiding DHCP (assigning static IPs in /etc/rc.conf).

  • Scheduler? (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 07, 2013 @07:02PM (#43942273)

    Is it worthwhile yet to use the 'new' scheduler?

  • Still harboring those binary blobs in the kernel? (Score:0)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 08, 2013 @05:47AM (#43945051)

    I don't mean drivers but firmware... Not so free after all I guess.

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