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Operating Systems BSD Technology

FreeBSD 9.2, FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 4 Released 133

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced the release of FreeBSD 9.2. FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE has ZFS TRIM SSD support, ZFS LZ4 compression support, DTrace hooks and VirtIO drivers as part of the default kernel configuration, unmapped I/O support, and numerous other minor features. FreeBSD also announced FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 4 on the same day, which is the next major feature release of the open-source BSD operating system."
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FreeBSD 9.2, FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 4 Released More

FreeBSD 9.2, FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 4 Released

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  • They're not posting meaningless, scale-less graphs showing sub-percent increases in compile times of various linux kernels... they're actually providing value for once. Phoronix is the OSNews of the new millenium.

    • They're not providing any value, they're summarizing a release announcement -- and the only things they left out are three bullet points that are just version number bumps for major apps/libraries in base.

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Informative)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @10:20PM (#45010655)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by smash ( 1351 )
      *shrug*. I just resurrected an EFI loader SNAFU on my mac mini with a firewire cable. Target disk mode rocks.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by fisted ( 2295862 )
        How does Target Disk Mode even remotely rock? It turns the device into an external HD the (physical) size of the whole device in question.

        What a nice piece of Apple-Fanboyism.

    • Are you saying Firewire is dead? Does Netcraft confirm it?

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by LoRdTAW ( 99712 )

      Firewire was dead from the beginning. Apple held onto the Firewire trademark and there was a per device charge of twenty five cents (!394 cards, cameras, cable boxes, PC's or motherboards etc.). USB was inferior in many ways but was royalty free, almost as fast and available on every motherboard. After USB 2.0 came out, it was over for 1394.

      I just hope Thunderbolt doesn't make the same mistake as it is a good replacement for 1394 and has plenty of bandwidth, even for video cards.

      • With the bandwidth that USB has - particularly 'super'-speed USB, why would Firewire or any successor technology be needed? Just use standard, off the shelf technology

  • Relationship between Apple Darwin and FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by GPS Pilot ( 3683 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @10:41PM (#45010737)

    Found this tidbit here [wikipedia.org]: when developing OS X v10.3, the "BSD layer was synchronized with FreeBSD 5".

    Will new FreeBSD features eventually show up in Darwin/OS X, or have the two projects been sufficiently forked to prevent that from happening?

    • Re:Relationship between Apple Darwin and FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)

      by smash ( 1351 ) on Tuesday October 01, 2013 @11:36PM (#45010967) Homepage Journal
      The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

      • The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

        Darwin is not a BSD kernel, so the kernel changes will never show up, no probably about it.

        • The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

          Darwin is not a BSD kernel

          Yeah, it's a kernel that's a combination of Mach and BSD.

          so the kernel changes will never show up

          Not necessarily.

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by smash ( 1351 )
          True, however various bits of the BSD kernel have been ported to it. This is why I said "probably won't show up", because stuff like the firewalling code has been ported.

      • Re:Relationship between Apple Darwin and FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)

        by Guy Harris ( 3803 ) <guy@alum.mit.edu> on Wednesday October 02, 2013 @01:53AM (#45011437)

        The relevant bits of the FreeBSD userland are periodically (every major release) imported into OS X. The two systems are fairly different, so kernel changes in FreeBSD probably won't show up, but tweaks to command line tools and other stuff probably will.

        The best way to think about it is that Darwin is "the kinda sorta fifth BSD", separate from {Free,Net,Open,DragonFly}BSD, but willing to pick stuff up from the *BSDs, just as the *BSDs are willing to pick up stuff from other *BSDs to various degrees.

        • I had a look through this timeline [levenez.com] tracing from the origin at NeXTSTEP 0.8, and now my brain is slightly melted O_o... but I managed to find all of the inheritance from other systems (excluding integrations between derivatives of itself like Darwin, OS X Server, OS X and iOS etcetera):

          • 1988, NeXTSTEP 0.8, inherited from: 4.3 BSD, Mach 2.0
          • 1989, NeXTSTEP 1.0, inherited from: Mach 2.5
          • 1996 - 1997, OPENSTEP, inherited from: None
          • 1997, Rhapsody DR1, inherited from: 4.4 BSD lite 2
          • 1998, Rhapsody DR2, inherited from:

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by smash ( 1351 )
            Heaps of open/next step is inherited. Most of the core libaries of objective-c for instance.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by tomxor ( 2379126 )
              That's what i thought, but i don't know much about the early OS X before 10.4 ... did it have everything you define as inherited from rhapsody in 10.3? if so perhaps i should ask the author to add a link between the two offending nodes.

          • So it looks like mostly FreeBSD and a little of the old Mach

            Well, if you call the osfmk directory of the XNU source [apple.com] a little, I guess it's "a little of the old Mach", although a fair bit of that code comes from NeXT and Apple as well.

            I think NetBSD was used as a means for porting between architectures more than a literal inheritance.

            Well, let's look at the libc source [apple.com] (the libc part of libSystem):

            $ fs . | xargs egrep -h '\$NetBSD:' | wc -l
            49
            $ fs . | xargs egrep -h '\$FreeBSD:' | wc -l
            482

            ("fs" is a script that finds source files and prints their names to the standard output). The files it found with "NetBSD" in them were ./gen/FreeBSD/fmtcheck.c, ./gen/FreeB

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by fisted ( 2295862 )
              is fs a script because you aren't able to operate 'find', or is find simply not available on your oh-so-unixish os x?

              • is fs a script because you aren't able to operate 'find',

                fs is a script that runs find with a long list of file extensions because I'd rather not type the long list of file extensions in a find command every time I want to find source files. I can operate find, I just prefer to write a shell script to do it for me rather than doing it manually over and over again.

                or is find simply not available on your oh-so-unixish os x?

                As per the above, fs wouldn't work if find weren't available on OS X.

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by tomxor ( 2379126 )

              Wow, never new that info was retained in the sources, interesting :)

              Yeah i was a bit confused at the temporary switch in 2006 - 2007 in the timeline that suggested Darwin was the main development branch... i always viewed Darwin as the excerpt that Apple occasionally kept up to date.

      • Some bits of the FreeBSD kernel make it into the BSD server in the XNU kernel. One of the big ones is the MAC framework (SEBSD), which is shared between FreeBSD and XNU and supports pluggable access control policies. This is used to implement the code signing logic on Juniper routers and the application sandboxing on iOS and OS X. There are some pretty big differences to the VM subsystems on both (they're both derived from Mach 2.5, but they've diverged hugely since then).

  • It's always the way - I do a new install and they release a brand new version.

    • You can upgrade quite easily with the freebsd-update utility.

      • And having done this, I've yet to run into a library compatibility issue that wasn't fixable with symlinks, though my test suite is still running.

  • I know it was mentioned in the FreeBSD 10 release, but looks like several other ZFS features for 10 made it into 9.2.

    https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD10 [freebsd.org] Can anyone smarter than me make sense of the SNV page to see if it's in 9.2 too?

    http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=243524 [freebsd.org]

    Thank you in advance.

  • Why does FreeBSD continue to develop two different versions rather than concentrate on making on superior product? They are years behind *nix and a decade behind Microsoft when it comes to drivers, wireless support and printer support. It just defies logic that they spread their all ready meager resources between to products rather than concentrate on making on superior product.

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