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Programming Software BSD

FreeBSD 10.0 Released 136

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 10.0 has been released. A few highlights include: pkg is now the default package management utility. Major enhancements in virtualization, including the addition of bhyve, virtio, and native paravirtualized drivers providing support for FreeBSD as a guest operating system on Microsoft Hyper-V. Support for the high-performance LZ4 compression algorithm has been added to ZFS and TRIM support for SSD has been added to ZFS. clang is the default compiler. This release has official Raspberry Pi support. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and a quick FreeBSD installation video is here. FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE may be downloaded via ftp or via a torrent client that supports web seeding."
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FreeBSD 10.0 Released

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  • It is really nice that the recent Linux distros have them.

    It is a pain in the butt on FreeBSD to manually switch compilers and hack /etc files and then do a manual compile to get them to work in VMWare workstation 10 in comparison.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      In 10.0, "pkg install open-vm-tools" should work. There are a few issues, but we're waiting on fixes from upstream for those.

    • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

      I use qemu now but when I used to use VMWare, I never bothered to install VMWare tools on any guests. It seemed much easier and safer to just use my own script that would use ssh with password less key auth to shutdown, reboot or what not guests.

      Do you really need VMWare tools?

      • I use qemu now but when I used to use VMWare, I never bothered to install VMWare tools on any guests. It seemed much easier and safer to just use my own script that would use ssh with password less key auth to shutdown, reboot or what not guests.

        Do you really need VMWare tools?

        It depends on one's individual needs. If you want better graphics/sound support, copy/paste support, seamless use of the mouse, and other features then they are great. In practice I only install them some of the time, mostly for desktop type guest OSes.

        • by ls671 ( 1122017 )

          Well, I use VNC or remote desktop for windows guests, running on the guests for those. I find I get a better mouse+cut and paste behavior and decent graphics and I do not have to be logged into the host to access the guests GUI.

          I have to admit that I never used sound support and maybe graphic acceleration neither. I develop all day working on guests that I access either with VNC or remote desktop although and it works just fine with no VM tools installed.

      • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Do you really need VMWare tools?

        One of the things the VMware Tools packages offer, apparently, is a kernel shim that allows the guest to inform the host of certain I/O-related things pertaining to filesystem use (ex. file deletions). Otherwise what you end up with is a disk image on the host (of the guest) which continually grows and performs worse and worse the more file creation/expansion/deletion is done on the guest.

        I've yet to see the VMware Tools package work correctly on Linux (particularly Debian). I've tried for years to get th

        • by swb ( 14022 )

          As far as I know, VMware tools doesn't provide any filesystem paravirtualization. It will improve mouse and video performance and implement some memory management tools to help the hypervisor know what used memory is active vs. inactive, memory ballooning and time sync.

          I think disk virtualization is a pretty simple mapping of SCSI block access to the virtual disk file. I've run a number of FreeBSD systems on ESX without any issues of growing disk files.

          The only issues I've ever had on VMware have been wi

          • by ptudor ( 22537 )

            Running NTP on ESX guests is often nasty and a great reason to use the vmware-tools:

            vmware-toolbox-cmd timesync status
            vmware-toolbox-cmd timesync enable

          • by icebike ( 68054 )

            You forgot the Network optimization. Moving from essentially a 10meg nic to a gigabit with drivers in Vmware Tools.

            • by swb ( 14022 )

              You only need that if you're going to run the vmxnet3 interface.

              The e1000 virtual NIC is supported without any problems with the em driver in FreeBSD. ESXi generally reports a link speed at the maximum throughput the driver supports (ifconfig shows 1000Mbit for me on two FreeBSD guests), but this is just a reported link speed.

              IIRC, the *actual* throughput capable isn't limited to this reported link speed, although there may be limits imposed by the way the driver in the guest implements timing and interrup

      • by EasyTarget ( 43516 ) on Monday January 20, 2014 @03:06PM (#46016273) Journal

        Do you really need VMWare tools?

        Yes.

        Things like Gui integrations are fine and handy/essential if you are virtualizing a desktop OS.

        But even if setting up a headless virtual server that you never access on the console after sshd is running you should still use them in order to benefit from virtualized disk and network I/O. This can deliver decent speedups if your VM is bottlenecking in that area.

        The drivers you want should be in ports, or a precompiled package for all common OS's. If this is not true for your VM system then you should be questioning the VM provider, not the guest OS, about why they are so hard to setup.

      • by smash ( 1351 )

        VMware tools give you the balloon driver in the guest, which massively improves memory utilisation between guests. It also enables VMware to tell a VM that it's host is under pressure, and essentially "asks" the VM to start paging stuff out that is not active(via the balloon driver consuming memory on the guest, forcing it to swap. The memory "used" by the balloon is memory VMware knows it can re-allocated).

        If you do not have the VM tools installed, VMware has no way of telling its guest it is under me

  • Outstanding (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday January 20, 2014 @01:41PM (#46015421)

    Good to hear. I'm sure I'm not the only one who really likes the BSDs in general. After almost 20 years in the IT biz, I would still choose FreeBSD or OpenBSD for my server needs for almost anything over almost anything. I've never been disappointed in the service of either BSD variant. Kudos to the FreeBSD devs!

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ZFS is reason alone to use BSD in critical data storage situations, as far as I'm concerned.

      Linux ZFS implementation is severely lacking in stability and features.

      Of course, some Oracle products have ZFS features that BSD in turn lacks, but I can do without those.

      • by Shaman ( 1148 )

        ZFS has been dangerous for me on many occassions. FYI

        • The alternative is to store data without checksums, and that is also dangerous. With ZFS at least you know it when your data is toast.

          • ZFS now is pretty solid, but there were some interesting teething problems with ZFS. The rule of thumb that filesystems people tell me is that it takes 10 years for a new FS to be solid. ZFS is now 9 years old, so is very close...

            In early versions, there was a problem that a write, including a delete, would cause the filesystem to grow (if it's a delete, it would then shrink) and you could get into a state if you let your filesystem (almost) completely fill up where you didn't have enough space to be abl

        • by smash ( 1351 )
          UFS, ext2, NTFS and FAT have been dangerous for me on many occasions. FYI
      • by Anonymous Coward

        Agreed. ZFS is a lifesaver when you're needing a robust trusted filesystem. There is nothing at present in Linux that comes close. It's not lost on me that BSD is chosen as the embedded OS for mission-critical infrastructure applicances. Linux has some of this market, but mostly in the entertainment sector. Even BSD in the Playstation.

      • I've run the ZFS kernel module for a while. No crashes or other issues.

  • It would be nice if FreeBSD had a Xen-like tier 1 hypervisor. Running as a client is one thing. Running as something with ZFS underneath would be very useful as an alternative to QEMU or Bochs.

    • by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Monday January 20, 2014 @01:57PM (#46015571)
      bhyve is technically a type 2, but it makes use of the HW acceled instructions that Type 1s normally use. bhyve is more a of a hybrid between 1 and 2, with more of a bias towards 2. Because of this, it is not very friendly with many Type 2 guests because it lacks legacy support and it's not a true Type 1, so it still needs proper interfaces, but it is faster, lighter weight, and uses about 10x fewer lines of code than most, so it is easy to debug and prove security.
      • Is there any real difference between a Type 1 hypervisor and a Type 2 where you never run anything? If you took FreeBSD and ripped out everything but the minimum binaries and scripts needed to boot and run bhyve instances, how would that be different from a Type 1 hypervisor?
        • Exactly. Versus a properly configured host, It's a "difference" drummed up out of thin air so they can sell you "security".

        • by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Monday January 20, 2014 @02:44PM (#46016033)
          According to wiki: Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM) and bhyve are implemented as a kernel modules for Linux and FreeBSD respectively which, when loaded, allows its host operating system to act as a bare metal (i.e., Type 1) hypervisor

          So the only difference is the kernel is not just a hypervisor, but also an OS. If you don't make use of the OS part, it works like a normal Type 1 hypervisor.
        • The distinction between Type 1 and Type 2 hypervisors doesn't really make sense anymore, and is largely marketing. For example, Xen running on a system with no IOMMU is still a Type 1 hypervisor, but the whole of the dom0 kernel and a chunk of its userspace are in the trusted computing base (TCB), where a compromise can extend to every other domain. In the case of Linux's KVM and bhyve, the host kernel (and anything that can poke kernel memory, or exploit kernel vulnerabilities) are in the TCB.

          The dist

          • by Bengie ( 1121981 )

            The important distinction is between hypervisors that do software partitioning of devices (either via emulation or paravirtualised devices), and ones that don't. Xen, KVM, and byhve all fall into the former category and so have a TCB that's several MBs of object code.

            It is interesting to note that KVM is over 12mil lines of code and XEN is about 515k LOC, while byhve is only 1,300.. yes.. 1 thousand three hundred. byhve also compiles to just under 500KB. XEN is around 1MB, but I can't find info on KVM.

            • I think your numbers for KVM are for the entire kernel, not just the VM support, but your bhyve numbers are for the bhyve kernel module, which depends on a lot of other stuff in the kernel (the VM subsystem, device drivers, at least one out of the network and storage stacks). The Xen number includes, I think, includes just the hypervisor, not the domain 0 guest that is responsible for running the control plain, providing all of the emulated devices, and so on.
    • by ThorGod ( 456163 )

      I agree...FreeBSD seems like a great Xen host.

    • Some guys at Spectra Logic and Citrix have been pushing Xen PVH support into FreeBSD recently. It didn't make it for 10.0, but hopefully should be in 10.1. In PVH mode, a guest boots as if it is a PV guest, with Xen's entry point and event channels instead of interrupts, but then uses the hardware page tables and either PCI pass-through devices or PV devices. This is important, because PVH guests can also run as dom0, if they implement the management interfaces (which are mostly userspace and shared acro

    • Does FreeBSD/PC-BSD have anything like a QEMU/KVM?
  • by Anonymous Coward

    pkg is NOT the default package management

    "pkgng is the next generation replacement for the traditional FreeBSD package management tools, offering many features that make dealing with binary packages faster and easier.
    pkgng is not a replacement for port management tools like ports-mgmt/portmaster or ports-mgmt/portupgrade. "

  • by drussell ( 132373 ) on Monday January 20, 2014 @02:00PM (#46015605)

    I've been using 10.0-PRELEASE for most things here for a while and it works well... Watch the package system change though if you're upgrading a really old system and used to just using things like portupgrade, I'm still trying to get one of my old 8.something boxes ports all updated properly, though that's probably mostly my fault for being sloppy and not reading ports/UPDATING carefully enough :) The 10.0 kernel and userland themselves are working perfectly and it was a pain free transition all the way from 8 on that box.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    Before anyone considers upgrading or installing FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, it is recommended you first read the Errata (particularly the Open Issues section):

    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/errata.html [freebsd.org]

    Some of these might come as a shock to readers, especially the killall argv parsing bug and the ipfw fwd link-layer bug.

    • by lgw ( 121541 )

      Wow, you weren't joking!

      * A bug in killall(1) has been discovered. It makes killall -INT to deliver SIGTERM rather than the desired SIGINT, and may cause blocking behavior for scripts that uses it, as -I means âoeinteractiveâ. A workaround of this would be to use -SIGINT instead. This bug has been fixed on FreeBSD-CURRENT and will be fixed in FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.

      * A regression in pw(8) does not remove a user from groups not specified in the provided group list when the -G flag is used. This is expected to be corrected in FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.

      * ipfw(8) fwd action can send packets to the correct interface with a wrong link-layer address when the route is updated. This bug has been fixed on FreeBSD-CURRENT and will be fixed in FreeBSD 10.0-STABLE.

      Bugs in killall() and pw()? Wow.

  • by wonkey_monkey ( 2592601 ) on Monday January 20, 2014 @03:00PM (#46016211) Homepage

    ...that's the one that's a bit like Linnux but not quite, right?

  • by johnjaydk ( 584895 ) on Monday January 20, 2014 @04:35PM (#46017439)

    My primary attraction is the strengthened random number generation for cryptography. This eliminates the NSA introduced weaknesses in the underlying hardware.

    That alone is enough to turn me into a rapid FreeBSD supporter.

    • by Anonymous Coward
      I'm all pro-BSD as the rest, but I thought Linux has also been doing very well on this front.
    • You do know that Linux and OpenBSD always used this method, right? FreeBSD was relying too much on hardware random number generation. Now they are finally catching up. If anything, it should make people wary of FreeBSD security.
    • That alone is enough to turn me into a rapid FreeBSD supporter.

      Rabid perhaps? ;)

  • I read about Fuse support being added before now, but I wondered if anyone has setup Gluster with FreeBSD since then? I am very interested in the combo of ZFS and Gluster, but up until now it seemed like only Centos/RHE were the options and like another poster said, ZFS on Linux has more in the way of potential licence issues and other tech limitations. But in the reverse, Gluster on FreeBSD is still "weird"
    • by armanox ( 826486 )

      You've given me an interesting thought - if time permits I might try it to see what happens.

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