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Open Source Operating Systems BSD

FreeBSD 10.2 Released 103

Posted by Soulskill from the onward-and-upward dept.
moderators_are_w*nke writes with news that FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE is now available. Here is the download page, the release notes, and release errata. Features highlights: The resolvconf(8) utility has been updated to version 3.7.0, with improvements to protect DNS privacy. The ntp suite has been updated to version 4.2.8p3. A new rc(8) script, growfs, has been added, which will resize the root filesystem on boot if the /firstboot file exists. The Linux® compatibility version has been updated to support Centos 6 ports. Several ZFS performance and reliability improvements. GNOME has been updated to version 3.14.2. KDE has been updated to version 4.14.3.
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FreeBSD 10.2 Released More

FreeBSD 10.2 Released

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  • Still no 64-bit Linux support? (Score:3)

    by the_humeister ( 922869 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @03:50PM (#50318973)

    Oh well. I use it for only ZFS anyway.

  • Yes, they really are rising from their graves. Netcraft confirms it!

  • Really like FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday August 14, 2015 @04:15PM (#50319123)

    It's a real pity that FreeBSD and the BSDs in general don't get more love from Slashdot. Linux seems to have stolen the thunder from the BSD camp, but in all honesty, FreeBSD rocks. It makes a far better server than Linux for the vast majority of cases. I used to run BSD servers, both FreeBSD and BSD/OS back in the day. Never, ever had an issue save for HW failures. Cannot say the same for Linux on identical HW. FreeBSD handles load that bring Linux to its knees. I've always agreed with the statement that "Linux is hacked together, while FreeBSD is engineered". In general, I think the BSDs are better written pieces of software.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      To be fair, they can both "serve" various use cases pretty well. Though FreeBSD is more "service" centric than Linux's "user" centric. However FreeBSD (having come out from all of the post 4.x SMP development years) is now really beginning to invest and shine in some of Linux's traditional "user" areas and is running on things like ARM, RPi, etc.
      And yes, the "hacked" versus "engineered" thing is definitely true, and it's the reason I no longer use Linux, I simply can't afford the extra time to deal with hav

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward

        OP here. Great comment, and I agree. While I think Linux makes a great desktop OS, I'm a firm believer in BSD on the server side. I've run BSD-based firewalls/proxy servers and BSD-based Web servers and I really love how simple BSD makes config files. All in one place. Linux, as you note, depending on the distro, in several places.

        Right now at work, I have Linux servers in certain roles (CentOS for PBX and Debian for Web server) and the config files are Greek compared to FreeBSD and OpenBSD's simplicity.

        My

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      I ran FreeBSD servers for a few years, but when Linux got journalled filesystems, an O(1) scheduler and real threads, it just made Linux better. Plus much better hardware support.

      I know FreeBSD eventually addressed much of that, but just too late.

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        I didn't live through it, but based on what I've read and watched about the evolution of FreeBSD, they got set back for a long while from bogus legal issues and a resulting anemic community. It's well engineered base has allowed it to quickly catch up and is now starting to surpass Linux in *some* ways. While FreeBSD is lacking in some ways like a large driver portfolio and mind share of the popular crowd, the fundamental parts of the OS are starting to set the bar for high performance and stability. FreeBS

        • Re:Really like FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Saturday August 15, 2015 @05:00AM (#50321325) Journal

          The Linux community has a whole has some ADD notion that tools are disposable and to replace them with the latest greatest tool. This is just a sign that no one put any thought into the original tool.

          (FreeBSD developer, so beware that there may be some bias here:) In my observation, there's a tendency for Linux developers to identify a problem and immediately implement and ship a solution. In the FreeBSD community, there's more of a tendency to identify the problem, step back and try to find a more general solution, then implement that. This means that Linux often has the solution right now, whereas FreeBSD often lags a bit, but when the FreeBSD solution exists it's a lot more pleasant to work with (compare kqueue vs epoll + timerfd + eventfd + ..., for example).

          Both approaches have upsides and downsides. I generally prefer the end result of the FreeBSD approach, but it still sucks when you're in the window (often a couple of years long) where Linux has a bad solution and FreeBSD has no solution at all.

        • One thing that I do wish FreeBSD does is add a jail for SteamOS. I currently use a PC-BSD laptop, and to run Steam, it's recommended going into Wine. I'd prefer a solution where I can open a SteamOS jail and play my Steam games. It shouldn't be difficult, since support for Debian jails already exists.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by walterbyrd ( 182728 )

      Agree: BSD is a far better server than Linux. More stable, more standard, better engineered.

      Also, unlike Linux, BSD is still values POSIX, and UNIX philosophy.

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 )
      It's because a lot of BSD users are absolute jerks. They piss on anyone who isn't a part of their "ecosystem". A lot of people, including me, got scared away a long time ago due to this. Sure, I could use BSD, and it's evidently technically superior, but am I going to turn into one of THEM? Even if I don't, I'm still going to have to deal with these pricks on a daily basis while asking for support, and that's just too much. No way. Sorry, BSD.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by Bengie ( 1121981 )
        You should try working on the Linux kernel. Linus has a much shorter fuse for idiots. Sometimes it's better to scare some people off than to let them poison the code with their ineptitude. FreeBSD is a meritocracy. Quality over political correctness.
        • Who's talking about the kernel? I'm talking about being an ordinary user. Where did I even say anything about programming, much less on the core of the system? Get your head out of your ass and stop assuming everyone else is like you.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by Bengie ( 1121981 )
            I assumed you were talking about the developers because the community is great. Very nice and helpful people. Maybe you have a social issue and find any amount of push back to be threatening.

    • It's a real pity that FreeBSD and the BSDs in general don't get more love from Slashdot. Linux seems to have stolen the thunder from the BSD camp, but in all honesty, FreeBSD rocks. It makes a far better server than Linux for the vast majority of cases. I used to run BSD servers, both FreeBSD and BSD/OS back in the day. Never, ever had an issue save for HW failures. Cannot say the same for Linux on identical HW. FreeBSD handles load that bring Linux to its knees. I've always agreed with the statement that "Linux is hacked together, while FreeBSD is engineered". In general, I think the BSDs are better written pieces of software.

      Well, since the systemd saga began, FreeBSD has been getting a lot more respect from a good section of the Linux crowd that hates systemd. OpenBSD gets it as well particularly from people w/ old RISC based Unixstations, since they are the only ones still maintaining those old platforms.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rl117 ( 110595 )

        I did my first Linux installs in 1997 (slack/redhat), and first Debian install in early 2008. I used Debian as my primary OS from 2009-2015 initially as a user and after a few years as a fully-fledged developer. I started investigating options for moving away from Debian around the end of 2013-early 2014, and migrated all my local data to a FreeBSD NAS in Jan 2014. As I learned more about it, the more I liked it. While it's fair to say that systemd was the primary impetus for looking for a replacement,

    • As far as I can tell from the documentation, FreeBSD isn't usable for as a production hypervisor unless you're willing to make a large investment in supporting bhyve (I don't count VirtualBox as production - it's fine for development, but too slow for production.) But how is it as a client on top of KVM or VMware? Can you run a usable system without burning too much disk or memory, compared to Red Hat or Ubuntu?

  • Painless upgrade (Score:5, Informative)

    by rl117 ( 110595 ) <`rleigh' `at' `codelibre.net'> on Friday August 14, 2015 @04:25PM (#50319195) Homepage

    Just finished upgrading all my work and home systems and VMs, plus one clean install. Smooth painless upgrades from 10.1-RELEASE and no problems encountered, all systems running nicely. Great work, team, your efforts are much appreciated.

    FreeBSD merrilin.codelibre.net 10.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE #0 r286666: Wed Aug 12 15:26:37 UTC 2015 root@releng1.nyi.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64

    • Re:Painless upgrade (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Bengie ( 1121981 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @04:55PM (#50319375)
      FreeBSD foundation has a server that was originally FreeBSD 5.0 32bit and has been in-place upgraded all the way up to FreeBSD 9.3 64bit, not to mention migrated through several physical servers through the years. There are still original FreeBSD 5.0 binaries that are still running and to which they no longer have the original source code.

      Even when pushed beyond any sane limits, FreeBSD keeps on trucking.

      • There are still original FreeBSD 5.0 binaries that are still running and to which they no longer have the original source code.

        No longer have the original source code? Who are these guys, Microsoft?

    • Somehow, I have no idea what version I have successfully upgraded to, given what I get: [lintel@cisc] ~% uname -a
      FreeBSD cisc 10.0-RELEASE-p19 FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE-p19 #0: Thu Nov 6 21:53:58 UTC 2014 root@amd64-builder.pcbsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys /GENERIC amd64
      [lintel@cisc] ~%       I'll just wait for PC-BSD 10.2 to become final so that the upgrade can finally go through. I've tried doing it the CLI way too, but hasn't been any different.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rl117 ( 110595 )

        When you say, "wait to become final", it is final now as far as I can tell. Can't you run:

        freebsd-update -r 10.2-RELEASE upgrade
        freebsd-update install
        reboot
        freebsd-update install
        pkg update
        pkg upgrade

        That's pretty much what I did for all the systems I upgraded to 10.2.

    • Are you running VMs on FreeBSD? Is there a good management system for this? I'm running Proxmox VE at home and have been really happy with it; curious if you've had a better experience on BSD.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by rl117 ( 110595 )

        I'm afraid not. On FreeBSD itself, I only have jails at the moment. I did give VirtualBox a brief try, IIRC.

        I have FreeBSD guests on a work VMware ESX cluster, and on VirtualBox and VMware Workstation on my personal development machine (Linux and Windows). At home, I have the same (VirtualBox and VMware Workstation on Linux and Windows).

  • WTF Dice?!! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Thud457 ( 234763 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @04:32PM (#50319247) Homepage Journal
    This is a BSD story, why isn't it using the slashdot red BSD theme?!! Did Coyboy Neal take it when he left?

  • PC-BSD is pretty good, too (Score:5, Insightful)

    by epine ( 68316 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @05:26PM (#50319515)

    I had never run BSD on the desktop before, but recently I converted both my desktop and my aging T500 laptop to PC-BSD. The experience has been pretty good so far.

    I especially like the boot environment upgrade process. The only thing you need to be aware of is not installing new software on your system after the ZFS clone. Otherwise the upgrade process affects you not at all until you're good and ready to boot into it, and at that point if anything goes wrong, you just roll it back and wait for next time.

    Then I look at my real FreeBSD server and wish it was equally slick.

    My biggest problem with PC-BSD is that Life Preserver does something with SSH that's just never worked for me. I've tried multiple clients to multiple servers. I've emulated the SSH part of the connection process at the command line, no problem. But after setting up the same connection, Life Preserver bombs out with a generic (aka useless) error message.

    Mostly it just works, but when it doesn't I've found some of the error messages extremely unhelpful.

    (Yes, I know how to wrapper SSH to diagnose this properly, but I just haven't found the time yet.)

    • Re:PC-BSD is pretty good, too (Score:4, Interesting)

      by michaelmath ( 4223371 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @10:43PM (#50320621)
      I tried OpenBSD on a new Dell laptop. I thought I would end up writing over it, but I experimented and found that it is awesome. Everything I want is working: encrypted home partition, sound (hd-intel), 3d hardware accelerated graphics (intel card), suspend, wifi internet (with a tiny dongle), my wireless mouse, touchpad. all of my favorite applications are in ports and chromium is working fine. After all that I ended up keeping Openbsd as my desktop. It feels much cleaner, I like how everything is organized. Of course it can't use as many devices as linux. YMMV

      • Re: PC-BSD is pretty good, too (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        Yes, OpenBSD is the only viable candidate for laptops now. FreeBSD development has stalled. All of their big commits over the past decade have been back porting features from open source Solaris (ZFS, capsicum, dtrace). But graphics support for modern desktops (or laptops) has basically been: get an nVidia driver, or go home. No Intel support, nothing for radeon that isnt broken in some fubdamental way. No working suspend/resume from X. Why? Because all of the FreeBSD developers are running the operating sy

    • I especially like the boot environment upgrade process. The only thing you need to be aware of is not installing new software on your system after the ZFS clone. Otherwise the upgrade process affects you not at all until you're good and ready to boot into it, and at that point if anything goes wrong, you just roll it back and wait for next time.

      We currently have a GSoC student working on improving BE support in the ZFS loader. For 11.0, we'll planning on using pkg for the base system (which should make it possible to move between -RELEASE, -STABLE and -CURRENT branches a bit more easily and mean that -STABLE gets wider testing - we've benefitted quite a bit from PC-BSD shipping some experimental stuff). Nexenta has a nice model for apt-clone that inspired the PC-BSD stuff - we'll likely use something similar, so pkg will do a snapshot and then t

    • Install the beadm port and you get the same boot environment setup. It was actually available on FreeBSD first. PC-BSD just included it in their installer image.

  • FreeBSD on the Desktop. (Score:5, Informative)

    by srobert ( 4099 ) on Friday August 14, 2015 @08:05PM (#50320135)

    A lot of people say FreeBSD is best on the server, while Linux is best on the desktop. But I was a long time Linux user and started playing around with FreeBSD a few years ago. It turns out, that IF your hardware is compatible with it, and IF you know what you're doing, then FreeBSD is also best on the desktop.

    • Not that I disagree, exactly, but can you give some reasons why? I've tried running BSD desktops - both pure FreeBSD and desktop-oriented distros like DesktopBSD and PC-BSD - and while its certainly viable I don't know that I'd call it superior. ZFS is pretty awesome (though getting it set up correctly was a bit of a trick) but not sufficiently better than the current crop of Linux FS options to sway me that much. What else have you found that's better on BSD? Actual examples, please.

      I'll be rebuilding my d

      • I think Red Hat has been working to monopolize Linux. I think it's been going on for years. Systemd was a huge step towards such monopolization.

        Red Hat wants to be Microsoft. Who could blame them? Red Hat is imitating Microsoft in many ways. Systemd is open just like OOXML is open. Red Hat is using it's dominate position to push technologies on people who don't want those technologies.

        Pottering has made no secret of being a huge fan of the Microsoft way of doing things, and a hater of the traditional UNIX/L

        • Re: FreeBSD on the Desktop. (Score:1)

          by Anonymous Coward

          Oh, come on. RedHat *is* Linux, and has been for close to twenty years. No other single entity has come close to the number of committed lines in the kernel over the years, or the development of user land and user-facing tools. GTK+ and Gnome are de-facto RedHat projects, as are many things we take for granted in a modern distribution (pulse, systemd, gstreamer). RedHat hasn't monopolized anything that wasn't already theirs; maybe only Google comes close to leadership in the Linux world, and they are far wo

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by oddtodd ( 125924 )

            Spot on, I tried to tell walter this in a different forum and it didn't register, apparently.
            Hi Walter! Funny Cin U here

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by rl117 ( 110595 )

            RedHat has certainly made a lot of valuable contributions, particularly to the kernel and toolchain.

            Their influence on GNOME and GTK+ is a bit more debateable. Do you remember what they were like in the 0.9/1.x days? They had participation from a wide range of companies and volunteers, and even if it was riddled with bugs it had the prospect of being something pretty amazing. Today, many of the original design flaws remain and many have had a lot of polishing, but the vibrant atmosphere and sense of prog

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by kyubre ( 1186117 )

        In short, FreeBSD/PC-BSD is to the Linux desktop user experience what RHEL is to Linux in general

        I've been running PC-BSD as my primary desktop OS for about 5 years now. I say desktop, but I mostly use some variation of T-Series thinkpad as "my desktop". In the for what its worth, I also have several server class machines running RHEL compatible, Arch, and of course plain FreeBSD (which PC-BSD is mostly a specialization of).

        I also find PC-BSD/FreeBSD to be the best desktop experience but with caveats.

        To t

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by srobert ( 4099 )

        Consistency. When you learn to do something in FreeBSD, chances are that what you learned will remain relevant for a long time. Some Linux distros seem to impose change for it's own sake.
        I like the simplicity of many OS related configurations being done through only a few (plain text) files such as rc.conf and sysctl.conf.
        There is a clear separation of the base of the FreeBSD operating system from the end user applications, which is reflected in the file system layout. For example OS related configuration

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by dbIII ( 701233 )

        Not that I disagree, exactly, but can you give some reasons why?

        Faster on old hardware while still giving you firefox, thunderbird etc.
        If you have enough drives to feed ZFS a mirror or two, a lot faster.
        That's really the reason, a lot less is going on so it is quicker. If you have a lot of fast cores and enough memory then the speed increase is not going to be noticed - apart from disk access, so the advantage is less clear since the applications are often going to be the same anyway (athough sometimes lin

    • FreeBSD for the desktop is PC-BSD. Or, if you are referring to a CLI only experience, then FreeBSD on the desktop is TrueOS

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by kafka0 ( 3936931 )
      I've been using FreeBSD (plus NetBSD and OpenBSD before that) for quite some time on my personal servers as well as on my desktop and I must say I entirely agree with this: FreeBSD isn't just a server OS, it also really shines on the desktop. It's very easy to set up and keep up to date, the ports/packages system is rock solid, hardware support is very good... I also find running FreeBSD less demanding than Linux, Windows or OSX, with a lot less peculiarities to keep in mind. Also, hard-won knowledge doesn'

  • Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have been trying to get ARM releases
    out for a while. Neither is ready for Prime Time, but they're
    getting closer.

    I wish FreeBSD had gotten the armv7 architecture stuff into
    this release as a supported arch.

    I do have some early RPi boards, but also have (for anything
    serious) some RPi 2 B + whatever boards. And without the
    new boot code, they are useless for FBSD. Should be in the
    release, even with whatever warnings and caveats are needed.

    NetBSD has a not-really-release that supports t

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