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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD Updated 33

Posted by CmdrTaco from the more-of-that-bsd-kung-fu dept.
Elwood writes "Well, the time has finally come. The 3.0 tree was branched to 3.1-stable (RELENG_3) and 4.0-current (HEAD) today. Whoo-Hoo! Time to make those FTP server do that thing they do... " Update: 01/21 09:28 by CT : clarification from Jesse FreeBSD 3.0 has become the FreeBSD-STABLE tree, a new tree in the CVS has just been made for development. 3.1-RELEASE will come in 1 month (Feb 15th).
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FreeBSD Updated More

FreeBSD Updated

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  • Threads... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Is FreeBSD threaded?
  • I assume that FreeBSD is compatible with the current PC hard drive partioning scheme (allowing Linux, Windows and FreeBSD) to happily co-exist.

    IS THAT CORRECT?

    The reason I ask is that way back in '93, I was looking at using either FreeBSD or Linux (I bought both from Walnut Creek CD). I started with FreeBSD, read the installation/partition docs and came to the belief that FreeBSD's partitioning scheme would not be compatible with my DOS/Win3.0 partition. So instead, I picked up the Linux CD, read the docs, found the magic words claiming compatibility, and haven't looke back. Until now.
  • I bought the 4 cds from Walnut Creek.

    Is midi support broken? And is there an effort or something like ALSA for the BSD Lite OS?

    I appreciate you include packages that depend on Motif to build, this is understandable. But when building from /ports with make install, where is gqmpeg, gmod distfiles? GQmpeg isn't a package, it is in /ports dir tree, but no distfile on disc 3 or 4...this is just an example, but why include all those packages even, when you haven't even bundled distfiles??

    When I open Walnut Creek CDROM case about 5, or more..plastic taps holding cds in place isn't sitting where they usually do (broken off), in a new jewell case. I figure this case must have been shaken, or dropped, cause they are broken, making rrr rrrr rrr noises when you shake , can you consider making a more robust one? Also one side (front) is unable to close up..
  • Enjoy em! 3.1-RELEASE is truly the best ever, by far, with so many new features... it's just not even funny!
  • 2.2.8 would probably be best unless you have unsupported hardware (ie the drivers are only available in 3.x)

    The user limit isn't necessarily a problem if you pick something like Cyrus IMAPD for a mail server.. Then noone has to have accounts on the machine anyway :)

    (Of course then all your users would be using POP or IMAP to read mail.. Something I would suspect is going to happen if you have 20k+ users)
  • Time to get compiling and see who'se got the quickest build times again... Anybody got a quad Xeon with a few Gb of memory that I can borrow?

  • Well, yes the release of 3.1 won't be fore a while. I don't recall if you date is correct though.

    What this does is get new features out of the 3.1 track. Linux is currently running pre-2.2 kernels for the same reason. Linus just stops accepting new features though, whereas FreeBSD just stops accepting them for the stable track. Both ways have good and bad points.

  • Anyone care to go over in brief the differences in features from the 2.x stable to the 3.0 stable?
  • Whilst I'm going to stick with Linux at home, I have all but given up on trying to install it at work, because of hardware problems.

    I've a Compaq Deskpro, with one of those ultra-high density floppy drives that'll still take regular floppies, at work. NONE of the Linux distributions or *BSD distributions I've tried will work. They either crash, reboot the machine or fail to recognise the floppy drive. Sometimes all three. BeOS does strange, possibly obscene things to the monitor, which I'm sure computers aren't supposed to be aware of, let alone capable of. :)

    Can anyone suggest a way to get FreeBSD (any version - the most experimental development version on the planet's fine! honest!) onto this pile of junk, before NT drives me round the bend?

  • BSD (Score:1)

    by Trashman ( 3003 )
    Gotta try it one of these days, when I can spare a box...

    How's hardware support on the BSD's? I imagine that its a little futher along than linux.

  • I'm getting ready for the large phone bill I'll receive after upgrading my firewall/gateway machine from 2.2.7, but i'll be worth it.
  • At my work we are going to be deploying a new mail server, serving about 20,000 users, growing to perhaps 30,000 or more. FreeBSD was highly recommended for this task, but I was wondering whether I should use 2.2.8 or 3.0 . This will be a machine open to the world, so security and stability are crucial. Also, what is the user limit for FreeBSD? 64k?
  • Actually, as of right now, I believe we're better than Linux at least for bleeding-edge network cards. I don't know of much hardware that Linux support and FreeBSD doesn't support at the moment (the Mylex SCSI cards are the only gaping lack - there are people working on closing it); if there are specific questions, I can probably answer them.

    Eivind.
  • Is this automatically enabled, or is it something I have to add to /etc/fstab? As I recall, softupdates also had some kind of weird license. I have two machines running 2.2-stable but am thinking of upgrading.
  • Don't forget "soft updates" in the file system! This gives near 'async' performance with 'sync' stability...
  • Load it with 3.0-RELEASE and then upgrade it to 3.0-stable. Since your application is exactly what the -stable branch was meant for, and there's some bugfixes from the 3.0-RELEASE sources.

    As far as I know, there is no user limit for FreeBSD, since you can change it in the kernel whenever you like. But there is a point where demands for resources exceed the existing resources and you end up with an unhappy box. The suggested method is assign users to different shell servers to keep the load down.;
  • Probably misunderstanding ;-)

    There is an option during install where you CAN choose to lose compatibility with other OS's - but you get a big warning message first.

    If you want all the Gory Details(tm) then search the FreeBSD mailing lists for "dangerously dedicated" partitioning.

  • I believe those are ATAPI floppies, correct?

    If so, FreeBSD has support for them - although I haven't used it to say if it's stable.

    My suggestion would be to download a current boot floppy image and fire it up - if it detects the drive correctly, it should work. If not, check the mailing lists for more info.

  • As Jordan Hubbard pointed out, Satoshi Atami (in his mail to FreeBSD-announce) was mistaken in calling this 3.1-stable. It should be 3.0-stable. Anyway, just calling it FreeBSD-stable is always correct ;)



    It's important to note that the ports collection will probably no longer be maintained for 2.2 and a.out support will be dropped too (over time) so this is the time to consider upgrading.



    Well, there goes my uptime :(

  • Cool, and just as I now have a dedicated machine to load FreeBSD on. =)
  • The current situation is that FreeBSD uses a port of LinuxThreads to provide support for kernel threads. (The older native pthread library is userland-only.) FreeBSD also supports LinuxThreads for Linux emulation - it'll run StarOffice 5. (Instead of clone(), FreeBSD has the rfork() system call.)

    The plan for the future is to have a combination userland/kernel threading library to reduce the cost of context switches between threads.
  • There's also the Vinum disk mirroring and RAID software.

    The perl in the base system is now 5.005_02.

    There's a new kernel module system and a new boot loader. The boot loader can load modules as well as just the kernel before everything starts up.

    There's an Alpha AXP port.

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