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FreeBSD 5.0 Delayed One Year

Posted by timothy on from the measure-twice-cut-once dept.

Satai writes: "FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE has been delayed a full year, until November of 2002. The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."

7 of 264 comments (clear)

  1. Re:15 to 1 ? by Nater · · Score: 5, Informative

    Hmmm... I've been moderated a troll. Perhaps I should rephrase myself...

    Don't think FreeBSD is impervious to the sort of misconfigurations that you've cited as faults for Linux. A naive user installing any operating system is still a naive user. I have seen in my life exactly one FreeBSD system, and it was r00ted once about three years ago and once within the last year.

    Security is not platform-dependent, it is admin-dependent.

    --

    I like to play children's songs in minor keys.
    "We're all sons of bitches now." --J. Robert Oppenheimer

  2. Not necessarily bad news by dglo · · Score: 5, Informative

    This isn't as bad as it might sound to Linux users.

    FreeBSD has multiple branches:
    * 5.0, aka -CURRENT, currently the target of
    most new development.
    * 4.4, the next release in the 4.x series,
    due to be released today
    * 4.3-RELEASE, which is updated with security
    fixes as necessary
    * 3.x, which is still being used, so it
    occasionally gets a fix or two.

    What this delay means is that the general public won't see most of the nifty 5.0 features until the end of next year.

    That doesn't mean, however, that we won't get *any* new features; the list of 4.4 improvements will be evidence of that...

    1. Re:Not necessarily bad news by Baki · · Score: 3, Informative

      Plus, if you read the announcement w.r.t. the delay well, new features shall be backported from 5.0 to 4.x in the meantime.

      In fact the time between 4.0 and 5.0 won't be that exceptional. 2.0 to 3.0 took 4 years (1994 to 1998). See this page for a nice overview of past releases. Note that 4.0 -> 5.0 will be a relatively large jump compared to past major releases.

  3. What a pathetic and misguided attitude by MO! · · Score: 3, Informative
    Oops! Here goes my Karma! - Oh well...

    Fact: Jordan Hubbard did not leave the project - he simply changed employers. He is still the FreeBSD Release Engineer, and still active member of the CORE team.

    Fact: FreeBSD-Current (5.x branch) has so many changes that pushing back the switch of Current to Stable does not mean that features from Current won't be MFC'd back to Stable during the course of the year. It just means the whole of it won't.

    Assuming this is some sort of "writing on the wall" of FreeBSD's demise is incredibly short-sighted. If you truly have been involved in FreeBSD for 6 years, I would expect you to know better. The 4.x branch was delayed many times due to the amount of changes to various subsystems - some of which were then MFC'd to the then 3.x-Stable branch.

    Passing FUD about the GPL beating BSD is just further evidence of your troll.

    --
    I AM, therefore I THINK!
    1. Re:What a pathetic and misguided attitude by kkenn · · Score: 2, Informative

      Please stop trolling.

      #1) Jordan is as active as he's ever been in FreeBSD despite the move in his daytime job to Apple. He's even paid to work on FreeBSD during the week. The fact of the matter is that Jordan isn't an active developer anyway, he's more of a publicist and manager. If you're choosing to move away from FreeBSD because you think the PR spokesman is no longer dedicated to his job, well, that seems like a misguided decision to make.

      #2) The "14 developers who haven't been working on SMPng" have NOT left FreeBSD and continue to do their work in the other areas of the system they work on. The announcement merely stated the lack of current developer activity on the SMPng project within FreeBSD. These people have not left FreeBSD and there certainly hasn't been any massive behind-the-scenes "rift" in the developer community, as some of the replies to this thread seem to be assuming.

      FreeBSD developer activity continues to increase, and in fact has probably never been better in the history of the project

  4. 15:1 developer drop isn't what it seems by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Apparently, what happened was that those
    developers worked on things other than SMPng,
    they didn't leave the project. So there are lots
    of other new things, but the SMPng work needs
    more dedication. Go figure.

  5. Features aimed at enterprise servers anyhow by .Natalie_Portman · · Score: 0, Informative

    Work in-progress includes support for fine-grained
    SMP locking in kernel, allowing higher performance on multi-processor machines, support for Scheduler Activations, allowing parallelism in threaded programs, file system snapshots, fsck-free booting, network optimizations such as zero-copy sockets and event-driven socket IO, ACPI support, and advanced security features such as Mandatory Access Control.

    None of these features are needed by the average user. I don't find the slip surprising or a big deal considering the tech economy. Just look at yer VALinux corporate strategy, or some stock prices at LWN.

    These hackers are in it for the long haul, FreeBSD will continue to be one of the best OS's around.