FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #1 Released

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The FreeBSD developers just announced the release of an official snapshot of the upcoming FreeBSD 5.0 which should be expected in November. Time to try out amazing new feature like background fsck, FFS snapshots, KSC, devfs, SMPng and many more. Check the Release Notes for detailed information." Read on for a list of ISO mirrors, too.

Thanks to AEtherSPOON, you can spare the main servers and use one of these FTP mirrors to grab the ISO:

• ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp5.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.au.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
• ftp://ftp.dk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/

Comments

Freebsd 5.0 DP1

[Jeff Probst]

Do any of the linux distros have a beta release program as excellent as FreeBSD's?

Dropping 80386 from default kernel: Good Idea

[finite_automaton]

I would say that it is about time that both *BSD and Linux look at dropping support for 80386 chips from the default kernel.

From the FreeBSB-5.0/DP1 release notes:

Support for the 80386 processor has been removed from the GENERIC kernel, as this code seriously pessimizes performance on other IA32 processors. The I386_CPU kernel option to support the 80386 processor is now mutually exclusive with support for other IA32 processors; this should slightly improve performance on the 80386 due to the elimination of runtime processor type checks.

Supporting 386 chips is a good idea, but it should not be the default. I would like to be certain that the kernel that I build is taking advatage of the new features that my processor offers.

Re:background fsck

[mosch]

Sounds to me like you don't understand how the BSD filesystem works. While Linux has started implementing journaling filesystems in order to get better recoverability, BSD used a different technique. It shifts the filesystem from valid state to valid state, in a manner where the only error that can occur due to a crash is a harmless wasted inode, wasting a little disk space. This can be cleaned up with a fsck.

Because the only error that can exist on a UFS filesystem with SoftUpdates enabled is this wasted space, there's no problem running the fsck as a background process.