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FreeBSD 4.6

Posted by michael on from the daemonettes dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes "FreeBSD 4.6 is out! The announcement is out, and so are the release notes. Have fun, and thanks to the FreeBSD team!" The announcement has all the mirror information, etc.

7 of 279 comments (clear)

  1. Great to hear it... by Meat+Blaster · · Score: 5, Interesting
    It looks like they took care of the handful of things that were causing me a lot of problems. Not only that, but I'm rather intrigued by this bit:

    Selected network drivers now implement a semi-polling mode, which makes systems much more resilient to attacks and overloads.

    A partial defense against IP DoS attacks?

    Another thing that looks really cool is that reboot now takes a flag to tell it which kernel to reboot to. Isn't this cool? Granted, most of the time on my Linux system I'm at the console when I do a reboot, so I can just pick it from GRUB, but for remote reboots this could be quite handy. And they've eliminated the deal with the odd legit TCP SYN packet from crashing the box to boot. In a nutshell, it's time to start downloading...

  2. Re:Been there... by flynn_nrg · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The fact that the mini iso as already there doesn't mean it had been officially released. A new version of FreeBSD is not officially out until the announcement is made. This is necessary because isos and files need to be mirrored before the load spike comes. For the rest of us, we just cvsup and don't really worry when it comes :-)

    flynn@kajsa# uname -a
    FreeBSD kajsa.energyhq.tk 4.6-STABLE FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE #0: Sun Jun 16 14:08:54 CEST 2002 root@kajsa.energyhq.tk:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/KAJSA i386

  3. Linux for desktop, *BSD for servers? by korpiq · · Score: 4, Interesting


    My frustration grew last year proportionally with the time it took to make Linux 2.4 stable enough for production server use. It still makes me a bit nervous and I have decided to go for *BSD in future where possible.

    However, since Linux got most of the hype, most *nix desktop stuff especially from commercial side like game companies is targeted for it. So it makes sense to use it on the desktop. Just keep your data on the servers ;)

    More experienced administrators: do you support this kind of dualism?

    --

    I think, therefore thoughts exist. Ego is just an impression.
    1. Re:Linux for desktop, *BSD for servers? by lamontg · · Score: 3, Interesting
      More experienced administrators: do you support this kind of dualism?

      I'd support it if the ISVs did.

      I'm 1 of 8 admins that take care of appx 600 Linux boxes (projected to grow to 1,000 Linux boxes by the end of the year). We run software by BEA and Tibco on our machines (and probably other packages I'm not as familiar with, but those are the major two). We're interested in Oracle on top of Linux.

      Unfortunately, there's no ISV support for FreeBSD and while I'd *LOVE* to choose FreeBSD over Linux I can't do it for business reasons. Unfortunately this also leads to choose me to avoid FreeBSD even for ISV-free machines at work. The pool of System Engineers that we've got is more familiar with Linux than FreeBSD, and there's no way to guarantee than an ISV product won't be needed on any given machine in the future.

      And unfortunately when I'm talking about Linux ISV support I'm necessarily talking about RedHat ISV support. I really wish that either SuSE or FreeBSD would be supported by ISVs. RedHat is just flatly the worst Unix distribution in the world. They still insist on release kernels that have VMs which are substantially more fucked up than the vanilla one. Isn't it about time to simply recognize that the only guy in the Linux community who understands how to write a stable VM works for SuSE and move on?

      Unfortunately, what I care about most in a Unix OS is (in order):

      1. ISV support
      2. 12-18 month release cycle
      3. Three supported versions of distro (yes, that means you have to support a distribution for 3-5 years)
      4. Hardware product testing matrix and good QA

      I can get this out of Solaris. The only Linux distribution which comes close to this is RedHat and they really need to work on the third point and don't even come close to the fourth point (Intel hardware makes testing matrices difficult...)

      And I'd like to emphasize how important that third point is. With 1,000 machines and 8 people we can't handle upgrading all those machines every 6-9 months. "Release Early, Release Often" is an open source lie.

      If you're just building basic infrastructure, I'd agree that FreeBSD is the way to go over Linux. The one caveat to that is if you're using heavy SMP machines like 6-way boxes (like we do). Then you need to wait for FreeBSD 5.x for the SMP support (and every indication is that it will cream Linux's SMP support after it gets stabilized).

  4. Re:It's a titty by alfredo · · Score: 3, Interesting

    No, BSD is not dead. Try OSX.

    --
    photosMy Photostream
  5. Re:Linux for desktop, *BSD for servers? - why not. by Wouter+Van+Hemel · · Score: 2, Interesting


    I like linux, but if I can choose freely, there is nothing I would pick over a *bsd, most likely freebsd.

    There is no linux distribution that is as mature and aimed for servers. Don't even start talking about the bloated linux 'server' editions... A minimal bsd install, the latest versions of the services you really need compiled by hand and optimized, and you're set.

    Mind though: I really don't think there's such a big difference between freebsd and linux, each has its pro's and con's... It really doesn't matter that much. Just use the right tools for the job, it's all opensource anyway.

    And you can build a very minimal Linux distro yourself too, if you want... It's all about freedom, if you want linux on workstations (because that's what most distro's aim at) and freebsd on servers, you do that. And it'll work.

    I wish the 'x is better than y'-people would just shut up and use 'x' in silence. Or contribute, if they really have too much time and energy anyway.

  6. Re:Mac OS X is not really BSD. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    It's not really free.

    Do you have a point?

    It's a pain in the [...] to add unofficial hardware support.

    And this is different than Windows, The 190+ versions of GNU/Linux, BeOS etc la HOW?

    There are problems with porting of Linux desktop software to Mac OS X. And it's not a multi-platform.

    Talk to the bozos who write non-portable code. Writing code that is linux-only is different than writing code that is windows-only how?

    If your goal it to be no better than Windows, writing non-portable code gets you there. Some people have higher goals in life.