FreeBSD 4.6

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.

Comments

Great to hear it...

[Meat Blaster]

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...

Linux for desktop, *BSD for servers?

[korpiq]

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?

Re:Linux for desktop, *BSD for servers?

[lamontg]

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).

Re:It's a titty

[alfredo]

No, BSD is not dead. Try OSX.