Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #2
noackjr writes "'The FreeBSD Project is proud to announce the availability of the second Developer Preview snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0 (5.0-DP2). This
snapshot, intended for widespread testing purposes, is the latest milestone towards the eventual release of FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE, currently scheduled for mid-December 2002.' See the announcement, early adopter's guide, and the release notes."
SMP support in this new version should rock, Freebsd never had good SMP support until now, If you are a SMP user check this update out! I know its beta but its well worth it..HUGE speed increases.
keanmarine.com
Now that DP2 is here, I might as well jump in the CURRENT water again and give it a go again. The time that CURRENT _did_ work for me, it worked great and I considered it stable. I have been following/lurking the current@ mailinglist for quite a while, and it's been fun seeing al these cool new things appear.
Great work. I'm definately going to give this a spin.
Someone take BSD and do a Mandrake version of it while at the same time keeping it all opensource and free. Ie make it really user friendly(Gui installer, admin tools etc). I'm surprised there has been no effort to do so. I mean beyond what Apple did I don't even hear any rumors of anyone even trying to do that.
I know BSD is a more thought of as a server OS, but I've heard plently of BSD users claim its makes a fine desktop as well. If that's every going to happen they definitely need to start working on making it more user friendly.
This whole issue with BSD and the ammount of fervor behind it reminds me of a parable I'd like to share, not meaning to cause offense or shove doctrines on anyone.
Once in the land of Karjakistan, there was a great sultan who had no heir, his wisemen dispaired and decreed that the queen should be put to death that the king might marry another. In her desperation she called on the wisest guru of the land, Bobi-Son-Denobi (BSD), telling him he was her only hope. So BSD arrived at the palace and met Queen Needs-a-Leia and she told him of the problem:
"Oh BSD, you must help me, for my husband has not produced an heir for he will not take me into his bed!"
BSD was confused, what man would refuse a woman with such a large set of erm... kernals? So he searched for the answer high and low until he came to the master handler, Linux. Linux told him of a dark secret, how King Mesa Sofi (King MS) would sneak down into the animals cages and have wild escapades with the camels. BSD was shocked, the world knew MS was cursed but not so defiled, but still an heir needed to be produced, so he went back to the Queen and asked her to disrobe (hey, she did it for Jaba, right?). He gazed at her nubile figure, which seemed as if it were petrified, like Natalie Portman.
The answer was as obvious as steaming hot grits, of course he thought! I HAS THE SOLUTION!
And so BSD appeared before King MS, with Linux and the two approached the throne. "Your monopoliness," BSD began, "If you will view the naked body of your wife."
Need-a-Leia disrobed again her nude form shining forth, "You will notice her... um TCP/IP socket... looks a bit like the toe of a beast of burdan, a camel's toe if you will."
The King looked on and was pleased, and so the Queen bore him a son and was spared, BSD and Linux had saved the day.
The moral of the story is, Microsoft is a bunch of sick bastards who need to listen to open source and stop fucking livestock.
1.Ports
2.Packages
3.easy update (make buildworld etc..)
4.The Devil not that fat fucking penguin
Yes, the BSD's have a binary compatibility mode so you can take a linux compiled program and run it most of the time flawlessly. You can ALSO just recompile any opensource program and it will again 99% of the time run fine.
As for which is superior, that's certaintly a matter of taste. My first Linux experience was with Slackware way back, and then RedHat starting with version 4 and then 5. Then I gave FreeBSD a try. I actually find it easier to get setup and in many ways more consistent in terms of design and organization (given at least beginner level *nix knowledge). It's really a matter of personal taste though.
Jeremy Zawodny, who works at Yahoo, wrote an interesting article in his weblog a few months ago. It chronicles his experience with MySQL under FreeBSD and MySQL's problems with threading under FreeBSD. It will be interesting to see if 5.0 improves these things significantly.
6.02x10^23, baby!
If the application you want to run is one of the 5000 applications in the "FreeBSD ports collection", then a simple "make install" in the proper directory will download the sources, patch them for FreeBSD, compile and install. If you need to run something that is distributed as binaries only, then FreeBSD has support for the Linux ABI. I run Linux versions of Mathematica and Unreal Tournament 2003 with no problems at all.
I'm a FreeBSD user since three months, and I think FreeBSD is an excellent beginner's unix.
My unix adventures started with downloading Redhat and installing it. It took 30 minutes and I learned nothing. Then I sat there with a system that I had no idea how to configure to my taste. I disliked it and went back to Windows.
My next try was FreeBSD. Installing it took a couple of tries and it took at least a day or two before I was satisfied. But I learned a lot, mainly because of the excellent online documentation. Now I run FreeBSD on all my computers and I am not going back.
That being said, expect Linux to have better support for the latest and greatest hardware. (And expect Windows to have even better hardware support than Linux!) But I'm happy since the recent release of FreeBSD drivers for my NVidia card.
Linux is beginning to hit so big in corporate America that the software development effort to develop new applications and port existing applications to Linux is amazing.
This of course is just my opinion, but I would have to say that the development effort for Linux is outpacing that of the FreeBSD community.
I suppose the bottom line though is what works best for you? I would recommend that you take a look at both and decide for yourself which one works best for you.
Besides some small (and not so small) technical differences, the most significant divergence between BSD and Linux is the license model (and the underlying philosophy). Linux is a GPL kernel, with GNU tools providing rest of the system (thus GNU/Linux). The GPL license has a clause that says if one wants to distribute a modified version of a GPL'ed software, one must also include the modified source code. BSD however says you can do whatever you want with the program and its code, including selling your modified version without source code. All you have to do is include the BSD/UC Berkeley copyright notice. If you ever read the MS Windows copyrigth page, it includes the BSD Copyright. Yes, MS Windows has some BSD code.
A lot of other Open Source software are BSD styled. Others are GPL.
It's a matter of which philosophy you subscribe to.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
As of about a week ago, the Linux versions of many games run with full 3D acceleration on NVIDIA cards, for example Quake3 and Unreal Tournament 2003 (out of the box, although it's a pain to get installed).
99% of Linux executables can be run after a simple 'brandelf -t Linux executable', although I have found a couple of very sloppily coded sh scripts that ran on Linux and didn't work as-is on FreeBSD (most notibly the UT2003 install script mentioned above).
As someone who switched from Slackware to FreeBSD, I don't forsee ever moving to anything else. Not to disrespect Linux, but it is relatively a mess.
Someone else here described FreeBSD kernel as being a "borg cube", and that it is - in a structured and nicely organised way. And this philosophy extends to the entire distro.
If you're happy with Linux, fine - enjoy. You're only going to be able to run mostly the same software anyway. But I would recommend checking out FreeBSD if you're stuck with anything else.
Try somewhere far in the 7000's. You, sir, are several YEARS behind ;)
Anyone know if Apple plans on updating their FreeBSD-based bits with this anytime soon?
Probably too soon for 10.3 to be based on this, but maybe 10.4?
Just ask ... yahoo ... netcraft ... and slew of other servers that rely on BSD. If you want a server and you want the best bang for the buck, freebsd is the best price out there. (free)
For all the trolls who say BSD isn't GPL, well duh, BSD is in itself a license. Sometimes you just gotta wonder. If linux was so wonderful then why would apple choose BSD for OS X and not linux? It's more than just the license, BSD is a very nice OS that is wonderfully stable.
Rule of Thumb, if it works in linux it will more than likely work in freebsd, and vice versa, well that is until you try to compile a kernel not of that OS :-) ... try it before you bash it.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
The only thing Gentoo's portage has over *BSD's ports is the better updating mechanism. Portupgrade under freebsd just blows chunks, and not just because yet another script interpreter (ruby) needs to be installed. It croaks a lot when dependancies somehow shift (because you compiled new versions of something). Which lieves you with the dreaded pkgdb -F which sometimes leaves you guessing. I think the FreeBSD ports system could learn something from the NetBSD port system which has a make update target.
But that's just my personal opinion on both systems. They are both nice, but the FreeBSD ports system comes out on top wrt flexibility.
Here's a reason you might not hear from anyone else. FreeBSD is fast. It can make an old 486 seem like a Pentium 233MMX and a 733MHz PIII seem like a 3GHz P4. I'm serious, man. This has been my personal experience. Stop griping and try it. The installer isn't half as bad as the Debian installer and just about anything that can run on Linux can be recompiled for FreeBSD. Give it a shot.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
Here are some big ticket items in -CURRENT that you might want to check out.
;).. Recommended you use UFS2 for full extended attribute support.
:)
;(.. UFS2 is not yet bootable on i386 due to space constraints in the boot loader. No word on whether this will be fixed in time.
/pub/FreeBSD/development I believe. sparc64 is actually part of the DP release
/etc/rc.d. This is basically an import from NetBSD. scripts in rc.d, as opposed to the init.d/rc*.d method where the filename determines the dependency order, use a program called rcorder(8) to determine the order in which scripts are executed. rcorder determines the order by special headers in the scripts. e.g.
1) Filesystem Snapshots/Background fsck - On filesystems with softupdates enabled, fsck will be performed on the mounted filesystem (well, actually a snapshot) after the disk is mounted. This allows fsck to be run without affecting uptime along with the other obvious benefits of having snapshot support (dump comes to mind).
2) ACLs - Filesystem ACLs are included with FreeBSD now and can be set using the standard setfacl/getfacl methods
3) LOMAC - The LOMAC with DP2 is apparently old and seems intrusive. A recommendation from the author was to try the version of LOMAC from trustedbsd CVS. It is said to contain "99% less ASS"
4) MAC - I personally haven't tried it yet, however I plan to. Recommended you use UFS2 for full extended attribute support. This could/should rock
5) GEOM - A modular framework for disk I/O. This allows modules to be placed along the I/O request path in order to do nifty things such as filesystem encryption easily. There is an encryption module already written for this as well
6) UFS2 - UFS with extended attributes support and various code cleanup afaik. sysinstall will use UFS1 by default
7) SMPng - Have at it.. Last I heard, the speed increases weren't as significant as people seem to think they'll be. The groundwork is laid out though for future speed improvements. A lot of code has been moved out from under Giant (Big Giant Lock). That could have definitely changed though, as the last time I heard an SMPng update was at the kernel summit in SF. There are quite a few debugging options enabled in GENERIC, so you might want to take note of that.
8) sparc64/Itan{ic|ium} - If you have a supported hardware config.. Itanium is under
9) gcc3 - Nothing more to really put here.
10) New and improved rc system in
# PROVIDE: sshd
# REQUIRE: LOGIN
# KEYWORD: FreeBSD NetBSD
Ports, unfortunately, does not use this dependency system yet. However, last I heard, there will be a cutoff date at which time they should support it.
Some information may be outdated, but most of it should be correct.
Enjoy,
-JD-
Maybe i'll do gentoo again in the future, but definitely not now. Yes, it does do ports, but the ports tools are far from complete and almost useless. You can install a port using the portage tool 'emerge', but once it is installed there is no way to manage your installed ports. FreeBSD has a good variety of package management frontends. The pkg_* tools let you manipulate binary packages. The ports tree is based off of make files which makes versioning a bit of a pain, but there are tools that exist like 'portupgrade' which allow you to keep a current package/ports database _WITH_ version info. For some strange reason, there are changes appended to the changelogs of each port in gentoo without bumping the patch level of the port. This is insane! Thus it is not impossible, but a royal pain in the ass to keep two machines synced when it comes to package versions.
On to easy updates... A whole bunch of tarballs with patchfiles works for a ports system, but not the base system. FreeBSD keeps the entire base system in CVS. FreeBSD actually has a base system. FreeBSD has multiple branches of development. Maybe gentoo will mature to the point where they make a real base system and do real release engineering, but it currently isnt the OS of choice for me.
Also, because the development cycle of FreeBSD is significantly more sane than that of the Linux kernel and the base system/toolchain which never has and never will exist in one master repository, nVidia's drivers work on the -CURRENT development branch of FreeBSD from which this developers preview was taken. Change one line in one file, and they build flawlessly (or at least they can, hopefully on this developer's preview too). The drivers even register properly with devfs.
Do yourself a favor and try FreeBSD, then you can check the FreeBSD mailling list archive if something is broken, instead of searching for a fix with google. It'll save you hours.
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
Just after compiling the perl port, do:
use.perl port <enter>
and you STABLE system will always use the perl from the ports. This will probably save you a headache or two when upgrading to CURRENT
Funny, I have quite the opposite judgement. I'm a huge FreeBSD fan, am typing this on my FreeBSD laptop in fact, but it now dual-boots Gentoo. One of the big selling points of FreeBSD, for me, was the ports system -- RPM is just so much of a headache -- but that was until I met gentoo. It has really gotten rid of many of the headaches associated with FreeBSD's ports: in particular, if you have a port A installed, and then port B pulls in a newer version of port A, the old version can be uninstalled automatically and safely in Gentoo without touching any of the new files. (In fact Gentoo now does it automatically.) And that's just one aspect: I like the fact that gentoo portage supports multiple versions of ports, that it generates the CONTENTS file automatically, and if your favourite port hasn't been updated to the latest version, you can often trivially do it yourself (you can also do that in FreeBSD but it's more complicated to get the CONTENTS right, and if you don't it won't uninstall cleanly). Now that I've used Gentoo for some time, FreeBSD's ports system is clearly showing its rough edges and deficiencies.
So why am I sticking with FreeBSD? Because it performs better (especially under load), and a lot of things just work better -- eg, I occasionally have problems with ppp or dhcp/cable modem in linux, never in FreeBSD. But gentoo has huge potential, in fact it's already a pretty spiffy system, I think. If I had multiple machines, I'd install FreeBSD on the "mission critical" ones and gentoo on the "play" ones (bleeding-edge software, multimedia, etc).
When my company was just starting out in late 1998, we deployed Linux for our custom S.E.D.D solution. It worked reasonably, aside from the occassional ext2 filesystem crash or kernel panic, which wasn't a big deal then since we had redundancy and weren't under heavy load. Unfortunately, when the load started increasing, so did the crashes and panics. The systems needed to be reinstalled every week. After messing around trying to get the 2.3.x series of kernels to work, I eventually had a cutting edge test server to see if the latest Linux offering could match up. It didn't.
I read about FreeBSD and downloaded the 3.2-RELEASE version. Since then I've tracked both STABLE and CURRENT, and I can say with conviction that any FreeBSD system is more stable, can take higher load, and is far easier to configure for hard-core use than is any Linux dsitribution, in my experience. The FreeBSD servers slowed (but even then, not as much as the Linux servers had), but didn't crash, even when far higher load was placed on them than was placed on the Linux servers we used to run. As a S.E.D.D company, we send millions of secure documents out per day, and also thousands at once. Since this IS Slashdot, and people here are Linux fanatics, I am not logged in with my username or password, since (a) I don't want to lose all of my karma and (b) I don't want childish Linuxbrats sending flames to me.
Linux may be ok for some, but for people who are trying to run their own companies, still have some sort of life, have other hobbies, like horse riding, and have girlfriends, Linux is not the ideal solution.
I was having similar problems with FreeBSD, regarding newer versions of ports, and portupgrade helps a lot in making this easy to handle. It's made managing things just so much easier. It's incredible, really.
----------
Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless
Just because Linux is gaining share doesn't necessarily mean that BSD is losing. It does mean that UNIX is gaining though. :)
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
You do raise a good point in some ways--Linux has a lot of corporate backing and is very "loud" and attention grabbing. In the meanwhile, the server room is running bsd ;)
Don't forget that when you say development for linux is outpacing bsd what does that mean? The servers apps most people run has nothing to do with the OS. Samba, Bind, Netatalk, Squid, Apache, IP NAT+firewall etc, ssh, ftp, sendmail and variants of these programs--these are what most people run, and these have absolutely no connection to linux.
I have tried Gentoo, but I'm back to Slackware. I used to use FreeBSD (for 5 years) but had to switch to Linux because of vmware (current versions alas do not run under FreeBSD).
/usr/src, to be installed/updated by syncing the source and then execute 'make world' in /usr/src.
For me as an old FreeBSD user, Slackware feels much much more "at home". Yes, Gentoo has ports (I prefer FreeBSD's though) but a big drawback is that, in contrast to FreeBSD, the whole base system is also made up of ports.
In FreeBSD the 'core' system is the same everywhere, not maintained by ports but having all source code in
Gentoo, with its web of port dependencies and infinite number of configurations, is unstable because of this. Also a small change often requires recompilation and reinstallation of 'everything'. Just read the Gentoo boards/mailing lists to see how often some configuration (combination of ports) breaks.
FreeBSD ports also break occasionally, but at least the don't affect the base system.
Apart from that, Slackware is like FreeBSD w.r.t. simplicity for file layouts, rc startup files etc. Gentoo feels more like other Linuces. This is a matter of taste and of what you're used to. I am convinced that most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware if they have to use a Linux distribution.
1. It's true, most applications for Linux can be run under FreeBSD.
2. It's a matter of personal choice to run one or the other on a desktop workstation. I run Linux because it's just more fun. Better 3D games support, newer drivers for everything and much more rapid development full of new ideas, little bits of GNU humor or cleverness all over the place and a lot of variety. It feels right. Of course, a lot of FreeBSD users would say that 3D gaming is for gamer weenies, newer drivers equal more unstable drivers, GNU humor and cleverness are really just lack of professionalism and variety is really the same thing as inconsistency. It's all a matter of personal taste if it's your personal system.
For non-personal systems, I'd say it's more a matter of whatever your vendor is pushing. In more and more cases these days, that will be Linux, but there are still some large firms that are outfitting people with *BSD.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
Kernel threads are going to mean more than any other feature to FreeBSD 5. Benchmark performance may not increase that much because of kernel threads, but they'll allow many applications to be ported to FreeBSD. Now, a lot of programs that run on Linux, Solaris, and Windows, can't be ported to FreeBSD because of its inferior threading. Thread-intensive languages (most notoriously, Java) and database servers should be much more comfortable on FreeBSD 5, after it shakes down.
I concede that FreeBSD *is* more stable than Linux. However, the data you're using is nearly five years old, an eternity in the technology world. FreeBSD is certainly no longer an order of magnitude more stable than Linux, while at the same time both FreeBSD and Linux are several orders of magnitude more stable than Windows on "do-it-yourself" hardware found at small companies or in homes.
Of course, for controlled quantities like vendor-supplied hardware, all three can be very stable, though I'd still suggest that FreeBSD and Linux are at least an order of magnitude more stable than Windows.
And just to inject some of my own anecodtal evidence, on a volunteer basis I administrate several SMP x86 file and Web servers for NGO's/NPO's that 1) run Slackware Linux, 2) have uptimes >700 days and 3) have significant load a good percentage of the time with load spikes at times that can reach into the stratosphere.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
From my own experience my company uses FreeBSD. Yahoo uses FreeBSD. pair.com one of the bigger hosting providers uses FreeBSD. mp3.com uses FreeBSD. Hotmail used to use FreeBSD, I'm not sure if they still do. (after it was bought by MS that is). ftp.cdrom.com uses FreeBSD. I'm sure there are more, and this isn't even getting into the internal server rooms of companies, hard to say there. FreeBSD is definitely a proven platform, it's not fair to lump it as "ISP's only".
If you had to look at all the linux servers running on the internet today (and discounting personal boxes) I would bet you the VAST majority are running none of those applications you mention. That's one of the reasons that MS and the commercial unixes still hold a sway--running those apps. You do raise a good point--oracle on FreeBSD (for example) is not a viable solution. But I'm not at all convinced that Linux is beating out the BSD's the way you think.
I would be REALLY curious to see how many linux and bsd boxes are running what you call a little "utility" box (and I'll throw in fileservers too). I would bet that that is the big domain of linux and bsd alike.
One of the reasons I choose Linux over BSD is the rate at which Linux development takes place.
Well, a new kernel every couple of weeks is fine if you're running Linux on a PC in your bedroom, but in the real world, it takes time to deploy software. It has to be tested, downtime scheduled, documentation updated, staff trained, etc. The big advantage of FreeBSD (and Debian for that matter) is that it gets much more thoroughly tested before it's declared "STABLE". Although it may lag behind the cutting edge a little, that's a far, far happier place to be if you are relying on your systems to run your business. Not only that, but there is one FreeBSD, maintained in a consistent way by a single organization. If you are writing or deploying software that requires certain versions of certain things to be in certain places, then you have to only support a subset of the possible Linux distributions, or choose something like FreeBSD which is far more consistent. FreeBSD does not need to make compromises for portability to other platforms (like NetBSD and Linux), it is wholly developed for x86.
In short, my position is that Linux is better if you want to experiment, FreeBSD is better if you want to run crucial applications or infrastructure.
As I understand it, one of the reasons Linux took off so fast in the early 90s was that people were frightened of the whole IP/patents thing surrounding 4.4BSD Lite. Later on, the copyright (whatever) issues were resolved, but by then the damage had been done and Linux had gained a lot of recognition/popularity. *
:)
So I reckon that early adopters of FreeBSD would have had to struggle to persuade management that it was worth using, and that it wasn't a dead-end platform.
BTW, I use FreeBSD in all my servers at our small place of work (except where I have to use OS X server). Personally, I love it. But maybe that's because we *do* use all of the ftp/sendmail/apache stuff the above poster mentioned, and none of the crap the next one mentioned
* Someone correct me if I'm spouting BS.
- Oliver
The right to bear arms is only slightly less stupid than the right to arm bears...