FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 Now Available

Dan writes "Murray Stokely of FreeBSD release engineering team announces that they're one milestone closer with the immediate availability of FreeBSD first release candidate for the i386, alpha, sparc64, and ia64 platforms. ISO images and FTP installation directories are available now from the FreeBSD FTP site."

Comments

Re:Can someone Provide a link to "What's New" page

[ekrout]

Here's a direct link to the pertinent section. It details kernel, userland, and security updates that have gone into the 5.0 tree of FreeBSD.

Re:Hope it supports Token Ring

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know whether you're just a troll or unclear on basic concepts, but you're wrong on multiple counts. 802.11b cards are well-supported, and journalling is a band-aid for a filesystem. FreeBSD's filesystem is well-designed and doesn't need that band-aid. As for token ring, ehh...

Re:Yes...

[drdink]

FreeBSD does have a Linux ABI which allows it to run Linux binaries. In fact, I have an entire Linux base system in /usr/compat/linux for that reason. Using VMWare, it is also possible to run Linux on FreeBSD.

For more information about the Linux ABI, see this manpage.

Version 5.0 Early Adopter's Guide

[delfstrom]

The Version 5.0 Early Adopter's Guide summarizes some of the new features that were not feasible to port back to the 4.x branch:

• SMPng: The next generation support for SMP machines (work in progress). There is now partial support for multiple processors to be running in the kernel at the same time.

• KSE: Kernel Scheduled Entities allow a single process to have multiple kernel-level threads, similar to Scheduler Activations.

• New architectures: Support for the sparc64 and ia64 architectures, in addition to the i386, pc98, and alpha.

• GCC: The compiler toolchain is now based on GCC 3. X , rather than GCC 2.95. X .

• MAC: Support for extensible, loadable Mandatory Access Control policies.

• GEOM: A flexible framework for transformations of disk I/O requests. An experimental disk encryption facility has been developed based on GEOM.

• FFS: The FFS filesystem now supports background fsck (8) operations (for faster crash recovery) and filesystem snapshots.

• UFS2: A new UFS2 on-disk format has been added, which supports extended per-file attributes and larger file sizes.

• Cardbus: Support for Cardbus devices.

Re:Good enough for production use?

[drdink]

NO. Do not use it in a production environment. For specific details on this issue, see this page. Specifically:

(FreeBSD 5.0 suffers from what has been described as a ``chicken and egg'' problem. The entire project has a goal of producing a 5.0-RELEASE that is as stable and reliable as possible. This stability and reliability requires widespread testing, particularly of the system's newer features. However, getting a large number of users to test the system, in a practical sense, means building and distributing a release first!)

I would suggest you wait until at least 5.1-RELEASE before adopting it on a real production system. That said, I am using 5.0-RC on my desktop system and have been using -CURRENT on it for a while now. It is all about how much time you want to put into helping smash little bugs when they pop up.

Re:Yes...

[Fweeky]

(kldload linux ;./sick-linux-binary ; rejoice! )

Don't forget to brandelf it too, if said sick-linux-binary happens to have a broken elf header which says it's a Solaris binary or whatever, i.e:

brandelf -t Linux sick-linux-binary

Since while FreeBSD will use the elf header to make things like Linux emulation work, Linux just ignores it, meaning a lot of tools like to produce incorrect headers. Tsk :)