FreeBSD 5.0-RC2 Now Available

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 5.0-RC2 has been uploaded to ftp-master and is showing up on most of the primary mirrors. ia32, ia64, pc98, and alpha images are available now; sparc64 will be pushed out once it becomes available. The plan going forward is to cut an RC3 in early January, followed by 5.0-RELEASE a week later."

Comments

Use a mirror... please :(

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm getting about 2 kB/s. =[

Re:Use a mirror... please :(

[filekutter]

65 kps, ....... just a bit more and I'll have a new toy to play with... ;}

Big Step For Lil Devil

[Anonymous Coward]

I converted to FreeBSD 3 from RedHat 5 and have not looked back since. It just makes more sense structurally and is more solid than anything I have found on i386. BSD argueably has the most solid TCP/IP stack out there. A few examples:

- F5 BigIP's converted from BSDi to a modified FreeBSD kernel in v4 (microsoft uses these for Windows update)

- Also I had to laugh when I found out F5 inserted the BSD TCP/IP stack in one of their "Red Hat" cache appliances (EdgeFX) for performance resons. :)

- The evil empire also uses FreeBSD for hotmail. You didn't think Winders could hang?

- Nokia/Checkpoint FW1 and IDS sensors run BSD kernels

- Can you folks think of anymore on the resume?

The interesting history is that Bill Joy (went on to help form SUN) was behind the original BSD movement. I heard it used to be called Bills' Software Distro... Wasn't Berkley behind tcp/ip? You folks probably know more of the history than me.

Anyways, I had a crash and burn attempt at 5.0RC2 last night so I'll probably wait for 1/17/03 and get a new box for 5.0 Release.

Re:Big Step For Lil Devil

[Anonymous Coward]

thats nice, too bad freebsd 3 is more than 2 years old you asshat.

Re:Big Step For Lil Devil

[(startx)]

what's the point of copy/pasting comments from the first story as ac? dipshit

Re:Big Step For Lil Devil

[Anonymous Coward]

It was copied from the email announcing that RC2 was AVAILABLE (not "Almost") not from the other story.

The other submitter worded the story badly and had he copied from the email, like me, then the confusiuon wouldn't have been arisn. Instead he wanted to provide "an angle" and confused people in the process.

Besides which, I submitted this story way before the other hit the page.

Re:Big Step For Lil Devil

[someonehasmyname]

Yahoo!

Re:Big Step For Lil Devil

[Anonymous Coward]

- The evil empire also uses FreeBSD for hotmail. You didn't think Winders could hang?

Sigh, why do BSD-heads so often quote outdated information? Yes, Hotmail _did_ use FreeBSD on the frontend (the backend database, where all the real work is being done, was always Solaris), but it no longer does. Ok?

Re:Big Step For Lil Devil

[Anonymous Coward]

I said asshat yesterday and my wife laughed.

Double Take!

[XBL]

Wow, I never thought I would see a dupe on the main page of Slashdot with the original story. This is really incredible.

I have to say, my desire to come to this site has been weakening of late, and shit like this makes just kills people's respect for Slashdot.

Are there any other sites that provide similar news stories in a more professional manner? Are there any alternatives?

Not a dupe

[Stinson]

Its not a dupe. Compare the 2 articles. The earlier one this morning said that the FreeBSD developers said its compiled and should be available shortly and put up the release schedule, where as this new said its definitly available now, and even on mirrors, which normally take a while to get up to date. If anything, at the farthest, this is more like a partial dupe, but figuring CmdrTaco posted it, he most likely reads his news everymorning and noticed the previous one.

Re:Not a dupe

[shlong]

It is a dupe. The first article was a very poor paraphrasing of the announcement.

Re:Not a dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

The first article shouldnt have gone up IMHO. It was misleading.

pthreads using rfork?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this release candidate have a native pthreads implementation that uses rfork to provide kernel level threads?

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Re:pthreads using rfork?
I looked at the man page, this seems similar to the clone call on Linux, which they wrapped pthreads around. Aren't there performance issues on this, that it's a process not a thread? I could see issues with signals as well.

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[Leimy]

I thought pthreads were going to be based on KSE's [Kernel Scheduling Entities and yes it is possible to see something less than a kernel process as a schedulable context and to build one's threads and processes upon it.. though I will admit to not being very familiar with the architecture of KSE's yet. :)] and not be full processes. In fact I am 100% positive that FreeBSD 5.0 is going for M:N mapping of threads to processes meaning that they are not planning to do the 1:1 that linux had for years up until NPTL came out.

Linux used to use clone to get a new LWP but 2.6 should have some much newer, better stuff.

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this functionality present in 5.0?

I am running 5.0-RC1 and the compiling against pthreads hasn't given me any real difference over past implementations.

Importantly, when I use the msgrcv() to block and wait for a SYSV message, it halts every thread in my application, instead of the 1 thread calling msgrcv(). This is not good. All threads should run concurrently - I thought this was the whole point of threading.

Jamie.

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, threads based on fork/rfork/clone is a horrible idea. threads will be based upon KSEs, which will give solaris level threading performance, and much less overhead. This basically splits the process into an equal number of threads as you have processors, scheduling is done by the kernel of those threads, and user-level threading is done within each of those. This means you can fully utilize all the CPUs in your machine with only that number of kernel schedule entries, the overhead of managing thousands of threads is pushed off to that applicaton (where it should be). In terms of scalability, this is where it is at. Its simply a briliant idea. I'm surprised it took OpenSource this long to get it.

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps... IPC_NOWAIT?

Shall I continue to guess what else you've done,
or are you going to post more information or
even a code snippet?

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[muyThaiBxr]

FreeBSD has linux threads which do something similar.... FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE (as far as I know) will also have it's own form of kernel threading called KSE's... These are much better than the rfork threads.

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[Anonymous Coward]

But will this overcome one of the main limitations of the current FreeBSD pthreads implementation (4.x)?

If you block 1 thread, with say a msgrcv() call, every single thread in the application will be forced to sleep also! This is ridiculous. If one thread blocks, the others should run quite happily, even on a uniprocessor machine.

The rfork/clone method gets over this as each thread/process gets scheduled regardless if 1 is blocking.

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[Anonymous Coward]

neat idea but makes assumptions about application space. who's to say an application wouldn't desire to choose between a good container mechanism like you mentioned, or participate in full kernel scheduling?

a server is running a 1-process per user pop mail daemon plus an awesomely implemented 1 process per user threaded imap mail daemon. easy to see how the older technology will not only consume more vram but will also get more scheduling attention than a the threaded app server, assuming of course heavy load, and number of users orders of magnitudes above total # of cpus (or total # of cpus multiplied by two for hyperthreading or total # of cpus multiplied by two for nextend sparcs) etc. etc. etc. etc.

Re:pthreads using rfork?

[rplacd]

I believe the KSE migration won't be complete until 5.1 or so. This page is incomplete: http://www.freebsd.org/kse/

Read it first on Slashdot

[Groganz]

Tomorrow: Freebsd 5.0-RC2 one day old.

Re:Read it first on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

Tomorrow, later in the day: Freebsd 5.0-RC2 one and a half days old.

Re:Read it first on Slashdot

[Anonymous Coward]

This afternoon:

Freebsd 5.0-RC2 ALMOST one day old.

LMAO ;o)

Re:Read it first on Slashdot

[horcy]

hehe but this joke is gettin' really old. FreeBSD is a big thing so why not give it the attention it deserves. We dont want articles about every security patch M$ is releasing right? So why not some attention for this instead. One thing though, FreeBSD 5.0 RC2 almost ready is A BIT over the top.

pending bsd vs linux flame war...

[thogard]

os vs os wars should be moded to -1 but I just saw something I thought was odd...

In the "related links" section for this topic there is a link: Compare the best prices on: Software/Operating Systems

so which has the best price, Free BSD or Linux :-)

CVS Tree created

[pfish]

If you'd like to use cvsup to get to this release, change your current

<i>*default release=cvs tag=</i>
to:
<i>*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5</i>

Note: You may have to run this 2 times - the first time it will <B>DELETE</B> the contains of your existing src dir, the second time it will inflate it.

Re:CVS Tree created

[pfish]

Cute...it didn't post in HTML as i selected.

If you'd like to use cvsup to get to this release, change your current

*default release=cvs tag=
to:
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5


Note: You may have to run this 2 times - the first time it will DELETE the contains of your existing src dir, the second time it will inflate it.

Re:Why bother?

[schematix]

That is interesting. My company is currently using FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE-p2 on a dual athlon mp box without a hitch.

Not to start a flame war, but for certain things, FreeBSD is just better. Not to mention it makes my life a lot easier as an admin because of the excellent organization of the entire operation system. I switched my current company (along with the admin who was a Linux lover since 1.0) to FreeBSD and so far it has been perfect. The comment from the original admin: "Why didn't we do this sooner?". When you need something that just works, FreeBSD is there to do it.

Re:Why bother?

[Solosoft]

Uggh, dam zealots ... BSD is having the same problem linux had ... the goofs running it ... Linux is way ahead of it's time cause of the corprate support, BSD is old skool. Don't get me wrong, but I know WAY more people running BSD that know FUCK all but there OS is "stable" and "secure" Linux can be secure and all that you just need to play with it ... Face it BSD sucks

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only thing clearly obvious is that you are a dumbshit troll. Do you work for Microsoft??

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

GuK is GaY !!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re:Why bother?

[filekutter]

As a fren' of mine sez: "BSD is a nice mature 30 yrs old, while Linux is still a very young 10 yrs old. Now, who do you want running your rig? A youngster or a flexible battle scarred adult?" Remember, BSD is Unix, not Linux! HMMMM? The question contains the answer as far as I"m concerned.

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're too fucking dumb to distinguish "their" from "there", so you lose all authoritative magisterial know-it-all points.

Learn to communicate.

Re:Why bother?

[benedict]

People's Front of Judea, anyone?

News flash: for most intents and purposes, the
similarities between Linux and BSD are far more
significant than the differences.

PPC Support

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Power PC support in FreeBSD 5.0?

Re:Why bother?

[filekutter]

benedict, i thought a while on your note, and I do agree..... they are very similar. Nada else to say... no argument, or stance to take... :)

Re:Why bother?

[Solosoft]

Naw ... I could run BSD and be lame like you george ?

Re:Why bother?

[Anonymous Coward]

The parent was posted by:

Chris Sologuk
2195 Josephine St
Sudbury, ON P3A 2N4
(705) 525-1393

Call him.. call him late..