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FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 Now Ready

Posted by Hemos on from the go-out-and-get-it dept.

Dan writes "Scott Long announces that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 has been released and available at all mirrors sites. Release notes can be viewed here, you can download 5.0 RC3 from ftp.freebsd.org or from one of your favorite mirror sites. Many thanks to the FreeBSD Release Engineering team for their work efforts!"

21 of 291 comments (clear)

  1. Look it moved by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    So it can't be completely dead!

  2. You know... by sofo · · Score: 5, Funny

    ...saying *BSD is dead is dead.

  3. Re:*BSD Vs. Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Common question, what you will hear:

    1. BSD can do everything Linux can do

    2. Better server OS though in recent years linux has greatly caught up

    3. Not as good on the desktop on Linux

    4. FreeBSD ports system is better than anything linux offers

    5. Not as good hardware support on FreeBSD as Linux, or games.

    6. I think FreeBSD is easier to install(others think I am crazy)

    7. Java sucks on FreeBSD

    7. BSD is dead

    I switched from linux to FreeBSD and prefer FreeBSD so take my comments with a grain of salt.

    Since I don;t want to label a linux-haters and watch my karma drop like a rock, I'm posting ac

  4. Excellent System by martinmcc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I've just changed my Desktop OS from Mandrake to FreeBSD - I'd been running FreeBSD as my server OS for a few years now and have always been impressed by its stability (NEVER had a crash) and ease of configuration. I was unsure about it as a desktop system since in that I want something that just works without any fuss, and Mandrake seemed to do the job. After 4 hours I had FreeBSD running kde with kdm, my mail/news/browsers, sound etc. all set up and working without any touble at all. All I have left is to get my scroll mouse working and I have everything I need, and I am confident I will have much less problems then with Mandrake (a fair few crashes and awkward to troubleshoot).

    I would now recommend FreeBSD as the unix of choice for any purpose, it may not have a fancy graphical install program, but you will really appreciate this simplicity when you come to make changes/ do something a little out of the ordinary.

    My OS catagories -

    Windows XX - For the clueless masses, and often a neccassary evil (esp. games)
    Linux Mandrake - Good when it is good (i.e. installs without a problem and no strange configurations), but a hog to troubleshoot.
    FreeBSD - The king of server OS's, and by the look of things a great Desktop system.

    1. Re:Excellent System by marvin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      FreeBSD is king on uniprocessor server or workstation. Even 5.0 SMP support is too young to be
      compared to Linux.

    2. Re:Excellent System by Tyler+Eaves · · Score: 5, Informative

      Edit in rc.conf:

      moused_enable="YES"

      moused_flags="-z 4"

      moused_port="/dev/psm0"

      moused_type="auto"

      In your XF86Config:

      Section "InputDevice"

      Identifier "Mouse0"

      Option "Protocol" "auto"

      Option "Device" "/dev/sysmouse"

      Option "Buttons" "5"

      EndSection

      That's my setup in 4.7-RELEASE with an MS Optical. Should be generic though.

      --
      TODO: Something witty here...
    3. Re:Excellent System by Wylfing · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Linux Mandrake - Good when it is good (i.e. installs without a problem and no strange configurations), but a hog to troubleshoot.

      This is what keeps Mandrake from being a great OS -- desktop, server, or otherwise. If something doesn't come out of the box from Mandrakesoft, you can pretty much forget about it. I have moved every machine that once had MDK to something more, er, alterable like Debian or FreeBSD (which really shines in the turning-old-machines-into-dedicated-servers department).

      --
      Our intelligent designer has never created an animal that we couldn't improve by strapping a bomb to it.
    4. Re:Excellent System by Zeio · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I've actually found cases where the SMP on FreeBSD 4.x was superior to Linux. In order to test Linux's networking performance vs. FreeBSD, I changed a program for an algorithm to just run in the background calculating the Ackermann Function.

      Anyways, the base rate was to run two Ackerman's at once, thus causing 100% USER CPU usage on both CPUs. The base rate for FreeBSD 4.62 was 15.5 Ackerman's per time period, vs. Linux's v2.4.18 14.0 during the same time period. Now this isn't a smoking gun, but the hardware was identical, and they were both running on custom compiled thin as possible kernels under the same duress.

      Why would anyone do this? Well, my goal was to eat up all USER CPU and see how much I could rob from user with system under severe network abuse. Needless to say, that both OS's did very poorly, with FreeBSD having a clear edge, when the interface was brought to promiscuous mode to listen to a packet flood. FreeBSD degraded less, but in both cases an almost useless amount of CPU was left over for USERland. FreeBSD with RX polling turned on - a feature that practically seems unique to FreeBSD, from the XORP router project. I am aware of polling endeavors in Linux but was never able to get them working. As usual with FreeBSD, 'features' aren't creeping in, so they tend to work. I even changed the polling to work under SMP (it wasn't designed to) and it worked in a situation where it shouldn't have. The usefulness of RX polling cannot be stressed enough, its imperative to consider the live-locking of interrupt driven kernels when dealing with massive amounts of bandwidth. If interested, see: 'Eliminating Receive Livelock in an Interrupt-driven Kernel', USENIX 1996, its amazing to me livelock still happens over 5 years after stuff like this gets presented to the public.

      So, how bad is FreeBSD SMP? As far as I was concerned in my test, 2.4 Linux SMP seemed inferior (in my case) to FreeBSD on identical hardware. Are people touting Linux's big bad SMP zealots. Most probably, most good kernel hackers think highly of FreeBSD, particularly the VM. I find it amusing that RedHat is not porting to SPARC or Alpha anymore, and yes FreeBSD 5 is planned stable on IA64, IA32, SPARC64, PowerPC [stable planned a bit later, probably when a real PPC gets offered by IBM - die Motorola PPC, die] and Alpha. Clean code and standards compliance begets portability.

      As far as saying "SMP" is better. Linux may have a better approach, but like my example, and I am sure there are others, empirical tests say a whole lot more. It's important to keep the machinery well oiled and coherent, which is something I think FreeBSD does rather nicely. Empirical tests such as mine prove that approach and theory and real life are different.

      FreeBSD - it's coherent, well documented, "thin," bloody fast, BSD licensed so call it your own. You can see that well written code goes across architectures; the FreeBSD discipline is allowing them to easily stay stable on several platforms. I have run several tests that suggest that even FreeBSD 4.X is 'better' than Linux at various things, let alone 5.0. The VM subsystem is superior [2.5 is catching up]. Most big companies provide virtual servers with FreeBSD, such as Verio. The biggest irony of all is how small the FreeBSD community is compared to legions of hackers and companies trying to improve Linux. Yet why is Linux fragmented so horribly? You will eventually come to understand why this is the only free and open commercial grade OS there is. You will know what you are missing when you finally get a coherent UNIX. GCC, the C library and the kernel are all a matched set, not of this he said she said GNU-of-the-day distribution crap or fake compilers from RedHat and frozen broken CVS snapshots of the C library [RedHat again, with a fake C-lib on RH8]. FreeBSD is used by Juniper as the core OS, with network processors instead of 'real' network cards. It's beautiful. A full version of FreeBSD, relabeled JuneOS, with an IOS-like CLI for those who need it and superior design and interfaces. The UFS2 filesystem is also incredible. I really, really like XFS for Linux, but the Linux kernel maintainers won't merge it in [to 2.4] but have a myriad of vastly inferior filesystems merged into Linux [ext3 fake journaling, Reiser fsck for fun FS, JFS which is robust but slow]. RedHat's refusal not to embrace XFS with open arms boggles my mind. UFS2 addresses this problem. A fast, robust logging filesystem that is stable and in the kernel. I think UFS2 is a far superior improvement to UFS than was ETX3 to EXT2.

      Anyways, I don't think I'll wait for Linux kernel 2.6 or any of the flavors of Linux distributors to come out with something stable, well documented, coherent with UNIX as a standard and each other. Don't be fooled, LSB is a standards base, but you don't get decades of discipline, you get maybe a years worth of un-actualized planning. FreeBSD 5.0 is here. This project needs a better installer, and some 'for workstation use' cleanups, and probably a better package system, although, there are lots of people who like PKG and PORTS much, much better than RPM or DEB. Another annoying omission [and yet another Sun self-screwing maneuver] it that it is difficult to get a JRE/JDK to run natively [1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 are available as ports] and Sun does not provide one [they are apparently planning one]. People have lots of luck though using the Linux binary emulator, FreeBSD can run everything Linux does in binary form and it's easier to port to. Another good reason to develop for FreeBSD is this: Linux has /usr/include/linux. That in and of itself is a reason not to start there for development work. World, see a more beautiful future, one which was paved with the golden road made of FreeBSD - Certainly FreeBSD has a place, and in my opinion it clearly deprecates Linux in some situations. Particularly if you need to have a nice server box stay up forever or stay GPL-virus-free. [this said affectionately, I like the GPL, but you may not be able to afford giving your intellectual property to the world but would like to contribute in some way nevertheless. If it's a non-novel concept, the "community" will just implement it out of need/demand, if it's too difficult for the hackers to trivially add, then it might just be worth calling intellectual property.]

      --
      Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
  5. Java integration just rocks! by Spotless+Tiger · · Score: 5, Interesting
    From the changelog:
    1/10/2003: Integrated Java VM into kernel and replaced /usr/bin and /bin with keithw's java byte-code versions. Platform independence, here we come!
    This is great news, although as I understand it, this doesn't mean Java itself is integrated, just the byte-code JVM part of the thing. /bin/sh, for example, uses BSD type calls, but it's compiled Java byte code (using jgcc) rather than i386 code.

    And this is great because it's a start on making binary formats less of an issue. Sure, there's always going to be those who want the fastest versions of, say, "rm", but for the rest of us, being able to compile something on one system and then just move it across anywhere will help tremendously.

    Does anyone know if the OpenBSD and NetBSD projects are doing anything similar?

    --
    Racists should be sent back to where they came from
    1. Re:Java integration just rocks! by jandrese · · Score: 5, Funny
      You forgot to include the second bullet point:
      • 1/10/2003: Dropped floppy based installer for CD only approach to accomodate the extra 55MB of compressed kernel needed for boot.
      • 1/10/2003: Upped minimum requirements from a 386 with 5MB of ram to a Pentium II-400 with 64MB of ram, 128MB of ram if you want to run X.
      • 1/10/2003: Upped minimum reccomended size of root partition to 1 GB to fit new kernel and associated files
      • 1/10/2003: Redirected FreeBSD download page to Sun's site. Users wishing to download FreeBSD will need to click through badly worded and or hidden links on 5 different pages, sign up twice, and click through at least three liceneses, then do it all again for the patch set.
      --

      I read the internet for the articles.
    2. Re:Java integration just rocks! by jayed_99 · · Score: 5, Funny
      Damn! I missed that commit message! Thanks for pointing it out!

      It must have come fast on the heels of the following commit message that so enthralled me:
      From the changelog:
      "1/10/2003: Replaced our TCP/IP stack with one licensed from Microsoft. Work continues on porting over the Linux virtual memory management system. "

      No wonder I missed it.

      *grumbles at the trolls -- even the funny ones*

  6. Re:*BSD Vs. Linux by Test+Drive · · Score: 5, Informative
    FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are available for you to try out in the HP Test Drive Program. We also have several Linux distributions available for you to try, as well as HP-UX, Tru64 UNIX, and OpenVMS. Personally, I've found the *BSDs to be quite stable and easy to comprehend. Try them out for yourself in Test Drive and see what you think.

    I may work for HP, but I don't speak for them.

  7. Watch out. SCO might sue you! by Newer+Guy · · Score: 5, Funny

    After all, you're an OS that runs on a computer. They have a patent for that you know!

  8. Darn! by leomekenkamp · · Score: 5, Funny

    My prediction is one day off...

    Can anyone recommend a display cleaner?

    --
    Wenn ist das Nunstueck git und Slotermeyer? Ja! Beiherhund das Oder die Flipperwaldt gersput.
  9. I feel like such an old fogey by AssFace · · Score: 5, Insightful

    (however one spells "fogey")

    I can recall my days in college where I would always install the newest, latest and greatest stuff on my pc and then learn it and think I was cool... well, I don't know if I ever thought I was cool.

    but nowadays I'm constantly just thinking "why should I upgrade? this stuff works just fine for me the way it is now!"

    I think it is because I'm more business minded now and the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality has an effect on costs in that world.

    after reading through what is new in FreeBSD 5, I see no reason for me to change. it looks like things that I don't have much need for in my world.
    4.whatever works just dandy for me.

    --

    There are some odd things afoot now, in the Villa Straylight.
  10. Re:*BSD Vs. Linux by big_groo · · Score: 5, Informative

    6. I think FreeBSD is easier to install(others think I am crazy)

    As a relative noob here, I have to say that I've found the exact same thing. I've tried Redhat, Mandrake, Debian, Slackware(fav. linux distro - since 4.0) Caldera and SuSE. After trying all these, I found that the BSD install just makes sense (and talk about your options!!) Kind of like Slackware.

  11. 5.0 Chicken or Egg Conundrum by FrandGunk · · Score: 5, Interesting

    FreeBSD 5.0 is as important a milestone
    as ever seen in the *NIX world. Many new
    features and core technologies are
    incorporated in this release.

    The main problems with this release will be
    caused by the "Chicken or Egg Conundrum",
    in that the release will spur many new 5.0
    users, whose input will come "after" the
    pre-release testing process, finding bugs
    that are not apparent in the release candidate
    series due to limited testing on the incredibly
    varied hardware and software systems found
    in the "wild".

    This is not a FreeBSD specific problem, this is
    a reflection of the reality of a volunteer based
    project with limited resources.

    The incredible speed that FreeBSD developers,
    contributers, and users update and solve
    problems is amazing. Just check the mail
    list archives for *many* examples of this!

    IMHO many of the best and brightest minds in
    the *NIX world have gravitated to the BSD's
    stability and more structured development
    model. For younger readers a "structured"
    development model may seem to be a turn off,
    but a few years of real world experience
    will certainly temper this argument.

    Thanks and Best Wishes to the BSD community,
    and when the dust settles FreeBSD 5.X will
    be the standard others are compared to.

    --
    Sig em Duke !
  12. Upgrade path from 4.x-STABLE to 5.X-STABLE? by swb · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Will there be a reasonable upgrade path from 4.X-STABLE to the 5.X STABLE branch, when it becomes available?

    There was from 3.x->4.x, although it may have stretched some people's idea of reasonable. I pulled it off without problems on two boxes, although both were soon replaced with new hardware and fresh installs of 4.x.

    1. Re:Upgrade path from 4.x-STABLE to 5.X-STABLE? by Geekboy(Wizard) · · Score: 5, Informative

      Yea, super easy.

      make buildworld
      make buildkernel
      make installkernel
      rm -r /usr/include/c++
      make installworld
      mergemaster
      reboot

      (Check UPDATING for more precise instructions.)

  13. No One Expects the SCO Inquisition... oh nevermind by Nick+Driver · · Score: 4, Funny

    Well since SCO thinks that Linux infinges on their patents and is wanting to charge every Linux user almost $100/CPU fee it's a good thing that FreeBSD is the highly refined, free unix that it is. :-)

    (A die-hard FreeBSD user since 1996)

  14. Re:I love FreeBSD to death, but... by FrandGunk · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The error in the sym driver you speak of is on
    a SPARC based system, a very small percentage
    of the FreeBSD user base. This is not an i386
    issue.

    Nothing to see here, move along

    --
    Sig em Duke !