FreeBSD 5.0 Available

Vegard writes "Although not yet officially announced, the 5.0 version of FreeBSD is beginning to appear on the FreeBSD FTP site and mirrors world wide." Congrats to the developers. Update: 01/19 17:44 GMT by T : Some more detail -- Dan writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD Release Engineering team has officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 release. Improvements include second generation UFS filesystem, GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394 and many more! FreeBSD is also available on 64-bit sparc64 and ia64 platforms."

Comments

Re:Nice linking

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Does it have anything to do with linux being monolithic kernel?

FreeBSD is also built on a monolithic kernel. Monolithic kernels tend to be as fast or (usually) faster than MicroKernels - no message passing, everything is essentially 'global' and readily accessed. As far as monolithic goes, you might be having a brainfart about MacOS X, which is a MicroKernel (Mach) with a kernel level BSD blob (a mix of Free and NetBSD).

FreeBSD has always been able to withstand higher loads than Linux. Just been around longer. It has a more mature VM that can take the load, and has a more mature TCP/IP stack.

Not a troll, I just FreeBSD has stability advantages over Linux under high load. Linux has a lot of other advantages, take your pick. I don't know why folks get into religious arguments and start yelling over what free UNIX you should use. "You know if you use THIS free, stable, x86 UNIX-like system with a lot of application support, you're real cool, but if you use THAT free, stable, x86 UNIX-like system with a lot of application support, you're a total asshole man." I must be clueless; I just don't get it.

GEOM sounds interesting

[DrSkwid]

I hope one can run GEOM filters in userland. Sounds like a way to implement a totally soft file system.

I'll use the eponymous plan9 example of ftpfs

ftps -m /n/FreeBSD ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD

This would mount the remote ftp site into your local namespace so that when you did ls /n/FreeBSD you got the directory listing of ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD

Shell programmers will instantly see the advantage of such a system over application level ftp clients.

You can use all the tools you presently use for files for manipulating the remote filesystem. None of your applications will have to understand ftp to operate and you can write new ones without even worrying about ftp libraries or whatever difficult protocol you can envisage.

plan9 achieves all this by employing a kind of universal protocol called 9p [now 9p2000]. It's quite a simple protocol and just does not much more than read, write, walk.

It sounds like the filtering system is a way to implement virtual file systems. I do hope so.

There are many interesting applications for such a concept. The list supplied with plan9 is here