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FreeBSD From Scratch
geekmedia writes "Daemon News has an excellent article which describes a fully automated installation of a customized FreeBSD system compiled from source, including compilation of all your favorite ports and configured to match your idea of the perfect system. If you think make world is a wonderful concept, FreeBSD From Scratch extends it to make universe."
It's called 'make world'.
Can someone explain to me what's wrong with binary distributions? What's with the recent rise in all these source based, do it from source distributions?
I'm not criticizing, I'm asking.
Is there really a *significant* increase in speed to justify the hours in CPU time to recompile everything with unrolling loops and athlon-tbird or whatever specific code?
futurama is on. I have to go!
"when life gets complicated, I like to take a nap in a tree and wait for dinner" - Hobbes.
bsd has better virtual memory handling - mainly because it grew up in the days when RAM was expensive and it was actually used, hence debugged. linux, otoh, grew up in the days of cheap RAM, meaning it hasnt used it's virtual memory code as much, and it's still a little buggy with it.
btw- outdated and stale might also mean productive, reliable, and mature.
The big emphasis on source-only distributions is likely being spurred on by 64 bit processors due out from IBM/Apple, AMD, and Intel later this year. In theory, you update your compiler to the 64-bit optimzed one, and build your system from there. My guess is that once the opterons and hammers become more common, we'll start seeing binary distros for them, but that could be a while. Having popular source-only distributions will dramatically assist adoption of 64 bit goodness.
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
For some people, unfortunately, yes. There are some rare individuals who say "I use FreeBSD instead of Linux therefore I am better than you". These same people would have at one point said "I use Linux instead of Windows therefore I am better than you". These people can be safely ignored.
Can anyone please tell me how similar this is to a fresh OpenBSD install, as I am thinking of doing one. Sawan
I have yet to figure out wether or not there's any benefit to the make world + cflags combo for those of us using older (i686) cpu's. I can say that in my personal experience things such as gnome and mozilla didn't seem to benefit from being compiled with --march=k6 (I'm sure there's a ton of flags I forgot, however).
As far as for-certain-cpu distributions go; aren't most Linux cpu's still compiled for i386 computers?
It is sad to see that you keep pasting this same thing. Part of being a troll is being creative. You are not creative. Kuro5hin users could troll better than you.
besides the fact that you're trolling, why should I switch to something I don't know as well, when what I have does what I need very well?
In general, I find that FreeBSD is more logically laid out than Linux is, but honestly that could just be because that's what I learned first. I tried Linux and never really did much with it, but once I tried FreeBSD I never looked back.
"Outdated" and "stale" my ass.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
...living
what were you expecting??
Repeal the DMCA!
Your Kreskin link is dead. Now, this probably doesn't matter to some readers, but there are those of us who can tell an authentic 'BSD is Dead' post by wether the Kreskin link is an href or just plain text, indicating the post is a cheap cut-and-paste job.
A suggested new link for Kreskin is here.
Thank you.
I have yet to figure out wether or not there's any benefit
wether - A castrated ram.
I found the article of little use at all for a few
/usr/src/UPDATING
:)
reasons:
I think I've had an installworld fail ONCE in 7
years, and I think it was because I hadn't noticed
that the make buildworld failed.
As far as cruft in the OS laying around, I had a
system that went from 2.2.8 to 4.0 stable with no
problems. Part of the love of freebsd is not having to wipe partitions.
To sum things up, most of the people I know that
have had weird problems with things laying around
don't do two very important things:
#1 Run mergemaster
#2 Read
As far as I'm concerned, the article this story
references is completely pointless.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Is there really a *significant* increase in speed to justify the hours in CPU time to recompile everything with unrolling loops and athlon-tbird or whatever specific code?
:)
:)
:)
Yes if 19% is significant enough for you.
Quote from the link:
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
vendor_id : AuthenticAMD
model name : AMD Athlon(TM) MP 2000+
flags : fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 mmx fxsr sse syscall mmxext 3dnowext 3dnow
gcc version 3.2 (i686-pc-linux-gnu)
Result: '-O3 -march=athlon-mp -fomit-frame-pointer -finline-functions -fforce-mem -s -funroll-loops -frerun-loop-opt -fdelete-null-pointer-checks -fprefetch-loop-arrays -ffast-math -maccumulate-outgoing-args -fschedule-insns'
Performance gain(compare to -O3 only) ~ 19.6%
Warning: read my warning in the post before using these flags
Of course, you need to justify the time taken to benchmark individual optimization flag to yield such a result. It took me a day to obtain a optimal CFLAG and another week to fully optimize a system.
Older processors gain less performance boost over source optimization. I've little problem boosting a newer box to 19% and beyond.(compare to normal -O3 compilation).
There're few stability issues(if you'd take my warning down my post), but it's still good for desktop processing(games!). For servers I would not risk it and use some other binary-distro instead.
Of course, it's up to you. If you think you need extra performance boost for your production servers and you've management justification and you've given enough resources to test, why not.
Sadly, those are the people I end up dealing with a lot. The sheepish majority that think FreebSD is cool because their slightly-geeky friend said so, And because they assume that anything thats hard to use/configure must be cool because of pure elitism.
Someone needs to teach these sheepkids that not everything should be hard and that working default configurations arnt a bad thing.
(For the record, I prefer clean debian installs on the server, and knoppix hd install as a bootstrap to a working debian install on the home system. I'm not saying the world should be RedHat; I believe any sysadmin worth his privledges should read bash.1 like the bible.)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
But now you suggest that this would be the main reason for people. However, for some people BSD is better than Linux. If there is no linux-only app and/or driver that ties you to Linux, I would run FreeBSD too. I have for many years, and I found it to be much less time consuming and easier to install and upgrade, especially you can stay current with FreeBSD without install from scratch for years. Also overall level of "official" documentation is better.
Currently I run Linux because of some apps and drivers not available for FreeBSD.
Which one is better cannot be answered in absolute terms. To state plainly that Linux is better is arrogant and wrong. Linux may be better for you, or BSD may be better for you, depending on what you need/want/know.
ok, so some lame moderator missed the joke. gentoo is a relatively popular linux distro which is built from scratch - much like the os described in this article. *sigh* no wonder i've seen .sig's saying "Offtopic == moderator doesnt get it"
Sadly, those are the people I end up dealing with a lot. The sheepish majority that think Linux is cool because their slightly- geeky friend said so, And because they assume that anything thats hard to use/configure must be cool because of pure elitism.
Someone needs to teach these sheepkids that not everything should be hard and that working default configurations arnt a bad thing.
(For the record, I prefer clean Win2000 installs on the server, and DOS-5 install as a bootstrap to a working Win98 install on the home system. I'm not saying the world should be WinXP; I believe any sysadmin worth his privledges should read support.microsoft.com like the bible.)
Considering that "Scratch" is one of Satan's old monikers, I think we've finally found the real connection to their demon logo.
Sure, FreeBSD from Scratch. It all makes sense now.
For geek dads: Contraction Timer
Having learned Linux first, then tried BSD, I can say that (at least in my experience) this is not true. I find FreeBSD a lot nicer to use. The documentation is also far superior to anything I've seen on Linux. It also lacks the fragmentation of the Linux community, where a Mandrake rpm may not work on a RedHat box etc. Installing software, upgrading the system, and keeping it current are much easier under BSD, and it hasn't (yet) defaulted to the 'install everything the user might possibly think about using' philosophy present in a lot of Linux distros.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
gentoo is a relatively popular linux distro which is built from scratch
Hey, thanks for filling us all in. The hundreds of goddamned Gentoo fanboys who seem to swarm over every comment page on this site didn't make it adequately clear.
--saint
Actually I said;
I don't know how you managed to jump from "rare" to "main".
And I never said that. Perhaps you hit the reply button to the wrong person?
Considering that Gentoo copied the concept from BSD, you could say instead that Gentoo is the BSD of Linux!
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Would you use BSD over something better like Linux?
Who says Linux is better? Well, Linus would, but he's biased.
You know, it's funny that whenever there's a BSD story, all you guys stop bashing each other for a few minutes to bash us. But we know better. Tomorrow things will go back to Slashdot normalcy and you'll see folks asking why they should use Redhat when Debian is better, or some variation of that theme.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
This pretty well describes what I used to be like. But now I use Gentoo, so this time I really am better than you! :-)
I'm thinking of switching to Linux because the Nvidia drivers refuse to work under 5.0-current. Originally when I wanted to move to the unix secene, I tried linux. But then I found that it is nothing more than just distros after distros, and each one perturbed the design and goals of unix more and more to the point that it feels "hackish". I had used solaris and I wanted something that feels more like it. Then I tried FreeBSD and I was immediately in love. I accomplished more (learning) on it in one month than spending 8 months of just burning and upgrading ISOs and going through the RPM hell. FreeBSD in my opinion is better in most ways except now that gentoo might have leveled the difference a bit. I have yet to try it out, but the installation is like 10 pages long.
I have since switched to Gentoo Linux for my personal workstations. IMHO, Gentoo beats FreeBSD at its own game, in three ways:
I have seen Linux panic thrice (way back in 1997). I've only seen FreeBSD panic once. They are both wonderful OSes. If only I had the time to run them both. Right now Gentoo gets my time.
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
To rate an "Informative" mod I would expect to see some, you know, information to support the claim linux is 'better' than bsd. The truth, of course, is that 'better' only makes sense when connected to an application.