FreeBSD 4.8 Released

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the long awaited availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies. Murray says that the new release is also the result of conservative updates to a number of software programs in the FreeBSD base system, see FreeBSD 4.8 release notes for more information."

Comments

Running it already.

[geniusj]

Just upgraded a few boxes to RELENG_4_8 a few minutes ago. One of the boxes has 2x2.4ghz xeon, and now HT is supported. Yay!

Re:Running it already.

[b0r1s]

The HT support in 4.8 is actually pretty preliminary. The real development is going on in the 5-CURRENT branch, and although some of the changes are being MFC'd, most of them are not.

You may see a performance jump, but the real jump will be in 5.1.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

The release notes clearly state that FreeBSD 4.8 now includes Gnome 2.2 and KDE 3 along with XFree86 4.3.

FreeBSD

[elemur]

To those who run linux (or other OSs) exclusively, you really should give FreeBSD a try.

I started using it around 8 years ago for some core services.. DNS.. SMTP.. etc. It proved to be fast and reliable even then, and those were on old PII machines.

Since then, its gotten tremendously better.. the security subsystems are great, from ip firewalling to kernel and system level protections. (The jail environment is very interesting..) I currently have DNS and mail services running on it, with a vinum disk mirror (Vinum is a logical volume manager for FreeBSD) and have basically no maintenance.

If you wanted to experiment with a BSD machine, I know that http://www.johncompanies.com/ provides virtualized FreeBSD machines pretty cheaply, or just install it on a spare partition somewhere.

My only gripe is that it tends to trail linux on user interface/user focused device drivers, and in the Java space. Otherwise, it works great for me!

(I haven't tried 4.8 yet, since I don't have any need to upgrade my servers right now, but when I get a spare test box, I'll probably give it a spin..)

Re:FreeBSD

[b0r1s]

The problem with exhaustive testing of OSs is that to get the best performance out of most of them, they require someone relatively knowledgable.

For instance, there was a large comparison of Windows v. FreeBSD v. Linux, and FreeBSD came in dead last. Those who know realize that the FreeBSD box wasn't tuned (at all), and that any competant sysadmin would have made 10-20 substantial changes to the system before running that benchmark. Similarly, the Windows and Linux boxes could have probably been tuned better (the benchmark claimed that miminal changes were made, but they were important changes).

There seems to have been much more research into specifically network related code under FreeBSD, but FreeBSD 5 also has UFS2, which is also apparently a nice performance increase.

I'm of the opinion that FreeBSD is still the fastest of the major OSs (Windows, FreeBSD, Linux) for most services, although the preemptive kernel patches for linux may make linux nicer for desktop use. NetBSD is close, OpenBSD still doesn't support SMP, so you can pretty much kiss off OpenBSD on large SMP hardware.

BSD Ports

[vcbumg2]

I use linux for dev and the bsd's for everything else. If you are sick of rpm HELL give freebsd a try and see what a OSS OS that is managed from the ground up looks like not just the kernel. Redhat might come with bells and whistles but with a little more time I can make FBSD sing and dance with half the bloat!!! Codeman

Re:BSD Ports

[mosch]

If you'd say the same thing about debian, then you either haven't used debian long enough, or you haven't used freebsd long enough.

If you don't mind running the extremely old debian stable branch, debian works pretty well, but as soon as you need a new version of something, then you enter into a minor hell of incompatible required versions, and instead of just knowing how to use the basic apt-get commands, you're suddenly forced to fix all sorts of shit with dpkg.

FreeBSD doesn't have the equivalent to the debian stable branch for the ports collection, it's always new, and most of the software always works. That being said, if you're interested in running gnome and kde, you should try to install these off of a release tagged ports collection, as both of them have a tendancy to only FULLY compile out of ports about 90% of the time, which can be wickedly frustrating. So with FreeBSD, you might have to learn how to use the date tag, or the release tags in cvsup, to move backwards to a point in time where the whole ports collection worked (the whole thing is generally very solid right at a release).

On the whole, the FreeBSD system is probably your preferred choice if you cannot make do with 2 year old software, but if the older software is adaquate for your needs, debian's stable branch is probably your best bet.

Re:Newbie question

[DJPenguin]

5.0 is full of loads of features, and is considered "cutting edge".

4.x are "stable" and mature. Think of it like the difference between Linux kernels 2.4.x (stable) vs 2.5.x (current). Not quite a true analogy but you get the idea.

Re:Newbie question

[palfreman]

4.8 is the latest to be released. 5.0 is branched from the 5-CURRENT development tree in cvs, 4.8 is branched from the 4-STABLE cvs tree. If you are a beginner you will probably prefer to use -STABLE releases rather than -CURRENT ones.

Re:Newbie question

[Ded Bob]

There are several branches of FreeBSD. The two active ones are v4 and v5. v5 is new and not ready for production as stated by FreeBSD. Somewhere they warn not to use it for production at this time. v4 is much more stable. If you are learning FreeBSD, it will not hurt to try out either of them.

Personally, I am updating my boxes to 4.8--cvsup is a wonderful tool--as we speak. It may be safer for you to start there on solid ground.

Simple...

[sethadam1]

The same reason there's a 2.2 and 2.4 Linux kernel - because not everyone uses 2.5.

Not everyone uses XP, there're still updates to Windows 98, Me, and 2000 Workstation.

Just because the numbers are higher or the release is newer doesn't mean everyone flocked to it and upgraded immediately.

Most are predicting that 5.1 or even 5.2 will make 5.0 good to go for primetime. Until then, there are plenty still using the 4.x tree.

--
Adam

Just put into production

[rf0]

Just rolled a new server running 4.8 into production. Works like a dream and lastest CVS has security fixes as well so no patching necessary (well I guess for a few weeks :). The performance once again rocks.

Of course we have the ports tree which I think it the second best package managment, after apt on debian. Also I'm now running jails and they are stable and everything seems to just work. Which is nice.

Overall lets give a big hand to the FreeBSD team.

Rus

Re:trouble

[GnuPengwyn]

I have it running on a generic (leftover pieces of junk) 486/66 with only 16MB ram. As a joke I decided to try to run X on it, guess what, it has X now. Now I have these "bad memory" chips, one that makes the box think it has 27MB ram, and yeah, when you try to mount the fs it dies a horrible death. Make sure the memory is good - my advice

Pimping

[rf0]

Yeah I'll get modded down for this but we do virtual servers running FreeBSD as well. See my sig

Rus

Re:Pimping

[Anonymous Coward]

another example of someone who says "I'll get modded down but" and then they get modded up!

Re:STOP!!

[AntEater]

I d/l the iso images because I'm going to install on multiple machines and I'll want to experiment extensively with the installtion and configuration before putting the system into production use. I'd rather not waste their bandwidth as well as my own needlessly.

Slackware 9.0 and FreeBSD 4.8 released within a few weeks of each other?! Whee!

Re:reading release notes

[Anonymous Coward]

You're practising for the Being-Wrong event at the next Olympics, aren't you?

First, bit of pedantry, I'm a Linux user and I didn't so much as smirk reading the release notes. Nope, no laughing.

Next, the SMP's hardly rudimentary. I've been using it for several years. It's the Hyperthreading support that is new. Which isn't unreasonable, given I believe the last -RELEASE of FreeBSD pre-dated availability of the Pentium IV 3.06GHz. In fact, I'm very sure Linux didn't have HTT support in the late 90's.

So, that just leaves firewire as being "somewhat older", though I believe that first showed up in 2000. Again, not the late 90's.

As for ftp and sendmail, why wouldn't you update them?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls...

Re:Firewire... New??

[strabo]

FreeBSd is not designed to be a desktop OS. What server needs firewire?

Using that logic, what server needs Gnome 2.2, or KDE 3.1, or XFree86 4.3.0 ? Where on freebsd.org does it say that FreeBSD is not designed to be a desktop OS ?

In fact, the FreeBSD FAQ has this to say:

The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide software that may be used for any purpose...

Oh, and this:

FreeBSD is designed to provide a robust and full-featured environment for applications. It supports a wide variety of web browsers, office suites, email readers, graphics programs, programming environments, network servers, and just about everything else you might want.

I'm curious, where on the freebsd.org site did you see that FreeBSD was not designed to be a desktop OS ?

Re:FreeBSD PCMCIA Support

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an annoying oversight, true. I'm have a similarly hard time trying to find an answer for you (I'd look at CVS, but I need to get in the shower!).

-You can boot the floppy in 'interactive' kernel configuration mode, and see what devices are in the list.

-You can look in CVS (FreeBSD.org hosts a CVSWeb server, which is quite handy for these moments) and find the kernel configuration file used for the floppy set(s).

-You should be able to use SLIP or PPP over a serial null-modem link, to bootstrap the system to usefulness. Does require an existing workstation that you're comfortable setting up a PPP/SLIP service on. (There do exist some very Plug'n'Play PPP servers for Windows; Mocha PPP is a popular shareware one, often used by palmtop users.)

Keep in mind that FreeBSD (or any *BSD) can be fairly compiling-intensive. If you intend the 486 as a router/firewall, I'd suggest OpenBSD - more for its size and base packages than anything else. FreeBSD shines surprisingly brightly on 'reasonably modern' hardware (e.g. my P-II 400, with 8gb of disk and 256MB RAM), but one of the many ultralight Linux distros might get you rolling faster. I find conventional Linux distros greedily disk-hungry by virtue of default packages, but there's a higher minimum limit to use a BSD properly, in that you're best off having room for the complete system sources and ports skeletons. You can live without those, but then you're missing much of the 'point' of BSD, and it makes for a suboptimal learning environment. (Says I, who got started by being 'stranded' with a similar 486 running OpenBSD for a year.)

Of course, there's at least one ultralight BSD, as well. ;)

Re:MD5's?

[Dark44]

You'll find the MD5's for the three ISO images in the Errate section of the release information for 4.8.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.8R/errata.html

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[Arandir]

It's the desktop, you won't be able to tell any difference just because of the kernel. There may be some difference, but they will be because of other things, like libc vs glibc, or the build optimizations you use, etc.

In my experience, I can't tell the difference on the *desktop* between FreeBSD and Slackware, with both built from scratch with the same CFLAGs.

Re:A Matter of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

no, ur wrong, check the OSX site, its based on FreeBSD 4.4.

"Jaguar integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 4.4 and GCC 3.1 into Darwin, the Open Source base of Mac OS X, to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability."

http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html

-Chris