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

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: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

[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.