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.

STOP!!

[AntEater]

I was about 12% into my download of the iso files when this showed up on the front page. Everyone please wait until I'm finished. Thanks.

Re:STOP!!

[jhines]

That is silly, all you need is the floppy image, and MFS disk image, and then it will fetch the rest over the net.

Why DL an ISO image, when you can be up and running in the time that takes?

Re:STOP!!

[Daimaou]

Because I, for one, do not have any floppy drives in my machines.

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: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.

Re:Look it moved

[moderators_are_w*nke]

If you define the merits of an OS by its popularity, then Windows 98 must be one of the finest operating systems on the planet.

Newbie question

[ichthus]

I just decided to try FreeBSD a few days ago. I downloaded it, and the name of the file is 5.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso. I thought (from the file name) that this was v5.0. Am I wrong? Is 4.8 really the latest?

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.

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

[4of12]

So has anyone done exhaustive performance comparisons of all the x86 OS under different kinds of loads (network connections, processes, I/O, multiple processors)?

In the days of yore FreeBSD was highly regarded for its performance in some areas and I'm wondering if that's still an accurate assessment compared to Linux, Win2K/XP, other BSDs.

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

[stevey]

OT I know .. but I could say exactly the same thing about Debian.

I've used FreeBSD a little, but not enough to appreciate it's strengths I guess.

(My initial impressions were raised by the firey screensaver upon the console, and the way it printed your uptime when you rebooted it!)

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.

Hotswap IDE

[DJPenguin]

Anyone doing this in FreeBSD? I have it (kind of) working, using atacontrol detach / attach before removing or inserting a drive. Works with regular filesystems, but I want to use vinum - the logical volume manager. As soon as vinum touches the replaced drive, it panics.

What are people using for volume management on FreeBSD anyway? I really wish a Linux-like LVM was available.

A Matter of Time

[Spencerian]

It's only a matter of time until some wacko Mac OS X users asks "when will this latest BSD update become part of the BSD subsystem of Mac OS X?"

I'm not one of those people.

Nope. No way. Uh-uh. No sirree.

For the "is dying" trolls

[stud9920]

for the "is dying" trolls : be sure to visit the two links in my sig...

Conservative updates...

[MosesJones]

The conservative updates to BSD now mean that several commands and C functions are not available because they offend conservative moral values these include, but are not limited to (a full list will not be produced for reasons of security)

finger, bash, free, enable, alias & break

Awk is no longer considered under protection and users may hunt it to extinction if they desire.

kill is of course still available to all users, with the added bonus that you may now kill other peoples processes that you believe are interfering with your own and stealing CPU time from your processes.

In addition 4.8 introduces the first stage of BSD NSA Security which ensures your security by logging everything you do with the goverment, this is an optional package at this stage but will be mandatory in 5.0.

Anyone who doesn't like these updates is a liberal communist who is undermining the American Way of Life

The BSD Conservative Coalition Commitee

Re:Conservative updates...

[arvindn]

Full list of conservative changes has now been leaked.

1. "man" pages are now called "person" pages.
2. Similarly, "hangman" is now the "person_executed_by_an_oppressive_regime."
3. To avoid casting aspersions on our feline friends, the "cat" command is now merely "domestic_quadruped."
4. To date, there has only been a UNIX command for "yes" - reflecting the male belief that women always mean yes, even when they say no. To address this imbalance, System VI adds a "no" command, along with a "-f[orce]" option which will crash the entire system if the "no" is ignored.
5. The bias of the "mail" command is obvious, and it has been replaced by the more neutral "gendre" command.
6. The "touch" command has been removed from the standard distribution due to its inappropriate use by high-level managers.
7. "compress" has been replaced by the lightweight "feather" command. Thus, old information (such as that from Dead White European Males) should be archived via "tar" and "feather".
8. The "more" command reflects the materialistic philosophy of the Reagan era. System VI uses the environmentally preferable "less" command.
9. The biodegradable "KleeNeX" displaces the environmentally unfriendly "LaTeX".

1. SHELL COMMANDS To avoid unpleasant, medieval connotations, the "kill" command has been renamed "euthanise."
2. The "nice" command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be "nice". In System VI, the "sue" command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones.
3. "history" has been completely rewritten, and is now called "herstory."
4. "quota" can now specify minimum as well as maximum usage, and will be strictly enforced.
5. The "abort()" function is now called "choice()."

1. TERMINOLOGY From now on, "rich text" will be more accurately referred to as "exploitive capitalist text".
2. The term "daemons" is a Judeo-Christian pejorative. Such processes will now be known as "spiritual guides."
3. There will no longer be a invidious distinction between "dumb" and "smart" terminals. All terminals are equally valuable.
4. Traditionally, "normal video" (as opposed to "reverse video") was white on black. This implicitly condoned European colonialism, particularly with respect to people of African descent. UNIX System VI now uses "regressive video" to refer to white on black, while "progressive video" can be any color at all over a white background.
5. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy. We have instituted a dictatorship of the users. All system administration functions will be handled by the People's Committee for Democratically Organizing the System (PC-DOS).
6. No longer will it be permissible for files and processes to be "owned" by users. All files and processes will own themselves, and decided how (or whether) to respond to requests from users.
7. The X Window System will henceforth be known as the NC-17 Window System.
8. And finally, UNIX itself will be renamed "PC" - for Procreatively Challenged.

Source: http://paul.merton.ox.ac.uk/computing/newunix.html - Policitally correct UNIX

Re:Conservative updates...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

5. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy.

RMS doesn't like wheel all that much neither.

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

FreeBSD, the *BSDs, the *i*xes, etc

[ajs]

I just want to give a shout out (look at the older geek trying out the lingo...) to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, Linux, and all of the other free OSen of lesser popularity and even completion (yay GNU/Hurd)!

It's not said often enough (and certainly not by OS bigots like me) that this phenomenon of open source / free software is one of the brigtest examples of the human drive to form communities based on respect and contribution.

I wrote a couple articles for Dæmon News a while back on the topic of BSD and Linux, and they've grown dated. Perhaps it's time to write a Linux-free article about BSD. There's some interesting stuff that I see going on from angles like Perl and GNOME where these projects have become far more *BSD-aware in recent years (more so than just having a stable port to the platform), and I'm wondering if the future of free operating systems is beginning to shift back to the BSDs (as it was when I first started using UNIX and UNIX-like systems in the late 80s).

Good job on the release, folks!. May your bugs be few and your releases often.

PS: Hmmm, as I just said on the SpamAssassin mailing list, perhaps it's time I stop posting *right* after my first coffee of the morning ;-)

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

Firewire... New??

[TrollBridge]

"...and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies."

Umm... firewire isn't exactly new. What's taking them so long to get more than "initial" support? And what does THAT mean?

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: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

Ports one downside

[swb]

...is that you can get kind of dependent on them. I don't build anything that's not in ports anymore, and its eliminated my skill at building crap from .tgz files like I used to under Linux.

But it's not a skill that I miss terribly, actually, and hasn't been a problem.

Pimping

[rf0]

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

Rus

BitTorrent?

[Andy Dodd]

Anyone going to be "torrenting" this one?

I've been thinking of trying FreeBSD, and I definately will grab it if it's torrented. :)

ftp2 server traffic graph

[semanticgap]

Check out the traffic graph for ftp2. Now slashdot that!

Re:Wondering about those P IIs

[elemur]

This probably falls into the "whatever" camp.. I don't keep that close of a watch on hardware, and don't remember what processor I have in the server beside my desk off hand... It may have been Pentium Pro's or Pentium I's for all I know off the top of my head.

The main point is that FreeBSD is stable and fast, and has been for quite a while.

Re:reading release notes

[Loki_1929]

"Initial firewire support, rudimental hyperthreading and SMP, sendmail and ftp updates. Where have you been people all these years?"

Not rebooting our servers every 2 weeks.

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:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[the-dude-man]

Well that depends on wich distro of linux you are using, if your using redhat, it gets brutally slaughtered by freebsd, as do many of the other linux distros. However, there is a new linux distro out that really gives freebsd a run for its money. Gentoo linux is great.Its still realitivly new so there really arnt any gui tools like there are in red hat, so its not for beginners. But gentoo runs at about the speed of a freebsd 4.7 box. And about the same stability.

The really nice thing that comes with gentoo is an enhanced version of the ports collection. Literally, when i want to upgrade all the software on my machine to the latest version i type emerge rsync && emerge -u world, and then walk away. It literally does everything you want, and makes makes you a cup of coffie if you want :) not to mention that all the patches applied for you :)

so all in all, if your considering gentoo vs freebsd, flip a coin. Because gentooand freeBSD are breaking about even. I see both in a production enviornment and i still couldnt choose one over the other. But virtually all of the other linux distros get their asses kicked by freeBSD, so unless your looking at gentoo as your choice for linux, then freebsd is going to make the better desktop

Re:Hmmmm...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

How long has Mac OS supported Firewire? 15 years or something like that?
Not 15 years, since the tech's not that old. Considering Apple invented the technology, it's reasonable that they had an implementation fairly quickly. FireWire is actually an Apple trademark, the generic term is IEEE1394.

Re:What about..

[MrChuck]

When I first got a Motif "hello world" program (open a window with hello world in it), I was stunned.
about 3 pages of muck.

Motif failed. It never caught on. Dare I say it helped windows get the desktops.

I view KDE (based on QT which has both GPL or "pay us" licenses if you want proprietary) and Gnome as the answer by kids who grew up with GUIs (I grew up with vt52s and vt100s) who perhaps thought: Hey, unix doesn't have to suck to use.

I've run huge networks on Motif desktops and it was a bitch. Tools weren't there, programs were impossible to write. Hell, TK (with tcl or perl) were a godsend to slap up a quick X gui thing at t he time.

OSF gave us the now dominant (*cough*) counter to Sun+ATT's SysVr4 and Motif. And few higher end widgets and no design dictates such as "Every App Shall Have a File Menu Item and Open/Save/Save as/Quit as Options".

No, in this program, you type q in the window, in that one you hit something else. It's like DOS 3.3 (Lotus 123: "/qyy", WordPerf: "[F7]y", dbase: .quity"

That motif came up as (1) proprietary (open motif is too little too late) and (2) during the Lotus/Apple look and feel lawsuits to make up for their lack of innovation make them an interesting footnote in the history of Unix.

Perhaps the X developers (1987 or so) made MISTAKES and KDE and GNOME manage to recover from them nicely. QT is both programmable, usable and popular. Motif was close to unprogrammable, could be usable if you did lots of work - hardly innate, and was popular as the only thing out there.

The replacement of CDE (Commitee designed environment) with GNOME by vendors is just another brad in the coffin of motif and XWindows-classic. For FreeBSD users, KDE/Gnome are not part of the OS. They are a port that lives on TOP of the OS. In BSD, we don't shove every damn addon into /usr/bin/. We do generally have a man page for about every file on the system. (openbsd is anal about it, netbsd is pretty good, freebsd is good; but I use redhat and find something like 5 man pages and 40,000 files :).

Oh, and I can build from source! remember source? Yeah, I don't trust joe-random "I have an RPM for you" builder on my own.

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.