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FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM

drdink writes "A few weeks ago, PAE (Physical Address Extension) support was added to FreeBSD 5-CURRENT. This allows memory above 4GB to be used normally by the kernel and userland on the x86 platform. Jake Burkholder, the man behind PAE, is now looking for users to help him test this new feature. In his message to the freebsd-current mailing list, Jake describes the current caveats to PAE and also says 'We'd like this feature to be solid for 5.1-RELEASE, so I'm hoping there are people out there with systems with more than 4G of ram that are willing to test it.' This, along with other features make FreeBSD 5-STABLE look very promising."

6 of 271 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Volunteer... by Billly+Gates · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Bologna. Its not beta and its considered stable.

    Current != Release. I looked at there ftp site and only found -current or -Release versions. The only one mentioned as stable I found reading the docs are 4.0.

    Current = beta, and Release = stable. Stable= superstable or enterprise class stability.

    FreeBSD 5 is ready for %95 of user and server use. Its just as stable as FreeBSD 4.6 or 4.7 since they are also Release versions. Only 4.0 is considered STABLE at this point.

    However I would not bet my job on it with a server that needs to stay up 24x7 but FreeBSD 5 is as stable if not more out of the box as Redhat8 or Mandrake. FreeBSD hackers obsess about stability more then most linux hackers with the exception of Debian users. I would be cautious of course but to be release quality it needs to be %99.9 stable as opposed to %99.999 stable as 4.0 stable.

  2. Hate to inform you but there's users out there... by DaedalusHKX · · Score: 2, Insightful

    My old ISP switched to FreeBSD from SunOS Sys V I believe, quite some years ago. Many others did as well.

    Try looking up widomaker.com on any of the nmap spoof sites out there. Betcha you'll smile... they're running FreeBSD AND they are a significantly sizeable Hampton Roads ISP. I believe the MAJOR ISP in HR also uses BSD, but I'm not sure since I've not telnetted in for ages upon centuries (1997 :) the place is VISINET

    I am too lazy at the moment and too drowsy to check it myself. But I know for a fact wilma.widomaker.com is STILL running some version of free_bsd (unless they changed again VERY recently).

    BSD's a capable OS, I'm not much of a user because I do a lot more hacked together work often, and BSD only ran my old file server/ httpd rig. My home boxen ran a mix of ... uhmm... red hat, debian and mandrake. Oh and as usual LinuxPPC/YellowDog 2.x on the mac.

    I'm going to ask?? Why are all you folks having such a Unix vs *nix vs BSD JIHAD?! If we are to compare ourselves to the arab world... Isn't microsoft our "evil west" and Bill Gates our "great satan" type figure?!? Jeez people, we're fighting each other so to speak, while Billy boy makes a killing and leaves us hanging. And I'll take my own advice here since I recently forgot it and got into a long argument (I hate getting sucked into politics). But, if we all coded more and flamed each other less, and if we helped out the newbies, I bet we'd start stealing from the REAL big user base out there... MICROSOFT's. If BSD dies its only ONE more corpse microsoft can have strewn over their Gates of Mordor. Linux didn't win that one. Gates did, and will. And who do you think is next?! Damn straight. Billy's gonna take us down one at a time. First the weaker ones... then the strong ones. And yes Linux is at the top of the OS food chain under Bill Gates own pet. We're all supposed to have a purpose. OSS. So get back to coding, thinking or designing something cool and stop flaming each other. I know its tempting, I couldn't resist it once or twice but I caught myself. If you do flame or troll, at least post some info, some resource links so we can check, and then get back to doing something fun or useful that doesn't piss off half the damn messageboard just for the sake of pissing them off. That's just immature and stupid. That IS why nobody pays attention to us. We're all a bunch of immature little kids in the bodies of adults screaming bloody murder upon Bill gates, george bush, osama bin laden and whoever wants to hear us. Too bad we're in a cave all of our own and they locked us in.

    If BSD dies... let it die on its own. Gloating doesn't help anyone. Some people put a lot of effort in that project, and if you haven't you've no right to harp on them. If you never even USED BSD, then lay off until you have, and given it a very legitimate attempt to at least get the installer completed. Show some respect, just like Linux and even parts of windows, whether the ideas were stolen, litigated or created, they were STILL worked on by someone, usually someone brilliant. And until we each can surpass those people... whether in coding or marketing or design or even legalese, we need to shut the fuck up and show some respect. If you can't show some respect to those who gave us the nice toys we now use all the time and harp about, then perhaps you'd like to still be using punch cards!

    So speaking of this, I'm getting back to my work. Try to do the same. And as for the individual who modded down that post describing the disillusionment with BSD, it makes much sense. Let it stand up, replace BSD with OSS and get on with it, because the problem facing BSD has nothing to do with good code or bad code. It has to do with the george bushes and saddam husseins of the OSS community Once they finish with BSD they'll move onto another project and tear that one apart as well. Just like slashdotte

    --
    " What luck for rulers that men do not think" - Adolf Hitler
  3. Re:Volunteer... by addaon · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The problem is scale. A nice origami model is easily 100+ folds. Let's say I ask for a hemisphere. By your approach, we'd generate a maximum number of folds (say, 40), and choose the closest. But that includes, of course, two trillion (2^40 + 2^39 + ...) possible models... and Mathematica, as a lisp implementation, isn't memory efficient, so we're talking tens of terabytes. With my model, I'm guaranteed something that looks reasonably good with quite low memory usage (hundreds of megabytes, usually)... it's just not always the best looking. Brute force is almost always an unreasonable approach, and for this problem certainly.

    --

    I've had this sig for three days.
  4. Re:Easy by tigga · · Score: 2, Insightful
    Anyway can anybody think a good reason to run BSD with a pile of memory compared to say Linux????

    LiNUX??? Nooo, Thank you very much. Only FreeBSD.

    The reasons are cleaner design, better VM system, better network support (NFS especially), ports/packages system. In my experience FreeBSD has overall better device drivers support. Linux was supposed to work, but inconsistency with library versions and installed programs prevented it to work properly. If you have time you may recompile all needed pieces but why bother if you can use system without those problems. The rpm system should take care about dependencies but it falls apart. Portage in gentoo looks much better (well, it got copied from FreeBSD ports/packages).
    There are some little personal preferences - I dislike colored 'ls' and mess in /etc. And lack of man pages. Instead of 'man foobar' on linux you have to run man, than info, than look over all Internet for help. No problem - answer found. I'd waste my time on something more entertaining...

  5. AGP slot by Submarine · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well, you have to have a graphic board at least to boot and set up the system, and all current boards are AGP, thus the AGP slot.

  6. Re:Why... by smash · · Score: 3, Insightful
    4GB is nothing these days... I've got mates who have a couple of gig in their desktop boxes.

    Hardware support? Never had an issue with it under FreeBSD myself, and if you're planning on running it, you can always pick your hardware properly.

    Now as to WHY you'd run it?

    Its reliable, quick, sensibly laid out, and works very much like commercial unix.

    Just because you're too shortsighted to see a use for it, doesn't mean that no one else has uses for it.

    smash.

    --
    I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.