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FreeBSD 5.2-RC1 Released
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Please test this as much as possible so that the FreeBSD Team can release a good 5.2-RELEASE next week. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures."
Is oen better then the other? depends on what you need.
FreeBSD is very good for offering practical solutions to real world problems, based on a solid foundation. Bleedign edge technology only comes second to that.
Linux tries to push the envelope of Unix like development very succesfully, but at times forgoes the practical solution.
In the end, it doesn't matter that much. Sometimes you have to wait a bit longer in Linux before you get a practical solution for a problem, soemtimes you have to wait soem longer for FreeBSD to support a specific feature or piece of hardware.
Practical solutions?
It is things like having had 'accept filters' for a long time, that make it possible to wait for a complete http request before spendign any timeslices on the http server that needs to handle it, and thus preventing many context switches for example.
It is being able to reliably verify which uid is generating an outgoing packet in the standard ip filtering software for example.
Are those hitech/bleedign edge solutions? no, but they are practical, and provide solutions to real problems that allow you to get a lot more out of your hardware with very little investment of time and efford.
Do you need them? I don't for my workstation (tho it rubns FreeBSD, but that is more due to it being simpler to maintain a few machines with the same OS.
I do want them for my webserver and mailserver and such tho, there they improve control, security and performance quite a bit.
It wasn't the 3.x series so much as 3.0 and 3.1. Everyone, the FreeBSD folks included, admitted that they just weren't FreeBSD quality.
The result of those releases is that they don't let a release out anymore without even more stringent testing. 4.x is a testament to the improved release scrutiny.
-sirket