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FreeBSD 5.2 RC2 Now Available
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long announces the availability of FreeBSD 5.2 RC2 which fixes a number of bugs, specifically the one in which users experienced system panics during install and dynamic library problems in the 'fixit' environment. Scott is asking everyone to test this release over the holidays. You can download it from one of your preferred mirror sites." Update: 12/24 23:01 GMT by T : Dan writes with more info: "Scott Long has also laid out a roadmap for future FreeBSD 5.3 releases now that FreeBSD 5.2-RC2 is getting close to release quality."
That means that the next two releases on the 5 branch are going to be last times new features are added to the branch before -current forks, so it's going to require a lot of testing to ensure stability.
Why do you care?
Well, if you don't ever plan on using FreeBSD, you don't. If you do use FreeBSD, tossing this release on your hardware and making sure things like ACPI function with your motherboard are really important as NOW is the time to fix them so that they can be tuned and maintained prior to the 5.3 Release when the code is marked stable.
The major changes in FreeBSD 5 are significant. There's new locking throughout the tree, which should improve SMP performance everywhere. There's also finer grained locking in the Network stacks (thanks Sam), better ACPI (thanks John), support for AMD64 (coming slowly, thanks Peter), and the GEOM disk abstraction layer (nice work PHK), which has already been shown to be useful for things like GEOM-gate (a la nbd in Linux), is getting more mature with every release.
Performance and stability
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An HP ProLiant DL140 server, apparently.
Oh wait, you've probably got a different ad...
The following is from the October status report. A new one is due out soon as they are bi-monthly.
AMD64 Porting
Contact: Peter Wemm
The last known bug that prevented AMD64 machines completing a full
release has been fixed - one single character error that caused
ghostscript to crash during rendering diagrams. SMP work is nearing
completion and should be committed within the next few days. The SMP
code uses the ACPI MADT table based on John Baldwin's work-in-progress
there for i386. We need to spend some time on low level optimization
because there are several suboptimal places that have been ignored for
simplicity, context switching in particular. MTRR support has been
committed and XFree86 can use it. cvsup now works but the ezm3 port
has not been updated yet. The default data segment size limit is 8GB
instead of 512M, and the (primitive) i386 binary emulation support
knows how to lower the rlimits for executing 32 bit binaries.
Notable things missing still: Hardware debug register support needs to
be written; gdb is still being done as an external set of patches
relative to the not-yet-released FSF gdb tree; DDB does not
disassemble properly; DDB cannot do stack traces without
-fno-omit-frame-pointer - a stack unwinder is needed; i386 and amd64
linux binary emulation is needed, and the i386 FreeBSD binary
emulation still needs work - removing the stackgap code in particular.
The platform in general is very reliable although a couple of problems
have been reported over the last week. One appears to be a stuck
interrupt, but all that code has been redone for SMP support.
Allowing freedom includes allowing people to do things you don't necessarily agree with. I used to defend the GPL consistently, but I'm starting to feel like "Free as in Speech" should also include unpopular speech, and that's what the BSD license protects that the GPL does not.
...software which OpenBSD uses and redistributes must be free to all (be they people or companies), for any purpose they wish to use it, including modification, use, peeing on, or even integration into baby mulching machines or atomic bombs to be dropped on Australia.
In the words of Theo de Raadt:
As opposed to the the GPL, which exists as Stallman's attempt to redefine "Free Software" as any software that suits his political ideology.
The GPL as a strategy is fine, but to call it "freedom" is less than honest. Whose freedom is being protected by the GPL? The developers? Not really. The developers are only allowed to use the source as long as they conform to the RMS ideology that the work they do should benefit the collective and not necessarily just the individual who wrote the software. As for the users, what freedom do they gain by using GPL software over BSD licensed software? The freedom to use software that does not co-exist peacefully with others? The freedom to view the source code they don't understand or care to understand? Besides, the original BSD software always remains free as in speech and beer, even if the Hated Proprietary Software Vendor of the Week exercises their right to protect their own interests.
I'm certain that I'll be moderated as a troll, but this something that I've been pondering quite a bit lately, and I'm certainly willing to be proven wrong.