October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has posted the 2003 FreeBSD year-end edition status report. He says many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including SGI XFS port, MIPS, PowerPC on PPCBug-based embedded boards, and networking locking and multithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004."

Comments

That's a lotta stuff!

[bc90021]

I read the report, and it's good to see that so much work is being done on BSD. Having tried it (and gone back to Gentoo), I was unaware that there was so much community support for it. I may just have to give it another look!

I like BSD

[queen of everything]

I run FreeBSD on a webserver and I have been quite satisfied with it. I tried 5.2 and ran into some problems so I currently run 4.8. I think it makes a great server, I had a decent uptime, until the #$@#$ power was tripped, but it recovered perfectly. I'm glad that they are continuing to work to develop it and I will definitely install 5.2 once it is in stable release.

Re:How can BSD have XFS?

[rsidd]

There is GPL code in the FreeBSD kernel tree (eg, ext2fs, some pcm code, etc), it's just not compiled into the GENERIC binary kernel that the FreeBSD project actually distributes. You are free to compile it into your own kernel if you like.

There is also a fair bit of GPL code in the userland (starting with gcc), and it is distributed in binary form by the FreeBSD project, but of course the virality clause of the GPL doesn't affect that, because it's "mere aggregation".

Re:How good is digital camera support?

[dizzy tunez]

FreeBSD has gphoto too. It`s in /usr/ports/graphics/gphoto2.
Just do a 'make install clean' in that directory, and it will install gphoto and all of the depedencies it requires.

FreeBSD also got some(all of them, maybe?) of the GUI applications that uses gphoto, like gtkam. KDE probably has one too.

Re:How good is digital camera support?

[rsidd]

I can confirm that my digital camera (Canon, PTP protocol) works fine with gphoto2 under FreeBSD. Cameras that use the USB mass storage protocol "should" work, but YMMV.

Re:Merging in OpenBSD PF..

[Helevius]

Pf is available via the /usr/ports/security/pf/ port.

Helevius

Re:How good is digital camera support?

[welloy]

My camera, a Kodak DX-3500, works fine with gphoto and FreeBSD. I did have to update libusb because of this bug which may affect other USB cameras.

Re:Merging in OpenBSD PF..

[jmartinp]

You don't have to wait, it's already been done. Have a look in /usr/ports/security/pf and see for yourself.

threads

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole "heavyweights" idea isn't meaningful
when dealing with Linux. It applies to Solaris,
Windows, Mach+BSD (NeXT, Darwin, OSF/1), VMS,
OS/400, and zOS (OS/390). To some extent, it may
apply to any BSD or real UNIX.

No full-featured server or desktop OS can do a
fork() faster than Linux can. (vmware, pSOS,
eCos, and so on are not full-featured OSes)

NPTL speed has nothing to do with lightweight
versions of fork() or clone(). NPTL beats the
old LinuxThreads library because NPTL avoids
having an extra management thread to funnel
lots of library calls through. A non-leader
thread can now directly create another thread,
without needing to register it with the leader.
A non-leader thread can cause the whole group
of threads to exit, instead of needing to pass
messages around asking threads to exit.

Re:OS X?

[kernelistic]

You knock the very process (and projects) that brought you OSX. If it weren't for Mach, you wouldn't have a kernel for Darwin. If it weren't for FreeBSD, you wouldn't have a lot of OSX. After all, a quick look at the binaries in /sbin on an OSX machine (10.3.2 Build 7D24) reveals the following:

$FreeBSD: src/sbin/md5/md5.c,v 1.20.2.5 2001/12/26 09:44:56 phk Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/sbin/mount_msdos/mount_msdos.c,v 1.19 2000/01/08 16:47:55 ache Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/sbin/ping6/ping6.c,v 1.4.2.6 2001/07/06 08:56:47 ume Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/sbin/reboot/reboot.c,v 1.17 2002/10/06 16:24:36 thomas Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/sbin/reboot/reboot.c,v 1.17 2002/10/06 16:24:36 thomas Exp $
$FreeBSD: src/sbin/shutdown/shutdown.c,v 1.23 2002/03/21 13:20:48 imp Exp $

The command run was none other than "strings /sbin/* |grep FreeBSD | sort". Try it on /bin and you'll get 34 more FreeBSD CVS $Id$ strings. Surely FreeBSD doesn't suck so that bad if the almighty OSX incorporates it's code!

Re:BSD Dead? *CACKLE* NOT!

[puzzled]

Maybe those uptimes are load balancer => N=1 FreeBSD boxes.

FreeBSD still just rocks for overall uptime - I've gone four years without any trouble except on my much abused R&D boxes - the production stuff just keeps on producing ...