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October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report

Posted by Hemos on from the the-state-of-the-union dept.

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."

4 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. Re:How can BSD have XFS? by rsidd · · Score: 4, Informative
    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".

  2. Re:How good is digital camera support? by dizzy+tunez · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    "If you loved me, you`d all kill yourselves today"
    Spider Jerusalem
  3. Re:Merging in OpenBSD PF.. by Helevius · · Score: 4, Informative
    Pf is available via the /usr/ports/security/pf/ port.

    Helevius

  4. Re:OS X? by kernelistic · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!