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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."

9 of 182 comments (clear)

  1. How can BSD have XFS? by emil · · Score: 3, Interesting

    XFS is GPL. Is SGI changing to a BSD license?

    Good heavens, that is a ridiculous quantity of acronyms!

  2. OS X? by monstroyer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Has OS X, being semi-derived from FreeBSD, been a contributing factor to this growth? As a slashdot user, i see a lot of "FreeBSD is dying" trolls, but with a major computer manufacturer like Apple on the BSD train, this seems more false then ever. However, the only thing i see in the article that could be Apple related is "shared key authentication interoperability with systems like OS X". To me, this doesn't seem like anything major in BSD source code contribution . In fact, Apple seems to give more back to KDE (i.e. Safari) than FreeBSD. Does Apple help or hinder BSD growth?

    1. Re:OS X? by ysagal · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I certainly don't think Apple hinders FreeBSD growth in any way. But I don't think the fact that Darwin was derived from the 4.x FreeBSD branch (and to some extent included 5.x stuff) had much impact on the growth of FreeBSD. What it did do is put the FreeBSD name in the mainstream by including references to it in its advertisements and such.

      It would be interesting to hear from Mac OS X developers on their interaction with the FreeBSD developers community. I doubt there is much, if any. It seems to me that Apple chose FreeBSD as a good starting point and ran with it, on occasion checking back to see if there's any good new stuff made. They are not after the hardcore FreeBSD users, but the folks that once in a while would like to have a shell and basic *nix functionality available to them, without sacrificing the pretty windows. Not surprisingly these are rarely the people that actively contribute to fbsd.

      (I think I dug a hole for myself. I didn't mean the Apple users don't run fbsd or can't contribute, but that most users that seek *nix in OSX don't need fbsd [otherwise they'd just run fbsd]. As such, there is little user feedback to Apple and no feedback to BSD.)

      -s

  3. How good is digital camera support? by James+A.+E.+Joyce · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I'm just curious to know as a digital camera photographer. For instance, I often use a Samsung 800k camera and on Linux the only support is via an obscure little tool you may have heard off, gphoto which is a bit clunky to set up. How is camera support on FreeBSD? I've considered switching.

    --

    FloodMT: crapflood Movab
  4. Merging in OpenBSD PF.. by zulux · · Score: 2, Interesting

    OpenBSD Packet Filter is *really* cool - I can't wait for it's availabiltiy in FreeBSD.

    --

    Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.

  5. BSD Dead? *CACKLE* NOT! by cepler · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I think you're confusing death with a workoholic that doesn't have time to talk:

    http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html

    From those uptimes I'd say that BSD is most certainly not dead, it's quite hapily humming along reliably.

  6. Re:Anything NOT in Linux? by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 2, Interesting

    1) Doing feature comparisons is pointless. Checkbox marketing is not the way to select a server. If I had a server admin that changed machines often to get new features, I'd fire him.

    2) PAE has not been in there for years. It was a collection of hacked patches for years, finally getting released into linux 2.6, and backported to the RedHat Advanced Server 3.0 (Linux 2.4) kernel.
    Both Linux and FreeBSD had badly designed multi-threaded subsystmes for a while. They both just came up with sane, though different approaches very recently. Linux with NPTL in V 2.6 (also backported to RH AS 3.0) and FreeBSD with KSE in 5.x.

    Not sure why I'm feeding a troll, but someone may be able to use this info.

  7. A Long Way in a Year... by Coocha · · Score: 4, Interesting

    and by that I'm referring to FreeBSD and myself.

    I tested it for the first time about a year ago, and was seduced by the ports tree... it gave me the impression that BSD is a little more sleek in structure than most Linux distros.

    I upgraded my home server to 4.9 a few months ago, and the only downtimes were due to power outages... and after finding a little BIOS tweak in my Tyan Tiger, I think those will be minimized too :-)

    This weekend, I migrated from XP to 4.9 for my desktop machine after drag-n-drop of all things decided to quit working... wtf? There's a few things that I anticipate will be tricky, like Xinerama support for my Radeon 7000 VE dual display, tweaking Vmware so it'll work correctly, and openoffice is being strangely adamant at not compiling. I'm not much of a coder, so things like this tend to make me run to the 'net for assistance, but that's what a supportive userbase is for.

    Kudos to the FreeBSD team for attracting yet another user with a well-structured and well-executed OS.

    --
    May the threads progress competently.
  8. Re:GOD Bless America by 0xfc · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Heh, and I saw this for the first time today. Just look how slim and fit this mascot is! freebsd. OBSD btw, has a mascot contest going on right now! My vote is for a traditional daemon.