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

How can BSD have XFS?

[emil]

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

Good heavens, that is a ridiculous quantity of acronyms!

Re:How can BSD have XFS?

[VojakSvejk]

NTFS is not GPL, but Linux can have it.... the implementation of XFS in Linux is GPL, but there's really nothing stopping someone from implementing it the spec themselves.

And then I suppose OSX could have it, too...

Re:How can BSD have XFS?

[squiggleslash]

Implementations have copyright, ideas do not. Hence as long as the file system handler code has been written from scratch, it can be any license the author chooses.

As opposed to any license the author cheeses, which makes no sense whatsoever.

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".

OS X?

[monstroyer]

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?

Re:OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple has a lot of local changes that likely will not be incorporated back to FreeBSD, similarly to the local changes they have in GCC.

I think the primary reason there was more contributing back in the KHTML/Safari case was that there is a lot of user-visible improvement to be done there that everyone can agree on. Apple's focus in the lower-level parts of the system is often different enough from other projects that they aren't applicable directly.

Open source projects (especially the BSDs) have a bit more of a perfectionist "find a good solution before doing anything" mentality compared to proprietary software, where it's more often "we want feature X, make it work somehow".

Actually sometimes I think (feel fee to disagree) Linux has a sort of "lets do it somehow right away and then improve it" mentality, i.e. more by evolution than by design, which also gives good functional results but less consistency.

Re:OS X?

[ysagal]

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

Re:OS X?

[ph43thon]

well.. here is the trail of logic for the "BSD is dying" troll: BSD is dying -> major computer manufacturer like Apple uses BSD?? -> Apple is dying Then again, I'm not inclined to refer to Apple as a major computer manufacturer (with about 5% of the world personal computer market). Then again, the world computer market is farly big.. so 5% isn't really that shabby.

Anyway, I use FreeBSD. I figure it will maybe change into something else.. but it won't die. Also, I don't see how Apple could hinder the growth of BSD. Also, scroll to the bottom of this page to see where Apple at least implies that they make most, if not all, of their modifications available to the community. That is a pretty good contribution. Yes, it would be nice if they just ported their windowing system to FreeBSD.. but you can't really expect that from them.


p

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!

How good is digital camera support?

[James A. E. Joyce]

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.

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: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:GOD Bless America

[gregarican]

Since we're so fat as Americans shouldn't we add another branch to the *BSD tree and call it OBSD?

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.

Merging in OpenBSD PF..

[zulux]

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

Re:Merging in OpenBSD PF..

[Helevius]

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

Helevius

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.

I just off the phone with

[Anonymous Coward]

their development team. They are taking a break between RC versions. They deserve the rest. Good work guys!

Re:Anything NOT in Linux?

[proj_2501]

getting features hacked in as quickly as possible: linux
ridiculous stability as priority: freebsd

Re:Anything NOT in Linux?

[geniusj]

As far as platform support, freebsd has never been one to have much outside of x86 and alpha.. This is all new in 5.x.. If you want broad platform support, I'd use NetBSD.

As for your response to networking locking.. It has nothing to do with NFS and everything to do with Giant (the giant mutex that exists in the kernel). FreeBSD 5.x is largely an attempt to break away from this giant lock.

As for multithreading, both linux and freebsd have had it for ages. And it hasn't been that great in either one of them up until KSEs in FreeBSD 5.x and the revamped threading in Linux 2.6. FreeBSD had very good userland threading performance for processes needing to use threads on a single processor, but no native SMP threading support outside of using Linux's threading library (clone()).

As for PAE, correct me if I"m wrong, but it has NOT been several years. PAE, officially AFAIK, is still relatively new to Linux as well.

Re:Anything NOT in Linux?

[Quill_28]

Insightful?

What idiot modded this up.

Re:explain this

[Brandybuck]

What does a Penguin have to do with Linux? What the hell is the association there?

Besides the obvious similarities between Linux users and penguins, such as the propensity towards pear-shaped anatomies and strict black-and-white orthodoxies about software licenses, there's also something very fishy about them waddling around talking like Burgess Meredith.

Are they starting from scratch?

[vxvxvxvx]

I agree that they can have it BSD licensed no problems if they program it from scratch, but somehow referring to it as the "SGI XFS port" sounds like they're taking the existing GPL implementation and porting it. My guess is it'll be like the ext2fs parts, GPL code on BSD.

FreeBSD: Project Evil

[metal_priest]

That project certainly deserve the "coolest name" award. Basicly it's the freebsd equivalent of ndiswrapper to get wireless chips to work.
It's remarkable how applicable this name is :)
Here is a more detailed description.

Re:Anything NOT in Linux?

[proj_2501]

the best part is that i don't even run bsd

i guess that makes me a karma whore. AWESOME!

BSD: a lively corpse

[puzzled]

Despite the numerous BSD is Dying trolls on here, it seems to be quite a lively corpse.

I have half a dozen 4.9 servers, a couple of 5.2 laptops, and I'm playing with the Motorola 88k RISC port of OpenBSD trying to get it to load on an MVME187 ...

One of these days I'll get all crazy and complete the family by putting NetBSD on my toaster oven ...

Re:tigerhost.com needs to lay off the styles

[elcid73]

Given that a link is intended to "navigate", navigation should not "surprise" people... unless of course, you're Colombus. Navigation by definition is a controlled course. To navigate is to plan a course. None of those lend themselves to a "surprise" of any sort.

And in closing, it does not make me more inclined to see what else is there. Unless I'm at "Homestarrunner.com" I don't want to hunt for easter eggs, your site (being a business) should not make me hunt for information. Everything I need should be easily accessible.

And in closing again.. the tigerlink.org link on your main page is not on the left menu (I know.. it's at the bottom of the page w/icon). But my question is: why have links if you don't want people to click on them? If everything is on the left, why not leave it there only? What if I didn't realize all the information is on the left and I wanted to show someone one of your links? "Hmm I think that tiger link was here somewhere! Let me move my mouse over this entire page to find it!"

And not to further nitpick.. but the orange highlighing when you try to enter a domain name to check? That's strange.

Re:Which FreeBSD to install??

[cepler]

> They've taken perl out of the base GAH! ;)

Uhm, thats a GOOD thing.

BSD Dead? *CACKLE* NOT!

[cepler]

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.

Re:Anything NOT in Linux?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

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.

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 ...

A Long Way in a Year...

[Coocha]

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.

Re:GOD Bless America

[0xfc]

As usual FreeBSD is way behind linux. I mean come on, look at this little porky... linux. Tell me you cannot grab roll of that! Reminds me of a recent picture I saw of someone in a dunk tank. :pPpPpPpp

Re:GOD Bless America

[0xfc]

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.