October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report

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October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report

Posted by Hemos on Monday February 2, 2004 @07:20AM 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."

13 of 182 comments (clear)

OS X? by monstroyer · 2004-02-02 07:24 · 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 Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-02 07:46 · Score: 5, Insightful
  
  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.
2. Re:OS X? by ysagal · 2004-02-02 07:46 · 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. Re:OS X? by kernelistic · 2004-02-02 09:26 · 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!
Re:How can BSD have XFS? by VojakSvejk · 2004-02-02 07:28 · Score: 5, Insightful

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:GOD Bless America by gregarican · 2004-02-02 07:29 · Score: 4, Funny

Since we're so fat as Americans shouldn't we add another branch to the *BSD tree and call it OBSD?
Re:How can BSD have XFS? by squiggleslash · 2004-02-02 07:33 · Score: 5, Insightful

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.

--
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Re:How can BSD have XFS? by rsidd · 2004-02-02 07:35 · 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".
Re:How good is digital camera support? by dizzy+tunez · 2004-02-02 07:38 · 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
Re:Merging in OpenBSD PF.. by Helevius · 2004-02-02 07:51 · Score: 4, Informative

Pf is available via the /usr/ports/security/pf/ port.
Helevius
Re:Anything NOT in Linux? by geniusj · 2004-02-02 07:55 · Score: 4, Insightful

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.
FreeBSD: Project Evil by metal_priest · 2004-02-02 08:38 · Score: 4, Funny

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.
A Long Way in a Year... by Coocha · 2004-02-02 15:15 · 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.