FreeBSD 5.2.1 Released

Kalev writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has announced FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE. This is intended to address several bugs and vulnerabilities discovered in the FreeBSD 5.2 release. See the Release Notes. The release is now available for downloading. If you are currently running FreeBSD 5.x, you can easily cvsup to it or use binary upgrade feature of sysinstall."

Comments

Cool!

[Anonymous Coward]

Despite the claim that 5.x isn't yet the
production branch, we've been running it on
all our development machines and servers for
6+ months now. Apparently the FreeBSD
release engineering team has pretty high
standards! We're really looking forward to
FreeBSD 5.3, which has M:N threading and
the new O(1) scheduler as the default.
Thread creation in our application is
blindingly fast *and* runs on many CPUs at
once. After getting off the poor Linux 2.2
and 2.4 threading, there was no turning back.

Re:Cool!

[Warped1]

Lucky you.

I downloaded this yesterday, and for the life of me, I could not get it to install on my laptop. It would either kernel panic while extracting packages - or shortly after, I was multitasking ;) - or it would freeze while extracting packages.

I believe I had FreeBSD 5.1 on this laptop before so I don't know what's up. I just had OpenBSD 3.3 on that slice earlier, and it looks like I'll give OpenBSD 3.4 a shot now.

And yes, I'll most likely be a bad person and not spend the time necessary to submit a decent bug report. *shrug* Time time time ...

But anyway, I've used Free before and it's cool - infact I wanted to slap that on my laptop instead of Open.

Re:Cool!

[HeelToe]

Well, I'm using it for a home server. It has been worlds worse than FreeBSD 4.8 ever was for me. I have had numerous hangs that I cannot explain, 3 of which resulted in a corrupted /usr filesystem.

I just did a buildkernel/buildworld for 5.2.1. Here's hoping it is better, cause if it's not, I will have to roll back to 4.8 or heaven forbid, gentoo.

How's FBSD on AMD64?

[scrytch]

I've been pondering getting an AMD64 box, but I'm wondering how well it supports AMD64, what the performance is like, etc. Anyone running such a setup have any stories? Linux is the alternative here, but I would much prefer FreeBSD if it's feasable.

Re:Point point releases?

[dohcvtec]

Funny, 4.1.1 was the first version of FreeBSD I used, and I was hooked right from then. Heh, even a "bad" release of FreeBSD is still pretty good compared, oh, say, a bad RedHat release (anyone remember the whole GCC 2.96 fiasco?)

Re:Thank Apple

[Ricin]

Please name 5 specific examples of important contributions from Apple to the FreeBSD kernel or userland.

Hint: "The advanced VM and SMP code that allows Mac OS X to run so efficiently is the very same code that finally put FreeBSD on the level with Linux" is sheer nonsense. But I'll let you humor me and come with some example commits. Links to cvsweb or something would be nice.

What is it about

[coughski]

Operating Systems that invokes such spite between proponets? IMHO FreeBSD works very well I run 4.8 for my server and have never had a problem never crashes and it does what I need it do. For my Desktop I run SuSe 8.1 and it works very well for most everything I need. I suspect I could use both as a server or a desktop with few problems. I am not a developer or sys admin but I do enjoy tinkering with networks and computers and *nix or *bsd based systems. I just wonder why I see posts like "FreeBSD is dead" from a supposed linux user when clearly both operating systems are actively growing. cough

Re:Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE.

[cperciva]

Do you have any idea how many people actually use your service?

Yes. Around 100 systems per day; in total, somewhere around 2500 systems have been patched.

Are there any plans to make it an "official" offering of the FreeBSD project?

Yes. I recently joined the FreeBSD security team, and now that 5.2.1 is out of the way, I'll be pushing to get the integration underway.

Simply question

[Anonymous Coward]

If I want production stable as recommended by the FreeBSD team, I should use 4.9-RELEASE because 5.2-RELEASE is still being tested.

Will there be a point where the FreeBSD team says "go for it" or is it going to be a judgement call as it is with a Linux kernel?

Re:Point point releases?

[Anonymous Coward]

And some of us have crappy hardware, like Toshiba, Packard Bell or Compaq computers that simply have hard-or-impossible-to-work-around bugs.

BSD Starting

[SphericalCrusher]

I've never been a big BSD fan, as I've only used it a few times. I'm more of a Linux person. I truly respect BSD though, and for that, I'm going to be throwing together a box just to install this new version of FreeBSD on.

I feel that it will better help my knowledge in UNIX to learn it. I don't want to dualboot.

FreeBSD 4.5, February 2002...

[Anthony Boyd]

...was the last release of FreeBSD that I've purchased. I got the 6-disk toolkit to go with it -- tons of apps, it made for a great installation. I have no idea if 4.5 is considered a "good" release relative to the other releases, but it made me (mostly) happy. However, I did have one system -- an old laptop with a panel that needed WD drivers -- that just seemed to miss the FreeBSD sweet spot. It used a PCMCIA card to connect to my LAN, but FreeBSD 4.5 had only "early" PCMCIA tools then (which seemed weird, considering it was only a couple years ago). So I couldn't ever get the network up and running. Later releases had better PCMCIA, but they also used Xfree86 4, which couldn't handle my old LCD with its Western Digital chipset.

Soooo... now I'm wondering. The new 5.2.1 is surely excellent at PCMCIA. But does it have Xfree86 version 3 as an install option? If not, does Xfree86 4 have support for the WD chipset now? I'd really like to get FreeBSD running on my old laptop(s), but it seems that just as the PCMCIA started getting good, Xfree86 went modern and left a bunch of systems in the dust.