FreeBSD 5.2.1 Released

Point point releases? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 03:05 · Score: 4, Insightful

Is it just me or are point point releases of FBSD pretty rare? Almost seems like 5.2 was a bit of a rush job.

Re:Point point releases? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 03:28 · Score: 5, Informative

No, it wasn't a rush, but people didn't test it enough.
That is usually the problem, 5.1 ran so well that people didn't want to test the RC's, thus some bugs didn't get ironed out for _their_ hardware.
The thing is, if these people had downloaded the livecd of RC2 and sendpr'ed this release wouldn't be needed.

You should blame people for their lack of will to test but strong will to always complain.
Re:Point point releases? by cperciva · 2004-02-26 03:33 · Score: 5, Informative

Is it just me or are point point releases of FBSD pretty rare?

You're right. The only other one was 4.6.2-RELEASE. (I'm not counting the 2.2.x releases -- 2.2 was a major version number :) ).

Almost seems like 5.2 was a bit of a rush job.

5.2 was right on the boundary between "experimental" and "stable". As such, lots of people started using it once it was released, but few people actually participated in testing it. I believe that 5.2 had one of the longest ever periods between code freeze and release.

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Re:Point point releases? by rsidd · 2004-02-26 03:50 · Score: 2, Insightful

You're right. The only other one was 4.6.2-RELEASE.
Can't have been the "only" other one, since it implies a 4.6.1-RELEASE before that :) And there was a 3.5.1-RELEASE too.
Re:Point point releases? by shlong · 2004-02-26 04:24 · Score: 5, Informative

Almost seems like 5.2 was a bit of a rush job.

As Colin pointed out in a peer post here, 5.2 had quite a long release cycle. If you look at the 5.2 release schedule you'll note that we spent almost 2 months on it. Add in that 5.1 was released in June of 2003, and you have quite a long dev cycle. We did the best that we could to manage risks in the 5.2 cycle, but shortly afterward it became apparent that there were some significant bugs in certain modules that didn't gain much attention until after the release was made.

--
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Re:Point point releases? by cperciva · 2004-02-26 04:28 · Score: 4, Informative

4.6.1 never existed. It was going to exist, but some security issues appeared, so it was aborted. But you're right, I forgot about 3.5.1-RELEASE, mostly because it was never tagged in the CVS repository.

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Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Re:Point point releases? by shlong · 2004-02-26 04:41 · Score: 5, Informative

4.6.1 never existed. It was going to exist, but some security issues appeared, so it was aborted. But you're right, I forgot about 3.5.1-RELEASE, mostly because it was never tagged in the CVS repository.

FreeBSD 4.1.1 existed also, and was tagged. However, it was a branch off of RELENG_4 instead of RELENG_4_1 and turned into a disaster. But yes, ever since 3.0, we've had few point releases.

--
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Re:Point point releases? by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 05:53 · Score: 5, Informative

actually if you had looked at http:www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html

You would have noticed that 4.1.1 was the first point point release in almost two years after the decision that they were unneccesary extra work.
For 4.1.1 it was decided it was worth it because of the expiring of the RSA patents, it allowed the security pieces to be more easily merged in for US users.
Re:Point point releases? by dohcvtec · 2004-02-26 08:59 · Score: 4, Interesting

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?)

--
-- Never hit a man with glasses. Hit him with a baseball bat.
Re:Point point releases? by cant_get_a_good_nick · 2004-02-26 15:34 · Score: 3, Funny

Remember? I'm still dealing with it... Oi!
Re:Point point releases? by cperciva · 2004-02-27 00:14 · Score: 2, Funny

Heh, even a "bad" release of FreeBSD is still pretty good compared, oh, say, a bad RedHat release

A "bad" release of FreeBSD is pretty good even compared to a "good" RedHat release.

(In my defense re: forgetting about 4.1.1, I was thinking about point-releases-due-to-problems, not point-releases-due-to-added-features.)

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Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Re:Point point releases? by cant_get_a_good_nick · 2004-02-29 17:55 · Score: 4, Informative

When RedHat decided to release the 7.0 distro, they decided that 2.95 was too broken to serve as their system compiler. Too much C++ stuff was broken, not ANSI compliant, etc. So they grabbed a dev branch of 3.0 (at that time tagged 2.96) polished it, and called it gcc 2.96. Cool in some ways, because it was the first time the rubber hit the road for the 3.x branch. A lot of bugs got fixed. But it was a dev branch, and the code changed on the way to 3.0. So now you have a compiler that is C++ binary incompatible with anything before it, or anything agasint it. RedHat 7.x users (we support it at work) find it real hard to get 3rd party binaries compiled by 7.3. Either they use the more common 2.95, or they're finally trickling in to 3.2 or above (which are finally C++ binary compatible). Just a real PITA getting any C++ code using 2.96.

Cool! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 03:07 · Score: 5, Interesting

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! by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 06:27 · Score: 5, Informative

For the record, FreeBSD's scheduler was already O(1), it just didn't handle SMP extremely well. The new ULE scheduler handles the SMP case much better, along with other nice improvements. See Jeff's paper at http://www.chesapeake.net/~jroberson/ULE.pdf

The release engineering team certainly does have high standards. Trying to live up to the stability reputation. But keep in mind that 5.x still is considered in testing and major changes can still be afoot that can cause instabilities. So please still keep in mind what -current means, http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/current-stable.html, and read the early adopters guide.

5.x will get better and better as it approaches 5.3R, so while some of the problems running a -current release are lessened, one should still be aware of all this and the higher standard for fixing one's own problems when running 5.x. RTFM is not an insult when running 5.x, its simply a price of entry to a great OS.
Re:Cool! by Warped1 · 2004-02-26 08:23 · Score: 3, Interesting

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! by HeelToe · 2004-02-26 14:36 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.
Re:Cool! by Brandybuck · 2004-02-26 17:07 · Score: 3, Informative

I didn't have any problems with 5.0 or 5.1, but 5.2 gives me the occasional kernel panic. Something I have never seen in my life on any OS until the last few months. Like you I'm building 5.2.1 right now, hoping that this will solve the problem.

--
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!

Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. by cperciva · 2004-02-26 03:37 · Score: 5, Informative

[I posted the message below to -current and -security, providing an easier upgrade path from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE] In order to provide an easy update path for i386 systems from FreeBSD 5.2 to FreeBSD 5.2.1, FreeBSD Update will now update systems running FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. To take advantage of these updates, install and run FreeBSD Update, and reboot into the new kernel: # cd /usr/ports/security/freebsd-update && make install clean # cp /usr/local/etc/freebsd-update.conf.sample /usr/local/etc/freebsd-update.conf # /usr/local/sbin/freebsd-update fetch # /usr/local/sbin/freebsd-update install # shutdown -r now If you have recompiled any files locally, FreeBSD Update may not be able to update them automatically (it will complain). With the latest version of FreeBSD Update (version 1.5), you can use one of the following commands: # /usr/local/sbin/freebsd-update --branch crypto fetch or # /usr/local/sbin/freebsd-update --branch nocrypto fetch depending upon whether you installed the "crypto" distribution, to force files to be updated. (If you're not sure if you installed the "crypto" distribution, you almost certainly did). FreeBSD Update will update a 5.2-RELEASE system to the exact binaries distributed with 5.2.1-RELEASE, with the following exceptions: 1. Files under the following directories will not be updated: /usr/ports /usr/share/doc /usr/share/man/cat* /usr/src The ports and src trees can be updated using cvsup; the files in /usr/share/man/cat* are rebuilt from (updated) man pages automatically. 2. FreeBSD binaries include, in their headers, the value of __FreeBSD_version on the machine where they were compiled. This value was bumped from 502000 to 502010 as part of the release engineering process; binaries for which this is the ONLY change will not be updated. As always, this is something I'm providing personally; it is in no way endorsed by the Security Officer, Release Engineering team, or the project as a whole. Colin Percival

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Re:Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. by __past__ · 2004-02-26 11:55 · Score: 3, Insightful

Completely offtopic question: Do you have any idea how many people actually use your service? Are there any plans to make it an "official" offering of the FreeBSD project?
Thanks for offering it, by the way. It is both technically interesting and good to have (even if I personally don't use it).

--
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
Re:Updating from 5.2-RELEASE to 5.2.1-RELEASE. by cperciva · 2004-02-26 13:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

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.

--
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid

Re:What a shame by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 04:58 · Score: 2, Funny

Comments about BSD dying are biased blabberings of blithering linux losers.

Repeat after me, "BSD creates, Linux leaches, Microsoft profits"

I feel pretty secure with FreeBSD, given that since the 5.2 release on January 12th eight people have committed as contributors, 1 to documentation, 1 to ports and 6 to src. During which only one member resigned. Indication that FreeBSD is growing, not dying.

FreeBSD will chug right along as it has for over ten years. Linux on the otherhand will bloat, splinter, and implode.

Re:Unfortunately by anthonyrcalgary · 2004-02-26 06:34 · Score: 4, Funny

Even Theo deRadt is talking about a combined *BSD userland utility team.

oh god I hope not. They'd kill each other over philosophical issues.

--
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.

How's FBSD on AMD64? by scrytch · 2004-02-26 06:40 · Score: 3, Interesting

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.

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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.

Re:How's FBSD on AMD64? by eht · 2004-02-26 06:57 · Score: 5, Informative

The AMD64 platform is currently a Tier 1 FreeBSD platform.

Current Tier 1 platforms are i386, Sparc64, AMD64, PC98, and Alpha.

Current Tier 2 platforms are PowerPC and ia64.

Current Tier 3 platforms are S/390(R).

All systems not otherwise classified into a support tier are Tier 4 systems.

All information lifted verbatim from the FreeBSD website most of it from Section 10 of the Committer's Guide, Support for Multiple Architectures

So expect as much support for AMD64 as you would for the standard PC version, the only thing keeping AMD64 back is it's not a widely distributed and therefore not as well tested.
Re:How's FBSD on AMD64? by mi · 2004-02-26 09:04 · Score: 4, Informative

It works, except for the kernel modules. Currently, you need to compile everything you need into the kernel. kldload-ing does not work yet.
The 32-bit emulation is supported and turned on by default, although some 32-bit binaries, may have problems controlling some hardware with ioctl-s, because the sizes of structures are often different.
I wouldn't recommend it as a workstation, because too much stuff out there (open source and not) is poorly written and thus unportable and will break during compile time (at best) or at run-time (at worst). Think about all the foolish assumptions, that sizeof(int) == sizeof(void *) and shudder.... I don't think NVidia offers their drivers for amd64 either, and so on.
Makes a (very) nice server, though...

--
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.

Re:Thank Apple by Ricin · 2004-02-26 10:18 · Score: 3, Interesting

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 by coughski · 2004-02-26 12:41 · Score: 4, Interesting

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

--
two cans and a string, now that's innovation

Simply question by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-26 17:54 · Score: 3, Interesting

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:Simply question by thdexter · 2004-02-27 04:39 · Score: 3, Informative

Yes, probably with FreeBSD 5.3, the 5.x branch will become -STABLE and 4.9 will only be supported for critical security flaws. (4.9-STABLE, not -RELEASE, it's what's out, and 5.2.1-RELEASE.)

--
I'm on a road shaped like a figure eight; I'm going nowhere but I'm guaranteed to be late.

IPSEC still broken by dokebi · 2004-02-27 03:41 · Score: 4, Informative

It looks like the KAME implementation got borked between 5.1 and 5.2. ISAKMP packets get filtered even when they're not supposed to.
see here.

--
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!

Re:I'm confused... by Anonymous Coward · 2004-02-27 08:07 · Score: 4, Informative

Then be enlightened.

Re:Fuck Apple. by cant_get_a_good_nick · 2004-02-27 08:19 · Score: 4, Informative

If it weren't for the Mach micokernel from Apple
Mach is from Carnegie Mellon, by way of NeXT.

Windows NT / 2000 / XP runs on a variant of the Mach kernel.
XP does not run on Mach. It was a microkernel, made with a lot of input from DEC VAX guys. Over the years it has shed a lot of Microkernel attributes and become more of a macro style kernel.

Mach is a fairly standard, well documented design principal.
Microkernels are a fairly standard, well documented, design principal. Mach is an instance of them.

I actually agree with some of your other statements, your parent poster was an uninformed fanboy. Apple has contributed to BSD though, check out the BSD project list and see where.

BSD Starting by SphericalCrusher · 2004-02-27 18:33 · Score: 2, Interesting

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.

--
"Instant gratification takes too long." - Carrie Fisher

FreeBSD 4.5, February 2002... by Anthony+Boyd · 2004-02-28 11:53 · Score: 3, Interesting

...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.

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