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FreeBSD Status Report March-April 2004

Posted by Hemos on from the development-continues dept.

Anonymous Coward writes "The FreeBSD project has posted a new status report for March and April of 2004. Work continues on locking down the network stack, ACPI made more great strides, an ARM port appeared in the tree, and the FreeBSD 4.10 release cycle wrapped up."

20 of 63 comments (clear)

  1. An ARM port eh? by MrIrwin · · Score: 3, Insightful

    x86 life looks ever more limited!

    --

    And if you thought that was boring you obviously havn't read my Journal ;-)

    1. Re:An ARM port eh? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Considering the One-chip SMP Multiprocessor Core, things could get very nice.

    2. Re:An ARM port eh? by killjoe · · Score: 2, Informative

      Where is the PPC port? I am amazed that I can't install freebsd on my mac.

      --
      evil is as evil does
  2. Interesting note from the SMPng status report.. by harikiri · · Score: 2, Interesting
    From here:

    Several folks continue to work on the locking the network stack as noted elsewhere in this report. Outside of the network stack, the following items were worked on during the March and April time frame. Giant was pushed down in the fork, exit, and wait system calls as far as possible. Alan Cox (alc@) continues to lock the VM subsystem and push down Giant where appropriate.

    Same Alan Cox of Linux kernel hacking fame? Woot! We've attracted him to the dark side... ;)

    --
    Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
    1. Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report.. by Everlone · · Score: 2, Informative

      Nope, this is a different Alan Cox.

      Something tells me I once saw an FAQ list once that involved this same question but I could be wrong ;-)

    2. Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report.. by R.Caley · · Score: 2, Funny
      Nope, this is a different Alan Cox.

      Something else reimplemented to avoid the evil GPL?

      --
      _O_
      .|<       The named which can be named is not the true named
    3. Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report.. by apocamok · · Score: 5, Funny

      It's probably like the guy from Fight Club, he's working on Linux during the day, and unconsciously committing FreeBSD patches during the night.

    4. Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report.. by coolfruit · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, These are two different people. Alan L. Cox is a FreeBSD commiter. Here is his homepage : http://www.cs.rice.edu/~alc/

    5. Re:Interesting note from the SMPng status report.. by craig2787 · · Score: 2, Funny

      1st RULE: You do not talk about FREEBSD PATCHES.
      2nd RULE: You DO NOT talk about FREEBSD PATCHES.
      3rd RULE: If the code says "stop" or goes coredump, the commit bit is over.
      4th RULE: Only two comitters to a patch.
      5th RULE: One patch at a time.
      6th RULE: No GPL, no adware.
      7th RULE: Commits will go on as long as they have to.
      8th RULE: If this is your first night at FREEBSD.ORG, you HAVE to PATCH.

  3. Re:Misplaced effort by shlong · · Score: 5, Informative

    Most of the bugs in your list are marked closed, and one is for a package that has nothing to do with disks or the OS. That leaves two entries that are relevant. Guessing the geometry is a lot harder than it sounds, especially if you already installed Windows or another boot loader and it guessed the geometry differently (as is the case with at least one of the entries in your list). This is a common problem in Linux, too. Windows is 'immune' to it because it'll choose whatever geometry it wants and leave any previously installed OS's stranded.

    --
    Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
  4. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  5. Re:PF and ALTQ by agent+dero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Flip a coin, it doesn't really matter which you choose:

    FreeBSD is something i'd put on a critical nfs/http/ftp server or something

    OpenBSD is something I'd put on a Pentium 200Mhz box to keep that nfs/http/ftp box safe.

    Nothing prevents you from doing either one with either operating system. It's just about preference ;)

    --
    Error 407 - No creative sig found
  6. Re:PF and ALTQ by ArbitraryConstant · · Score: 4, Interesting

    OpenBSD will always have the most up to date PF stuff.

    What you'll notice with OpenBSD is that you're discouraged from messing with the kernel at all, and ports work better. Theoretically, you may notice it's slower, and you'll probably notice that the software isn't as up to date. Debian-stable should also be in consideration, depending on your needs, but its firewalling capabilities are well behind FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

    You're giving something up if you commit to anything period. FreeBSD and OpenBSD have dramatically disjoint sets of stuff they're good at. I've never seen an OS good enough at everything (or even most things) to make it worth commiting to. Not if you can deal with multiple OSes on a day to day basis.

    --
    I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
  7. One true ports system? by killjoe · · Score: 2, Interesting

    When are freebsd, openbsd, and netbsd adopt the one true ports system? Is there any logical reason to have three different source based ports systems?

    --
    evil is as evil does
    1. Re:One true ports system? by harikiri · · Score: 4, Informative
      I think the various ports systems emerged as a result of freebsd only supporting x86 (back in the day), and netbsd having a multi-architecture system (thus more effort was required to 'port' something to each arch, and there were fewer ports). Then OpenBSD came along, and imported in the FreeBSD ports system initially, and went on from there.

      The reason why FreeBSD's port system has grown so quickly is probably because there's only been one architecture they had to 'port' applications across to. It would be slowed down if they had to unify the ports system to support not only multi-platform architectures, but also the differences between the kernels for each BSD project.

      However, this reminded me of this. NetBSD's package collection actually has released their pkgsrc collection to both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

      --
      Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
    2. Re:One true ports system? by Strog · · Score: 2, Informative

      Pkgsrc is available for many OSes. It's most matured on BSD/Linux. It would be cool if several of the BSD's and Linux would use it. Check it out www.pkgsrc.org

      NetBSD
      OpenBSD
      FreeBSD
      Linux
      Solaris
      Irix
      Darwin (OS X)

  8. PowerPC port by IRLQBall · · Score: 3, Informative
    Where is the PPC port? I am amazed that I can't install freebsd on my mac.


    The current status of the FreeBSD on PowerPC is here

    Short version: It's a Tier 2 architecture which means it's not quite there yet. According to the project page it's "on the verge of booting to single-user mode".
    1. Re:PowerPC port by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      OS X is based on Next's Unix which was one of the hybrid Mach/Unix jobs from the early/mid 90s. The only real difference was that Next used BSD instead of a sysV Unix. What happens is OS X is actually a Mach microkernel with several layers on top of it. The BSD networking code and other parts of the kernel were made to run on top of Mach to give it a Unix layer that a lot of other things build on. This unix layer is augmented by a freebsd 5.1 userland (at least that's what I have on my new powerbook).

  9. dead trees! by MavEtJu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Book: The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

    I know a birthday present for this year!

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    bash$ :(){ :|:&};:
  10. Re:PF and ALTQ by pkplex · · Score: 2, Insightful

    #include "imo.h"

    I think the advantages of FreeBSD are drivers ( for newer toys ), speed, and that jail thing ( which I have not actually used ) which AFAIK lets you run a virtual machine chroot thing. Also, freebsd ( and netbsd ) have automagical update the ports/packages tools and things. On openbsd you need to pkg_delete them yourself.

    Other than that, I think OpenBSD is the ticket. Lots of people seem to think OpenBsd is only a firewall OS... which is unfortunate. OpenBSD works fine as a standard server ( eg, web, dns, mail, ftp, samba, etc ). The security effort which goes into obsd is also a deeper than just things disabled by default, too.