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FreeBSD 5.3 on the Horizon
underpar writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that FreeBSD is nearing a code freeze. August 15th is the deadline which will be followed by the usual beta testing and a final release hoped for by October 1st. ZDNet interviewed the software engineer leading the release work, Scott Long, for the article. He says: 'The 5.3 release will be the first one where we see the real benefits of that. The multithreaded network stack will outperform everything we've done before, for running applications such as Apache or MySQL.' Status reports can be found on the FreeBSD website." I've been using the last technology release of FreeBSD for some time now, and am really looking forward to the 5.3 release, as well as the 5-STABLE branch that's rumored to follow soon after.
A patch I wrote for the CVS versions of Apache/APR to Add KQueue support has been added to the FreeBSD Port version of Apache.
Just make the port with "WITH_EXPERIMENTAL_PATCHES=1" and you can get a 10-25% boost in performance. (depends on your traffic patterns..)
Its a quick way to get more performance out of Apache on FreeBSD, without waiting for the 5-STABLE branch.
-Paul Querna
A native port is already there! /usr/ports/java/jdk-1.4.2
p.s. If you want a prebuilt binary of jdk-1.4.2, then complain to Sun. They're the ones that prohibit the distribution of Java packages for BSD.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
"The JDK(TM) it produces is de facto compliant, but use in a production environment is still at your own risk."
But thanks for your words of encouragement. That "We don't want you" crack must make you feel really good.
See also: http://www.freebsd.org/java/dists/14.html
RTFA ;)
It won't be in beta until mid-August. The final release is expected in October.
You just read the headline didn't you?
ITYM ROFL! :-)
Yup, FreeBSD is fully userland ready, has been for, lets see, the last 6-8-ish years that I've been using it!
On the subject of RTFA, as the article says, 5.2.1-RELEASE is a little jumpy in some parts, and if you need solid stability, stick with 4.10-RELEASE for the time being.
I've used FreeBSD in production environments for years and years and years. Right now, I'm running 4.9-RELEASE and 4.10-RELEASE on production servers both at work and at home.
I'm tinkering with 5.2.1-RELEASE on a new Dell X300 laptop and a P4 desktop at the moment. They're both working pretty well, and surprisingly, I've got almost everything on the (very screwed up hardware-wise) X300 working! I have managed to break 5.2.1 several times, but it was mostly by doing really wacky things with the Project Evil code, upping and downing and kldloading and kldunloading different drivers on different interfaces with not enough kernel memory allocated for the bloated third party windows code!!!
Having said that, Project Evil is nothing short of a *GODSEND*, and Bill Paul is god! It's pretty amazing to be pinching windows NDIS drivers and compiling them into FreeBSD kernel modules - opens doors for all kinds of obscure hardware that couldn't be used before!
It's still too early for me to make any definitive comment on whether 5.x.x is good on desktops as yet, but if it's anything like the FreeBSDs that came before it, it will be nothing short of excellent when it hits -STABLE.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Well, 10.3 had bits of FreeBSD 5 in it according to Apple's page for it.
And according to the tiger preview page it's based on FreeBSD 5.x - so that would probably be 5.2.1.
save the GNUs!
From the article
FreeBSD 5.2[3] will also introduce a software layer that lets Windows network drivers work with FreeBSD. This layer, dubbed Project Evil, means that wired and wireless network cards should be able to work with FreeBSD even if the manufacturers have not written any drivers for the operating system.
This is totally awesome! FreeBSD network drivers are very reliable, but hard to come by for very new devices (eg. wifi). I would totally use this feature even with some reliability sacrifice.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
One problem with the FreeBSD installer is that it's both an installer and a configuration tool with menues that does not remember previous settings that you have done.
The OpenBSD installer is just that : an installer. Post configuration is mostly done after installation.
No one needs to break an NDA; any portions of the 10.4 DP that would be relevant to FreeBSD are publicly available through version 8.0b1 of the Darwin project.
I'm working on it. I think it's quite stable right now, but some features are still missing. I really hope to get it done before 5.3.
You know, 'portupgrade -aPP' is much faster, because it uses binary packages, as apt-get does.
The OS-X Kernel is Mach, yes, but then immediately loads the BSD kernel which pretty much runs monolithicly (very non-Mach). Below that level, you get in to a BSD userland, and the Carbon / Aqua layers. It's really not all *that* bizarre.