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FreeBSD 5.3 on the Horizon

Posted by CowboyNeal on from the counting-down-the-days dept.

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.

6 of 296 comments (clear)

  1. Apache on FreeBSD by FireChipmunk · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  2. Re:Java support? by Brandybuck · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  3. Re:Explain something! by Kyro · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!
  4. Windows Network Driver Compatibility! by dokebi · · Score: 4, Informative

    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*!
  5. Major improvements to jails too by bigberk · · Score: 4, Informative
    A hear from a friend of mine, who is also a BSD developer, that many improvements to jails are on the way in 5.3 (A reminder -- jails allow multiple virtual servers to exist within one system, allowing several customers to each have their own root). Some aspects of jails that have been improved:
    • More efficient resource usage among processes in different jails
    • Superior isolation between jails
    • Raw sockets etc. so you can finally ping and traceroute
  6. Re:Recent FreeBSD switcher by tigga · · Score: 4, Informative
    doing a 'portupgrade -a' makes me long for 'apt-get dist-upgrade'.

    You know, 'portupgrade -aPP' is much faster, because it uses binary packages, as apt-get does.