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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.
Can someone please explain how FreeBSD goodies like updated 5.3 code would make it's way into Mac OS X? How long might it take, what bits, etc, have moved in past releases?
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
I got into FreeBSD about 6 months ago and have not looked back. I was frustrated with RedHat and heard good things about the BSDs.
I have been tempted to check out OpenBSD, because of the networking. This FreeBSD 5.3 status announcement mentions work being done integrating PF (updates?) and ALTQ (new to FreeBSD?)
I'm working towards a site-to-site VPN deployment (hubs and spokes, of course) and am debating FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD. IPSec, queueing and redundancy (dynamic routing, perhaps DBU, and something like CARP) are requirements. Managability is important. "Room for growth" (transparent proxies, accounting, file/print services) would be icing on the cake.
I figure it all could be made to work either way. Is FreeBSD's IPSec and firewall (IPFW/PF) as solid os OpenBSD? How about queueing? I'm a "seasoned newbee" on BSD... My experience is with the FreeBSD 5.x branch, but I'm not sure what all is changing with 5.3. I figure on diving into OpenBSD someday, it's just that time can be hard to come by.
Any advice out there? Am I giving anything up if I commit to Free vs. Open BSD?
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.
The following has been brought to you by IANAT (I Am Not a Troll).
/etc, the fact that YaST didn't like me seeing the cluttered /etc, and this nagging feeling that it was a system of patched together parts, rather than a well-tested, stable "distribution" (note: I'm knocking the distro, not the kernel, and only slightly).
I've been using FreeBSD since long before it was apparently dying, since maybe the 2.x branch. I never tried Linux until this past year, because I live under a rock on the dark side of the moon.
I tried SuSE, and it was great and all -- the setup was really nice -- but it's not there yet. In fact, I backed over it with 5.2 immediately afterwards. Why? Well, for day-to-day use, I didn't see any difference between Linux and BSD -- except the cluttered
When it came down to it, FreeBSD and a daily-updated ports tree seemed to "click together" better than Linux. For most other day-to-day use, there wasn't a huge difference, though I will say BSD was a tad 'snappier'.
I urge those who haven't tried FreeBSD before to give it a chance. It's not that hard, and it is not, contrary to popular opinion, "better for servers". I play UT2004 and America's Army daily on my BSD box with no problems (thank you native nvidia drivers). What causes most people to gawk after seeing Linux is the text-mode installation -- which is just text menus, but still menus. (I've seen some installation programs that can make you wonder.. OpenBSD, I'm talking to you.)
Last month I introduced FreeBSD to someone who had never, ever used *nix in any form before. After about an hour explaining different concepts (slices, ports and packages, rc.conf), she was off and running and actually, almost sadly, hasn't asked for my help once since then. She had X and KDE up and running within the day.
So give it a try. We have no evil plan. (Except that, yanno, our mascot is related to Satan)
See also: http://www.freebsd.org/java/dists/14.html
Quoth the status report:
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
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*!
NetBSD.jpg
as always . . .
As a life-long practicing Christian, active in my local church, with many practicing Christian friends, I just can not in good conscience use an operating system that uses an image of Satan as its mascot.
Context is everything. The BSD "daemon" is in no way supposed to lead people in worship or in any other way lead people to violate commandment #1. In fact, as an open source project, I feel that projects such as FreeBSD and Linux best represent the kind of software development the Acts early church of the Apostles would do: communal. Honsetly, it is not menat the celebrate satan or represent some sort of mystic iconography.
Microsoft, on the other hand (which you currently use in favor of BSD), is a perfect example of immoral greed (if you mods disagree; fine. I'm just calling it how it looks from here), which I find much more morally reprehensible than a cartoon devil; because unlike the cartoon, it is real.
So, as a recent convert to Christianity, I find a great moral symbol in the fact that I run 100% open source at home, as opposed to corporate mammon.
no, that would be a debian release. (said, posting from a sarge box....)
FreeBSD for the impatient.
Other folks have responded. I'll just point out that the mascot is not Satan. Just as the mascot for the Duke Blue Devils and the icon on Underwood Devilled Ham are not Satan either. There isn't any thing holier about commercial products that have angels as their icon and the Anaheim Angels are not automatically the more righteous baseball team. (Back in the 80s there were baseball players with the name Teufel and Gott. It was not the apocalypse when they faced off.)
You have your faith and its symbols, ethics, and morals. It is a serious question as to how you integrate this into what some may call your secular existence. If you honestly believe that either God, Beelzebub or you will be confused as to your allegiances and as to what your mortal life means, then, you're right, stay away from FreeBSD.
Now, unlike the duality of heaven and hell, there are more than two points on the operating system spectrum. Other unix-like operating systems which do not use a devil mascot are NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux (many distros), and Solaris x86. The latter is a Unix operating system. Seek and you shall find.
So I was a Gentoo zealot for two years, it helped to teach me (more than I wanted to know) about Linux.
I got fed up with power-management issues on my employer-supplied laptop computer (a nice machine, but not Linux-friendly) and purchased a Macintosh PowerBook. Very nice, not as clean as Gentoo, but it got me interested in *BSD.
My server was running Gentoo SeLinux until last week. I've installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 and I am *very* happy with it as a stable, secure server platform.
Linux, Apache, etc. have lent legitimacy to Open Source, and BSD license is attractive to many who cannot otherwise use Open Source. So *BSD is helping spread Open Source, and to otherwise improve the quality of the aggregate code base.
Since Gentoo was developed by someone who liked BSD but wanted the device-driver support of Linux, I feel that most of my skills transfer very quickly. I feel that my learning curve on FreeBSD helps me better understand Mac OS X, which has an installed base of about 12 million computers (if Apple is to be believed).
BSD is dead? Hmm. I rather doubt it.
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.
by stability you mean a new way to get root on linux every month?
You know, 'portupgrade -aPP' is much faster, because it uses binary packages, as apt-get does.