FreeBSD 5.3-BETA5 Available

Nirbo writes "FreeBSD 5.3-BETA5 is now available! Get it while it's hot! Here is the mailing list post. Remember folks, this is currently the last beta that will be released for 5.3, we're only a week from a Release Candidate, and two weeks from a release!"

Comments

Anyone knows?

[FullMetalAlchemist]

Does anyone know if ULE is put back in as the default scheduler? The 4BSD scheduler is stronger, and better in almost every aspect, but unfortanly not on the desktop where you'll notice the difference.
The reason I ask is that my less than experienced FreeBSD users that have cron'ed cvsup and buildworld might complain that performace when using VLC is decreasing; it's annoying to have to explain possible reasons without knowing.
The mentioned disabled PREEMPTION option seams to indicate this, but I'm not familiar with that option as I'm very happy with the old RELEASE which has another option (options SCHED_ULE).

Honest Opinion?

[polyp2000]

Im using gentoo - running linux
kernel-2.6.8
(SMPx2way with low latency and pre-emptive enabled)

What are the main differences between the latest FreeBSD kernels and the linux ones.

A lot of people say FreeBSD is better because "its more stable" or "it has a more mature kernel" I've seen little evidence to substantiate these common claims. Whilst they may have been true some years ago are they really true today?

Apart from the cool things like the ports system and userland differences, licensing differences aside- At the core level of the kernel what makes a new FreeBSD kernel better than a new linux kernel?

(Genuine Question)

Nick...

Re:Honest Opinion?

[Brandybuck]

You pretty much said what I meant to say. If you have a cool new idea for implementing a subsystem what do you do? You're only choices in seeing it implemented are forking the project or starting a smear campaign against the old subsystem. DragonflyBSD did the former, and the myriad political battles in Linux attest to the popularity of the latter.

Re:Honest Opinion?

[YetAnotherName]

The vaulted FreeBSD stability is mostly a matter of conservativism rather than the long history of the OS.

Regardless of its source, it's that stability that made me choose FreeBSD as the platform for my firewall/NAT. Sure, I've got plenty of Linux, Mac OS X, and even a couple of Windows boxes on the inside, but that single FreeBSD system helps me sleep better.

(Oh, and I think you meant "vaunted", not "vaulted" :-)

Re:Honest Opinion?

[molnarcs]

I had similar experiences with gentoo. And what really bothers me is that they advertised portage as having 'real' dependency checking in answer to a question of why not use ports. I was surprised to find out that (as of may this year) in fact gentoo didn't have proper reverse dependency lookup.

Also, dependency hell was changed to use-flag hell. When Midnight Commander installs (I don't know if it still does) XFree86 as a dependency, there is a problem. In FreeBSD, it is the task of the port maintainer to configure a port that is good for 99% of the users. Everything has sane defaults, while still preserving flexibility: most ports offer a nice ncurses based menu for switching off or on different knobs. In gentoo I had to know what a particular use flag does: in case of motif, I found the extremely redundant info: "This use flag will install motif on your system" - well, thank you very much! On FreeBSD I have to remember one thing: if I interested in configuring a port differently than the port maintainer did, I can look into the usually well commented Makefile (takes less than half a minute).

And don't start me on documentation. I saw a PR (problem report) about one description file of a port, coming from FDP (FreeBSD Documentation Project). The COMMENT in bold was considered a bug:

Description

The COMMENT for the x11/kdelibs3 port is (for KDE 3.2):

<b>This is the base set of libraries needed by KDE programs</b>

It is bad practice to start a COMMENT with 'This is the', since this could be
prefixed to almost all comments and has no informational value.

Fix

I suggest to change the COMMENT to:

Base set of libraries needed by KDE programs

Full PR is here - link might be slow because PR database is always overloaded. This is a paradigmatic example for the difference between FreeBSD and various linux distributions. I think this attention to little details and the general simplicity - read userfriendliness - of the commands, ranging from configuring your firewall to configuring start-up services is what makes FreeBSD so excellent. Forgot to mention: with ports, you can leave your puter building for the night. Even if some ports fail, building will go on, and at the and you will find a nice list of which packages succeded, which failed and why, if there were any. No skipfirst kinda stuff (which seems to a me workaround for the weakness of portage). Also make search key|name will give more info on basic level than portage would give on maximum verbosity. Makes looking for stuff easier.

So yeah, I know what you're talking about :)

ps.I studied literature (finished Univ. last year) - and switched to linux after a virus wiped out most of my very important docs in windows 2 years ago. I have never had any computer training. I loved RH 7.3 (my first linux), and I liked Mandrake even better (till 9.1). Then came debian, but still, there was this urge to try out another distro, and then another, and so on. Since I tried FreeBSD last year in september, I realized that this was exactly what I was looking for. Simple, user-friendly, very fast Unix-like OS, which is easier to learn (because of the documantation AND its consistency) for a newbie like myself than any other linux distro I have tried.

Re:Honest Opinion?

[JQuick]

A lot of people say FreeBSD is better because "its more stable" or "it has a more mature kernel" I've seen little evidence to substantiate these common claims. Whilst they may have been true some years ago are they really true today?

Apart from the cool things like the ports system and userland differences, licensing differences aside- At the core level of the kernel what makes a new FreeBSD kernel better than a new linux kernel?

There is a lot of hype on both sides of the fence here. Your skepticism is well founded. You asked several questions, which I will try to answer, but not without first adding some context. I think this additional context is needed because I suspect from your phrasing that perhaps you are asking the wrong questions.

You ask:

1. Is freeBSD more stable?
2. Is the kernal more mature?
3. What makes the FreeBSD kernel better then a new Linux Kernel?

The reason I am compelled to add some context is that your questions are lacking context. Value jusdgements like "better" and "more __ than" require context, in this case the context of utility. Better for what purpose, and towards which ends? More stable in the context of performing what tasks?

Another question that I have about the phrasing is stems from your mention of the ports system and userland as a preface to your question about which kernel is better. FreeBSD and Linux have different histories. Their user and developer communities have had different priorities. Each thus has different strengths and weaknesses in particular contexts. I would prefer Linux for certain specific uses and FreeBSD for others. The answer to your questions about stability and maturity will shed light on the rest.

Linux distributions emerged from a set of disparate components. BSD evolved from a complete whole. Starting from V6 and V7 Unix in the 70s, it has always been an indivisible whole, kernel, userland, documentation, the whole shebang. The technological strengths and weaknesses of each system, relate to this difference. The expectations and conventional practices of the systems users also are heavily influenced by these differences.

Linux users, developers, and administrators tend to applaud the rapid pace of development, greater number of new drivers and other features, and technical merits of certain specific aspects of the Linux kernel or userland. When hype is stripped away, I believe they are largely correct.

FreeBSD users, applaud, the stability, coherence, and ease of maintenance of their systems. Because it evolved from systems that were already in use, they always had an installed base, and many developers were motivated by keeping themselves and their existing users happy. The needs of system administrators were always well represented in the user and developer community.

Given a particular work load, and a particular set of applications, FreeBSD will outshine Linux on some tasks and be blown away by Linux on others. Each system is sufficiently mature that a well planned and well managed system of each flavor can run reliably for years. Yes, FreeBSD has historically been more stable and robust than Linux. It has a longer history, and its well managed release engineering process has kept the stable branches of the code remarkably robust and reliable over time. Given the rapid advancement of Linux however, the general stability and maturity of each system is quite high. If configured properly and deployed responsibly these gaps have narrowed and are largely moot.

The most compelling differences between FreeBSD and Linux are not terribly important if one deploys a single host and uses it directly. The difference is what is required to maintain the system over time.

FreeBSD is a unified whole, strongly influenced by the desire of administrators to keep users happy. As a result, the ongoing effort required to upgrade and maintain the systems is very smal

Re:Honest Opinion?

[molnarcs]

lol. We are threading on dangerous grounds here, don't you agree? Two things prompted me to reply.

One: someone modded you troll, even though your criticism is specific and it is easy to look up your claims. Which leads me to my experience of the userbase. A ran into the absent nspluginscan problem, and searched the forums for an answer. That's how I found out that I need WITH_MOTIF. A user, just like me, found out this only after having compiled kdebase! I made sure that I didn't miss anything before compiling - and that's how I found the extremely useful description quoted above. Naturally, I was angry: there was no way to know before compiling a beast like kdebase that WITH_MOTIF is needed for plugin support. And of course no one can be expected to search for caveats on the internet before installing each port (or ebuild). To my astonishment, the user, who had to do a recompile just like myself, didn't share my exasperation. In fact, his reaction was: That's what I like about gentoo (referring to the use-flags, and ranting about the wonderful flexibility of the system!).

I only mention this because that somehow, modding your comment as troll reminded me of the absolute resistance to any kind of criticism (well, there are exceptions of course) on the part of the community. Saying anything against gentoo is dangerous indeed :)

Second: don't think (modders) that freebsd folks are antagonistic towards linux in general and gentoo in particular. Go to bsdforums, and search for the terms linux or gentoo, and you will find more threads that praise either of those than critical remarks. What really bothers me, however, is that I feel (both here on ./ and osnews) that when I am asked: why am I using FreeBSD, answering it is always like walking on eggs. Saying it is better in some respects (well, documentation is beginning to be accepted more or less) always results in attacks. So, for a time, I gave very careful and almost apologetic answers, full of remarks like this is just my personal preference, this is how I like it, OF COURSE THIS IS SUBJECTIVE, and so on. I am tired of this, so here is for burning some karma:

I LIKE FREEBSD BECAUSE IT IS BETTER IN EVERY ASPECT THAN ANY DISTRIBUTION I HAVE TRIED! Note the word: distribution. Not linux - linux distributions. It is as fast or faster than SLACKWARE, it has a kickass package management (pkg_add -r foo does exactly what apt-get install does - yeah, binary, precompiled, relatively up to date packages, and as a bonus, it has ports). It easier to maintain. It is straightforward. Documentation is unparallelled. Stable. It just works (out of the box, my usb mouse worked, without any ado and hotplugd or whatever). And most importantly: it is consistent.

One distribution might have excellent documentation. Another might be fast. Another might be simple (slack comes to mind). But I have yet to find one that has all of these. I use slackware occasionally, and except for lacking (or having to use 3rd party) package management, it comes close. But no separation of base and packages. Everything is dumped in /etc/. What does KDE do in /opt? Or gentoo: what does mplayer.conf or operarc do in /etc? Consistency is not the forte of gentoo.

ONE downside: linux distroes tend to have better hardware support (except for networking). Solution: I have fairly standard hardware, and next month, when I'm going to buy new components (a tv card) I would make sure that it works under FreeBSD.

Mod away!

Re:Honest Opinion?

[ArbitraryConstant]

"firewall configuration"

Status of PF on FreeBSD

From what I can gather, it looks like FreeBSD is moving towards using PF as the default firewall (not sure about the timeframe), with IPF and IPFW retained for backwards compatability. It's available as a kernel module/port for NetBSD, and I believe DragonFly has imported it into the base system recently.

It can do some very spiffy things. It might be a good idea to try it out, particularly since you don't have to change OSes anymore. :)

Preemption still problematic

[molnarcs]

Someone mentioned here that perfomance gain, especially on the desktop, is noticeably with ULE. I agree. I've been using ULE since 5.1. The reason I switched back to 4BSD is that options PREEMPTION was said to be buggy with (and this was the main reason for making SHED_4BSD the default for this release).

However, when I tried recompiled my kernel with options PREEMPTION, I had two complete lockups under heavy load (compiling in the background, running KDE, etc). During beta4, I removed options PREEMPTION for this reason. Now I've put it back, and I experience similar problems. I got error messages repeatedly (and the OS stopped responding for a few seconds now and then) when downloading files (with roughly 500Kb/s from network shares. Perhaps the same errors would pop up in other circumstances of heavy disk I/O. The messages were like this:

Sep 20 21:37:59 mcsaba kernel: ad0: WARNING - WRITE_DMA no interrupt but good status
Sep 20 21:38:10 mcsaba kernel: ad0: TIMEOUT - WRITE_DMA retrying (2 retries left) LBA=123095148

After removing PREEMPTION, problems went away. Note that I used preemption with SHED_4BSD, not ULE!

On the other hand, 5.3 will be an excellent release. Other than problems with preemption (which I don't quite understand, I mean preemption, so I would be glad if someone explained to me what it does exactly!), the BETAS were quite stable. In BETA5, the old problem of floppy not working with ACPI on some chipsets (I have via) is solved. Start up time is very fast, I think it is faster than 5.2.1. (it starts up roughly 2x faster than slackware with 2.6.7 kernel on the same box.) Perfomance on the desktop is similar to previos 5.x releases (and I have a few problems with KDE 3.3 now).

Oh yes, another question. options PREEMPTION is listed under the SMP section of /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES. Is preemption SMP specific? From the few things I've read (and the even fewer things I could understand :() I didn't think it was. Can someone explain this to me? And: does preemption help with latency? (I have problems with sound in some games, and I think they are latency related).

The best sleeper feature

[skrowl]

Unlike many who have posted here, I actually read the article ;) Here's a great sleeper / not widely publicized feature: NDIS Binary Compatibility a.k.a. "Project Evil". FreeBSD i386 can use binary Ethernet and WLAN network drivers written to the Windows XP NDIS 5.1 specification. It is a little cumbersome to convert a NDIS driver into a FreeBSD Kernel Loadable Module (KLD)