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FreeBSD 5.3 Release Candidate Released

Cronopios writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has just announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-RC1. This will likely be the only Release Candidate before the final release of 5.3, so please give it a try and report/fix any bug you find. You can read the announcement, check the schedule and the 'Known Issues' (problems that are still being worked on at this time)."

34 of 135 comments (clear)

  1. Bind version changed by Cronopios · · Score: 5, Informative

    An important difference is that BIND 9.3.0 has replaced BIND 8.x as the default name server.

    --
    Windows users:
    Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
  2. Binutils upgrade by theapodan · · Score: 2, Informative

    Basic binutils are upgraded too, but I find it particularly interesting that the Darwin msdosfs tools are getting incorporated into the BSD tree.

    Cool.

  3. 4x vs 5x performance by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Hi

    I have been following news for quite a while now and I have tested several fbsd releases form
    4.X and 5.2.1 releases from all I have noticed is that I liked 4.X very much especially the memory management, harvest performance, actually the overall performance and the widely available documentation, well that's one of the main reasons why freebsd is known to me.

    Know you guys coming close to the 5.3 -stable release alot of users are going to upgrade/switch, right, because this is what we have been waiting for. What about the performance that 4.X had? Will the performance be equal ? Will it be having better performance? Even on low end machines? And especially sinds freebsd is becoming more and more ready for desktop use, performance is a big issue on desktops.(look at Gnu/Linux for example, which I have been using for a very long time know, and all I can remember is that almost all of the releases have scheduling/latency issues. When I was using 2.2/2.4/2.6 All I have seen where low latency patches. What about freebsd?

    I'm so exited to try out the new freebsd release. Butt a couple of questions are desired first.
    As all you have noticed the above^ part, will fbsd have the same performance or better? When will this be ready 5.3.X ? Could I get some more accurate information about this? Since I'm planning to use it on my desktop.

    I have only been reading the bsd section at slashdot so I don't know much about the progress you guys are making on the feature release. Is there a offical news site for freebsd users? Like openbsd has *deadly.org.

    What about the compile flags freebsd RC is using compared to 5.3 -stable will there be a lot of changes? What about gnome packages? Will 2.8 make it in 5.3 stable (iso)?

    If those things are taking a while to be there, does fbsd have any kernel patches like linux does to improve desktop performance? For example like: http://members.optusnet.com.au/ckolivas/kernel/

    Joe

  4. FreeBSD 5.X issues by PinkFluid · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Am I the only one that feels that FreeBSD 5.X has gone in the wrong direction?

    I run FreeBSD 5.X on my desktop since I don't feel it's ready to replace the production servers running happily with 4.X; and 5.X and the desktop feels very sluggish and slow in many areas compared to 4.X.

    Maybe 5.X is faster on SMP, but on uniprocessor I think it's definitely a set-back compared to 4.X.

    I feel FreeBSD 5.x is not yet ready, even it's almost 2 years late based on the original predictions(5.X-STABLE at least).

    I don't want to start a flamewar, it's just that I cannot get rid of this bad aftertaste that 5.X left me with.

    I really really hope FreeBSD improves over time - it was a fine OS. Meantime DragonFlyBSD is something to keep an eye on ... it sounds promising, although only time will tell...

    1. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by martin · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Looking at the 5.3 issues on questions@freebsd.org most people wouldn't trust 5 as stable yet, and on a uniprocessor most say 5 is slower than 4.x.

      I do note there are tentative plans for a 4.11 release, but as most of the work is concentrating on 5.x it's existence maybe a still birth.

      BTW MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) is based on 5.x rather than 4.x technology so someone's trusting enough..

      And yes 5.2.1 is definitely fast on SMP systems then 4.10.

    2. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by agshekeloh · · Score: 4, Informative

      5.X still has all of the debugging options on by default.

      This can cut your performance by a good 50% or so.

      Debugging gets turned off last thing before release. (I'm not sure if a RC has debugging or not, mind you, but the BETAs certainly do.)

    3. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by a_hofmann · · Score: 2

      The 5.x branch is not targeted at production use before it's first stable release.

      As an other poster already said, the unstable and rc branches contain debugging code that cost performance. Don't let the stability of 5.x fool you into thinking it to be a final system yet. The team did a great job introducing loads of new features, pushing FreeBSD on top of current technology again, but polishing these new features (which actually should bring 5.x to beat 4.x performance wise afterwards) will mainly happen in the end of the release cycle, after all those nasty showstopper bugs have been fixed.

      If you really need drivers or features only present in 5.x, you are in an unlucky situation for the next months.
      Otherwise stay with 4.10, the fastest ia32 desktop operating system in existance...

      The future will bring us 4.11 with selected feature backports of 5.x and 4.x lightning speed, and soon afterwards a 5.x that will rock the CPUs like current stable branch does... :)

      No need to be hasty, younglings...

    4. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by 1UnixGeek · · Score: 2, Insightful

      The thing that *really* is of concern for the future of FreeBSB 5.x is the very complex SMP/Thread coding model in is used in 5.x and the fact there only seems to be 2-3 individuals on planet earth that are able to fix and fix bugs in the code. (See the recent posting(s) in the -arch mailing list for some examples of this. This is really a cause of major concern for the future of 5.x. Matt Dillon (aka the Dragonfly BSD project) has constantly been sounding alarm bells about this but no one on the project seems to be concerned at all about this issue.

      With the many bugs in 5.x that cause many mysterious crashes and lockups in SMP systems, and that fact that only several people on planet earth seem to have the detailed knowledge of the code to find them, this should be a major source of concern for anyone considering using 5.x in any sort of production application ?

    5. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by Brandybuck · · Score: 4, Informative

      If you have not already done so, TURN OFF the debugging switches in your kernel. Non -RELEASE versions of 5.x are going to have major performance issues simply because they've got so many debugging switches on. So turn them off, or wait for -RELEASE to appear in a couple of weeks.

      --
      Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
    6. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by guroove · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Someone please correct me if I'm wrong, but wouldn't taking out the smp lines in the kernel config fix the problem of slow performance on single CPU systems? I have had 5.3-Beta on an old 433 MHz system for a few weeks now, and I have been using it as my home NAT machine. It routes packets way faster than by linksys router did, and seems to be much faster than a similar system I installed at work that runs FreeBSD 4.10-STABLE.

      --
      Someone stole my old sig.
    7. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by Drishmung · · Score: 3, Informative
      BTW MacOS X 10.4 (Tiger) is based on 5.x rather than 4.x technology so someone's trusting enough..

      That's just the BSD subsystem---i.e. userland. Memory and I/O in particular have almost nothing in common with BSD and so FreeBSD UP vs MP performance etc. are not going to have any effect on Darwin.

      I'd be interested to know long it will be before the ports tree has reasonably complete support for 5.3.

      --
      Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
    8. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by Baki · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Did you recompile the kernel without WITNESS option?
      The beta GENERIC kernels have lots of debugging which slows down a lot.

    9. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by ozzmosis · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually they were removed on September 7th

    10. Re:FreeBSD 5.X issues by anholt · · Score: 2, Informative

      Desktop sluggishness is something that gets complained about a lot, and I know I hate the feel we have on the desktop right now. Currently, scheduler work has been focused on 4BSD with server loads, notably mysql. SMP performance with supersmack (mysql test) has gone up something like 50% in the last few months, thanks to netperf and 4BSD scheduler improvements. What would be nice to see is somebody fixing ULE (the new scheduler) both in terms of server performance and fixing those remaining bugs, since it is known to be significantly better in terms of desktop interactivity. However, its author only has sporadic FreeBSD time and others find ULE to be very scary, so it's not getting fixed currently.

      However, I do think that we'll see interactivity continually improve at this point, as Giant keeps getting pushed out of more subsystems.

  5. Re:what's the status with usb 2.0 ? by PinkFluid · · Score: 2, Informative

    My experiences with USB on FreeBSD is very positive. I tried three different digital cameras and two external disks, mouse etc. and everything was autodetected, although I never tried a USB 2.0 mass storage device. The best thing to do is try out it yourself.

  6. Re:Very good news by gtoomey · · Score: 2, Interesting
    I've been doing the same, & the only problem I found was that I could only boot in safe mode with an nforce motherboard. KDE is looking good.

    I'll try it my wireless usb adaptor soon.

  7. How? by captnitro · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I have a question. I have a number of small systems of varying specifications (all x86) and I'd love to be in on stress-testing 5.x; I'd love to have been in on testing all the BETAS. But my daily operations in FreeBSD are limited to working in Gnome or XFCE under a few IDEs, compiling ports, doing some maintenance work on servers, playing games, reading Slashdot, etc., none of which I find particularly stressful to the system. If it was, I would be inclined to believe it was a port problem, not a system problem.

    What is the best way to stress test FreeBSD that will put it through its paces?

  8. Something of note by the+real+darkskye · · Score: 4, Informative

    If you've been tracking 5.3-Beta and want to switch to the RCs and eventual RELEASE, don't forget to change your cvsup tag to RELENG_5_3 else you will end up with 5.3-STABLE, which isn't.

    --
    Music is everybody's possession.
    It's only publishers who think that people own it.
    Fuck Beta
    ~John Lenno
  9. anyon want to bet on the actual release date? by CaptainPinko · · Score: 2, Interesting
    when I first saw the schedule when it said October 17th I was betting on Halloween, but now I think it may be longer. With that many Known Issues and one marked as "errata candidate" and with that many "Needs Testing" I'm guess that either a) FreedBSD 5.3 will be released in the Beginning of December (last of the majour BSDs to release) or b) 5.3 will be called the first stable but 5.4 will really be.

    Anyone have any predictions?

    --
    Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
  10. Re:Scheduler? by 1UnixGeek · · Score: 4, Interesting

    There appear to be bugs in the new SMP scheduler (SCHED_ULE) that no one can track down that cause mysterious crashes and lockups when a system is run under heavy load. The real issue seems to be that only a couple people in the project understand the complex kernel threading model enough to be able to find and resolve bugs, and even they don't seem to be able too most of the time ?

  11. Re:Scheduler? by molnarcs · · Score: 4, Informative
    Is that you again. Back to provide some more fun?

    Don't listen to this guy. He has been spamming every -bsd related announcment for weeks now. He is selling an os called HawkinsOS which is still beta. Trolled FreeBSD mailing lists as well, and when he was pointed out (politely I might add) that he might be violating some of the copyrights in the BSD os (not the BSD copyright, but other copyrights included in the base system) he went mad and started a crusade against FreeBSD developers. Began with PHK and DES, but by now, as you can see from the thread I linked to above, he has an issue with everyone, even documentation folks.

    This is a hoax folks. He claims to have sold 2000 copies of HawkinsOS, which is basically FreeBSD beta!!! He claims to have developed patches making FreeBSD 'enterprise ready' (meaning: in his opinion, FreeBSD isn't. lol: tell it to yahoo, or netcraft, or even apache.org!), but if you check his site (the spelling mistakes, the prices) or any of the threads he started, you'll see how 'serious' he is.

  12. Re:5.3-STABLE or not? by stox · · Score: 4, Informative

    Yes, it is:

    5.3-STABLE FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE #0: Sun Oct 17 13:50:02 CDT 2004

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
  13. Re:Very good news by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, once you branch a release you cannot make radical changes, that's why 4.x still has gcc 2.95 and why it has that ancient copy of perl. Because 5.x will be the -STABLE branch for years they decided it would be more practical to wipe perl out of the base and let people install it from ports. This way you can install 5.6 or 5.8 or whatever version you need/want.

    This wasn't done in 4.x because it would be against POLA (principle of least astonishment). A 4.10 system should work the same way 4.0 did unless a change is justified. You just cannot change the version of perl on a production system. Once all the perl scripts in base were replaced by sh+awk or C equivalents (so the system can work without perl), perl was taken out and the user is given the option to install a package during installation.

    Jaysen

  14. DragonFlyBSD by ceallaigh · · Score: 4, Informative
    If you have concerns about the path being taken for FreeBSD 5.x, I highly recommend you take a look at DragonFlyBSD.

    DragonFlyBSD

    DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. These operating systems belong in the same class as Linux in that they are based on UNIX ideals and APIs. DragonFly is a fork in the path, so to speak, giving the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series.

    1. Re:DragonFlyBSD by archen · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Kernel stuff aside, does Dragonfly lean towards the 4x userland or 5x userland?

    2. Re:DragonFlyBSD by setagllib · · Score: 2, Informative

      It was forked from 4.x so large portions of userland are still 4.x's, but have had imports that bring many components up to 5.x and beyond (e.g. RCNG from NetBSD/FBSD5.x, gcc 3.4 snapshot [not default nor exclusive since some kernel/boot bits aren't compatible]).

      DragonFly BSD is a "too good to be true" project, I would have to say. Its developers are highly talented and very quick in their work, and the stability has been very high given the massive changes made to vital kernel facilities. Sure there have been bumps but that always happens.

      I have to say on the other hand, though, that DragonFly BSD's development appears to be like Linux (innovative code instead of sticking to tried-and-true [but assumed outdated] designs) but with higher quality and less contribution from randoms. It's progressing amazingly quickly and with minimal regressions, compared to FreeBSD 5.x which took years to get even near stable and has suffered enormous regressions in performance (except on SMP, the only thing it does much better than 4.x).

      For DragonFly to really break the FBSD 4.x mold, it'll take a lot more surprising work. The keyboard system is just silly (one keyboard at a time?), and requiring a user-land daemon to support even mice is unheard of in modern systems. These are problems persisting without any resolve in FreeBSD, and would need to be addressed in DragonFly BSD if it's to share the stage with NetBSD 2.0 and Linux (which both have much cleaner device behavior).

      --
      Sam ty sig.
  15. Re:what's the status with usb 2.0 ? by molnarcs · · Score: 2, Informative
    My experiences with USB on FreeBSD is very positive.

    Likewise. Works better for me than hotplugd Recently when helping out a friend with suse, I didn't know how to make a flashdrive work. Partly this is because of my negligence: I forgot a lot about how linux works. Hotplugd was running, yet the system didn't gave any indication of what happens when I plugged it in. On the other hand:

    Plug in flash drive in freebsd (5.x) :

    umass0: Super Talent Flash USB 2.0 Flash Drive, rev 2.00/10.00, addr 2
    da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
    da0: <S Talent Flash Drive 2.0 1000> Removable Direct Access SCSI-0 device
    da0: 1.000MB/s transfers
    da0: 123MB (252928 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 123C
    plug out flash drive
    umass0: at uhub0 port 2 (addr 2) disconnected
    (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): lost device
    (da0:umass-sim0:0:0:0): removing device entry
    umass0: detached
    plug out my usb mouse (samsung optical)
    ums0: at uhub1 port 1 (addr 2) disconnected
    ums0: detached
    plug mouse back in
    ums0: vendor 0x055d product 0x1030, rev 1.00/0.04, addr 2, iclass 3/1
    ums0: 3 buttons and Z dir.
    Note that even Z dir is detected :) These messages all appear on the first console. Now about the bad things: crappy usb2 support. You need device ehci in your kernel config file, and currently, ehci is in want of a maintainer, because it is quite buggy. It doesn't bother me too much, but I think it is high time now for FreeBSD to have better USB 2 support.
  16. Re:anyon want to bet on the actual release date? by molnarcs · · Score: 4, Informative
    I think 5.3 will be quite STABLE. On the other, I don't think 5.3 is a real 5.x release. I know it sounds silly, but as long as the old 4BSD sheduler is the default scheduler, I consider it something like a hybrid. I know this is just one thing of the many improvements/features of the 5.x branch, but this is the one (as a desktop user) I feel mostly. Of course I use ULE, but this switch back (for the sake of PREEMPTION) gives me the feeling of incompleteness.

    Hopefully, as soon as the release process is over, they will switch back to ULE in -current (officially, that is. in every dmesg/kernel config file I have seen on current, most developers run ULE). And I hope 5.4 will be the ULE release!

    So, to answer your question: yes, 5.3 will be STABLE (and not only in name. the whole 5.x series is fairly stable, at least beginning with 5.1, or at least as stable as your average linux distro). I think it will be out on my birthday :))) (nov 11). But I also think that 5.x will be really ready when they have ULE back as default (ditch preemption if it needs be, ULE is so much better in every other aspect).

  17. Re:Very good news by inquisitor · · Score: 3, Informative

    Have you got plug-and-play-OS turned on in your motherboard BIOS? If you do, turn it off; FreeBSD 5.x (and some later 4.x) has problems with the option, and Windows doesn't need it anymore. I didn't have to turn off ACPI that way...

    (This is occasionally listed as "Device Configuration" or whatever, like on my Toshiba laptop, in which case the right answer is "All Devices".)

  18. ndiscvt by Burb · · Score: 4, Informative

    The ndiscvt tools that allow you to convert your NDIS network drivers into kernel modules works really well (at least in BETA7). I'm very impressed. (My only gripe was that it had problems reading my .INF file because it was unicode; I converted to ANSI and all was well). I can now run a pretty good GNOME desktop on my Acer laptop with wireless access.

    --

  19. Re:what's the status with usb 2.0 ? by R.Caley · · Score: 4, Funny
    Bullshit you idiot.

    Such a persuasive technical argument, I am sure we are all almost as impressed by your insight as by your inability to work out how to log in.

    --
    _O_
    .|<
    The named which can be named is not the true named
  20. Re:How? (oops) by hugo_pt · · Score: 2, Funny

    renice -20 *setiathome pid* will kill pretty much any OS

  21. Re:Scheduler? by molnarcs · · Score: 2, Insightful
    For your interest: this is a copy & paste job from FreeBSD current mailing list. The thread name is "FreeBSD 5.3b7and poor ata performance," and by now it is solved. It looks like it was a hw misconfiguration issue.

    This also flies in the face of this troll's claims of FreeBSD developers are uncooperative *sholes. Follow this thread to its end, and you'll see that even though the original poster (as DES rightly claims) was quite confrontative, they went out of their way to reproduce the issue. Robert Watson even commited some code to help trace down similar problems. And some stats from the same guy later, when the problem was solved:

    Transfer rates:
    outside: 102400 kbytes in 1.897858 sec = 53956 kbytes/sec
    middle: 102400 kbytes in 1.934135 sec = 52944 kbytes/sec
    inside: 102400 kbytes in 2.735875 sec = 37429 kbytes/sec
  22. Re:anyon want to bet on the actual release date? by molnarcs · · Score: 2, Informative