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FreeBSD 5.3 RC2 Released
ValiantSoul writes "FreeBSD 5.3 Release Candidate 2 was just released. This new RC includes an updated network stack that fixes a bug where the system stops responding when under severe network load, the complete disabling of the ULE scheduler due to instability, and other fixes. Originally the FreeBSD team decided not to release a RC 2 however the fixes in the latest CURRENT were important enough to do so. As long as there are no severe problems with RC 2, this will be the last test release until a final one. See the full announcement on the mailing lists."
Whell, FreeBaSeD is only on Version 5.3 - speak to the hand, thats so like 2002 retro - You aren't all that and a bag of potato chips.
Like whateva, Solaris is on version 8 and Fedora is on 9, Slickware is leading with 10, Gentoo is Gentoo is.... As if I would use something so not invouge. I run this click so I might just use 2003 since it has such highya numba.
Where is my lip gloss. Don't mess with me. I'm one crazy mo-fo. I once popped a cop cause he wasn't giving my props in Oak town. I've heard that somewhere.
Christ - its hardly like it just cost you the price of two DLT tapes to write those ISO images or something.
A spindle of 100 CD-R's costs around £14 here currently... so two blank CD-R's is around 28p, or the cost of a chocolate bar. Sound the bells!
Try writing RC's onto CD-RW's and then when updates come out, wipe them and burn the latest version!
Sheesh.
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
That's the risk of putting betas/rc's on cd. I know those cd's will become obsolete soon enough. If I'm going to use those, I'll just put them on rewriteables so I can use them again for the next release. :-)
I'm waiting for the final release this time because rc1 wouldn't even install on this Dell C810. In the meantime it runs 4-stable like a dream.
home
If you're really concerned about the $.20 or the downloading, you should probably just track the branch using CVS until release. Is FreeBSD on 2 CD's now? I thought it was one disk, and one rescure disk.
I've actually given up downloading the entire thing and now just use the mini install cd. For me the first step after setting up a system is always updating the ports tree and installing from ports anyway.
This is just more proof that the folks over at FreeBSD are committed to releasing nothing that's not at-or-near perfect. For sure, nothing will hold the -RELEASE tag unless I'd run it at home if not in a production environment.
Personally, I'm happy that they're more concerned with stability than they are with the release schedual. The bugs in RC1 were pretty severe if not overreaching.
I am really impressed with the work that went into this RC. GDB fixes, plus work on memory allocations and networking data structures.
Bravo! I hereby increase my bid to $52,000.
Sincerely,
Jeff Merkey
(Please remember that directing vitriol against the mentally disabled may be a violation of Federal Hate Crimes statues)
Yeah, but this release is probably just to show off to the NetBSD team that the FreeBSD team has the guts to stick with the demon logo.
Lemon curry???
"1. Why not fix the new schedular?" "2. Why did it take so long for them to realise it wasn't going to work" 5.x has been too slow. They want to release a stable, functional operative system. Despite of the lack of the ULE scheduler there're a lot of stable areas and new features in FreeBSD 5.X which people need in the real world to solve real problems. Hence the "need" of a 5.x-based "stable" release, to leave 4.x behind (just for mainteinance) and start to work 100% with 5.X. The ULE scheduler has some problems but it also has a lot of good things that work, it'll be just delayed to get maximum stability for 5.3. It looks like they don't want to have Yet Another Delay. Other operative systems (linux 2.6, windows, other BSDs) are also a natural competition for freebsd and freebsd needs a stable 5.x to face them because 4.X is just old and misses lots of features. I'd guess the ULE scheduler will be fixed and enabled by default in 5.4.
[Man with OS slung over his shoulder] 'ere's one!
[FreeBSD, slung over shoulder] But I'm not dead yet!
[Man with cart] 'e sez e's not dead.
[Man with OS] Don't mind 'im, what does he know?
[Man with cart] Well
[FreeBSD] Netcraft? Netcraft! Well, that bloody does it!
FreeBSD jumps off the second man's shoulder and begins to club both men, vigorously.
See what I've been reading.
...includes an updated network stack ...
In other news, Microsoft has declared they have just improved the network-stack of Windows XP, making it more robust under heavy loads....
10 ?"Hello World" life was simple then
i'm using 1024x768 @75Hz (128 columns of text!) and it's a dream for coding in. i don't wanna use X, so only way i'll be happy in fbsd is if i can get big BIG console windows like this. anywhere from 128 to 132 cols is good enough for me.
(i already checked fbsd web site man pages for wscons, and it looks like 800x600 with 90 cols is the max???)
fair enough, but im just going to chime in and say - on what distro is the fastest internet land speed record performed on.
nothing else but netbsd.
What is the best way to upgrade to this version? Download the CDs? Through the ports? Do you have some sort of strange method that no one else has heard of?
Victory is gained, not in knowing your opponents next move, but in preempting them.
I am a student with a dialup connection at home. The only way I can possibly install most software is by compiling "fetch lists" and then fetching files from the school connection. The easiest way to get FreeBSD is to download ISOs, the second easiest might be to wget the entire FTP directory. The second method is very rude and so I use the first method. There are many people who have access to a fast connection only at certain times. Also, I have a laptop that runs Mac OS X. Furthermore, everything I access on the internet goes through this laptop. That means that can only install via files and not with any kind of a network install. Downloading ISOs is not much of a waste of time as I have it downloading on the background. In this case though, I it is a waste of media as I have two obsolete CD-Rs.
some time ago there was something happenning about grapgics for the console, hmm let me google...
http://people.freebsd.org/~nsouch/kgi4BSD/
Those are some cheap chocolate bars you've got (ours are at least 35p, typically). Also some expensive CD-Rs. I can get CD-Rs for around a nickel (2-3p, about) apiece.
+++ATH0
The ULE scheduler was supposed to be the default scheduler. It was placed as the default in 5.2. Between 5.2 and 5.3 kernel preemption was enabled. Some serious flaws in ULE popped up leading to crashes and other instability. Due to the complexity of ULE and preemption together only a handful of core people are able to fix this.
Since 5.x has been hold back long enough it was decided to drop ULE as the default scheduler for 5.3 and concentrate on releasing 5.3.
This doesn't mean that nobody is working on fixing the problem nor that ULE will not be the default scheduler. It is just going to take a while before it happens.
The reason for totally disabling ULE in 5.3 was to focus on other bugs in 5.3 and fix ULE on current (6.0) and then backport this to a later 5.x release.
I suggest you read cvs-src summaries at http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/ which gives a view on what is happening on current.
I've been running FreeBSD 4.x on my web and database servers for a while. I'm about ready to buy some new hardware, and I'd love to put 5.x on it, but after looking at the release notes for 5, it appears that they are urging me not to do this. So I guess I'll go with 4.10 on my new machines. Does anyone know when the 5 branch will be ready? Is 5.3 final going to be it? If so, how many more months before it arrives?
I remember a few months ago that 5.3 was the target for making the 5.X branch the official "stable" branch. Any word on when 5.X goes stable if not with this release?
"Watch your cornhole, bud."
Let's not get too huffy here about ULE. Anyone care to bring remember the ugly VM wars of the early 2.4 series? Even now there's still plenty of LKM traffic over scheduling in the 2.6 kernel. The unfortunate thing is that I think a bunch of the work is for naught. I believe Dragonfly (at least in concept) will end up being much more scalable. If that proves true, I'd hope that down the road they re-merge to focus resources on IMHO is the most robust of the FOSS OS's.
My daemon pumpkin http://www.joyrank.com/misc/daemon-finish-20041028 .jpg
I did Tux last year with a stencil I found on the net so this year I made the daemon one from scratch. Kinda rough in a few places but overall, I was pretty satisfied with the results.
Cheers,
I once tried to install FreeBSD on my system. I couldn't get X and many other apps to work. And installation wasn't very "pleasant". So, here is my question: Can an ordinary user like me use FreeBSD?
> This 5.3 release is full of bugs and is slow too.
It certainly has some bugs. Regarding slow, it is far from slow for what I happen to do with it, but it might be for your case.
> It still does not release the Big Giant Lock like it was promised a year ago.
It does for some and not for other cases. It is definitely not free from giant locks for now.
> It looks like it's time to give the DragonFly branch of FreeBSD 4 a try.
I find Dragonfly very interesting but at the moment it is not usable for production for me for the simple reason that it lacks support for hardware that I have and use (and so does FreeBSD 4.x), so little choice there (alternative woudl be to run Linux on that hardware)
What hardware?
Broadcom gigabit ethernet chipset (yea, I know its crappy, but it is on many mid/lowcost systemboards, and it does work well enough for most workstation purposes)
Any graphics hardware with accelerated opengl that actually performs somewhat better then software rendering.
Support for multiple audio cards, preferably with virtual audio channels.
Now, those may not be features you require, fine for you. I do happen to need them, so I will pcik a platform that supports them.
If/when Dragonfly happens to support either smp on a hypersparc machine or most of the hardware that I happen to use every day, it will have a good chance of finding a spot on a machine here.
I wonder about your post tho. Commenting on the scheduler and locking problems is justified tho hardly new, but do you think you are doing anyone a favor by acting similar to that HawkinsOS guy? (ie, hijack each and every FreeBSD related thread anywhere to promote your system of choice while re-iterating the same argument over and over)
That should keep most people busy and relieve dial-up users from download-hell.
The DVD seems to be very cheap, so even with international shipping, it shouldn't cost a fortune.
Rainer
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
In this case though, I it is a waste of media as I have two obsolete CD-Rs.
Or you've got two bootable 5.x series cdroms that you can use to do a netinstall w/o fiddling with floppies. The second CD you have there probably won't change much from the actual release.
It all depends on how you look at it.
Sure, I got jacked in the middle of a binary install bc the mirror i was on changed from RC1 to RC2 in the middle, but oh well. What do you expect for free?
I give the fbsd team credit for pulling the plug on a release that wasn't ready yet. It takes a lot of guts to say "we thought we were set, but we were wrong."
do() || do_not();
the whole point of a RC is to find and fix bugs. hence the name "release candidate", not "release". there is no definitive number of RCs before a final release.
and if downloading and burning 1.1GB is too much of an effort, why don't you just pre-order 5.3? you don't have to worry about how many RCs there are and you'll be giving back a little. then again, you are complaining about wasting 2 CD-Rs, which costs less than the amount of change i have on the floor of my car...
Slackware
When RC1 was released, it was stated that it was "likely" to be the final, not that it was 100% going to _be_ the final before the actual release.
CD-RWs work fine for installing operating systems, I haven't burned an OS image to a CDR in years. CD-RW's are cheap enough now as well.
Perhaps you could download the 'bootonly' ISO, at 20mb, and install over the network?
- oZ
// i am here.
This is is clearly a Troll.
From the announcement of RC1: "This will likely be the only Release Candidate before the final release of 5.3". The word 'likely' should ring a bell...
Unlike most Linux distros FreeBSD is really easy to upgrade. Go ahead and install RC1. Updating FreeBSD amounts to:
% cvsup
% make buildworld
% make installworld
% reboot
It's a little more complicated than that, but not much more.
No you *can't* rest assured. Here, have a look at what the word "likely" means.
Kudos to who marked a Troll "interesting"... :-/
> I think Broadcom cards work now under DragonFly. I don't know about multiple audio cards. In both cases, it's worth asking on one of the DragonFly mailing lists (kernel@dragonflybsd.org or users@dragonflybsd.org) - if they aren't supported, there's folks who may be able to work on it.
Well, good to hear that it is developing well in that area also.
> As for accelerated GL - FreeBSD nvidia drivers work through a port override, and anything else that XFree86/X.org works with should go fine.
Hmm, means it will work on at least oen machien here with accelerated opengl, good to know. Is dri available for the opensource opengl drivers for older ati and matrox hardware also?
> There's a lot of VFS work going on right now,
Yeah, read about it on the Dragonfly website.
> so if this is for work machines, it may be worth waiting...
> but it will also be worth evaluating.
Yep. current lack of a modern x86 machine that is available for this is why I don't have it running right now. THe x86 hardware that I have is used for work and somewhat serious personal stuff. Most 'playing' with operating systems is on things like slightly older sgi and sun hardware here for now.
Definitely something I will keep an eye on tho, and as said, when it supports enough of the hardware that I use daily, it is likely to find a spot on a machine here. Good to kmow that it is closer to that point then I thought.
> Disclaimer: I work on DragonFly, so of course I think it's great.
Hehe, well, no problem there.
Also pls note that my original comemnt was not to say that Draginfly is not interesting, but to point at the thread hijacking by some of its supporters that imho is rather counter productive (and I hoped to do so in a somewhat funny way, which oh wonders seems to have been understood by at least one moderator)
At any rate, good luck with the system, and I will definitely keep an eye on how it is developing.
It must be those goddamned liberals and their treason again.
Incidentally, jeffr just came back and applied a couple of significant fixes to ULE, notably the KSE+ULE+PREEMPTION that was the primary reason it was disabled. Now let's hope its speed can be brought up to 4BSD levels for server tasks (assuming that it hasn't got better since the last benchmarking was done, which may not be true), so it can be turned back on and give us back that desktop-interactivity love.
(Parent post was definitely accurate on the reasoning)
Get the CD and install on a spare machine. BEAT THE HELL OUT OF IT.
If you find a bug you will be a GOD in the eyes of those that want to run 5.3 production-style.
I vote wait untill that release is FULLY READY TO GO OUT THE DOOR. 5.3 is critical to further acceptance of FreeBSD, further commercial funding support, further legitimacy of the platform, and confidence in the developers/Release Engineering team.
If you need it now, run the RC. Unless a TON of people need 5.3 NOW, the developers should feel no pressure to get it out the door. They should feel pressure to get testers to find problems. They should feel pressure to find people that like inflicting damage on a running OS. Find those twisted individuals and give them a RC CD and a keyboard. Hear their stories.
Make it good as the worlds's eyes will be upon this relase and any further potential problems. RC2 should be fixing a much smaller list of bugs.
WE'RE STILL PLAYING AROUND WITH SCHEDULER CHOICES!! ???? I'd suggest more RCs. Blank CD-R media is CHEAP. Corporate downtime when bugs are discovered 1.5 weeks out from a release IS NOT!
Test Test Test Test Test. Beat the hell out of it - portinstall all ports. Rock the box and see how she holds. Try and crash it. Pound it from the network. Pull a live disk. JMP to a block of random bytes. Run 200 instances of your JVM. Start up as many desktop applications as possible. Try and kill your install and see how Beastie holds.....
5.3 is going to ROCK but SHOULD NOT BE RUSHED!!! If it needs time, by all means give RE-team time!
I hope we don't have to see a 5.3.1 release.
Perhaps the developers should require a certain variation in hardware platforms tested on or a given number of people to run it with no problems before final release.
(I don't run FreeBSD in a corporate environment or profess to know much about RE's testing process. Just trying to get in people's heads that extreme testing WILL make this release a HUGE success.)
Look here:
Presentation on new things in Network Stack for 5.3
I think it was an excellent idea to delay the release and revert to the older scheduler. I installed RC1, and am using it now for ordinary day to day desktop stuff. In general it seems to be an excellent release, but within the first week of use, I experienced problems that seem to be problems with the scheduler. It's only a sample size of one, admittedly, but I think it indicates that the problems with the scheduler were not esoteric ones that would only bother a few people.
Find free books.
Sorry about the yelling people.
I LOVE FreeBSD!!! I really can't wait for this release. Actually I can (perhaps unlike others), but it does excite me quite a bit. Just wish I had a MP machine on which to play....
Developers. Developers. Developers. You're all beautiful. Your work is wonderful. You code so we don't have to. Kudos, thanks, and appreciation to the Nth!
Same goes for the testers. FreeBSD wouldn't be where it is today if it weren't for you installing untested code on your machines and diligently reporting problems and fixes. Cheers to you brave, brave souls.
Shoutouts to the documentation crew! THE HANDBOOK ROCKS and has since I started reading it. What a value. It comes free! Free OS, Free docs. What's not to love???
Port maintainers. Put up your hands for these guys. A wide range of code setup for flawless builds with a single command.
Wizardry. Pure wizardry.
Do the ULE scheduler problems have anything to do with XMMS skipping while doing certain other things? For example, every time I mouse over a link in Firefox, XMMS skips a bit even though Firefox is niced at +10. This is really the only thing that still bugs me about my new 5.3 RC1 install...
I just upgraded my desktop at work to RC2 from 5.2.1. The hiccups were minimal (remove PFIL_HOOKS, add devices io and mem, re-download HFS support), and for my trouble my problems getting my iPod to talk to the USB 2.0 interfaces have all gone away. While I was at it, I added LDAP NSS and PAM support ports and am now a very happy camper! Kudos to everyone involved.
Why three separate commands?
apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade && reboot
Works for me!
No matter where you go... there you are.
Most Reliable Hosting Providers during October
and the 4th is a bsd as well
I'm primarily a desktop user of FreeBSD, and I miss ULE soo much (hiccups in mplayer - and even JUK sometimes - during compile with 4BSD, and general responsivity issues - on the desktop of course).
Just a minor correction (granpda) : ULE was not made the default scheduler in 5.2/5.2.1! In fact, I think that was the main problem (switching to ULE only in current later meant less exposure, and less chance to find the bugs as early as possible, less time to work on those bugs, etc...)
> I am a student with a dialup connection at home. The only way I can possibly install most
> software is by compiling "fetch lists" and then fetching files from the school connection.
> The easiest way to get FreeBSD is to download ISOs,
If it is that awkward for you, why didn't you simply wait another week for the final release ?
Sig out of date