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FreeBSD 5.3 Released
cpugeniusmv writes "FreeBSD 5.3 has been released! This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the
release notes and
errata list. Bittorrent Download."
Let's take a cue from Groklaw -- all posts about *BSD dying, Netcraft, and similar predictions under this thread, please.
If it's not broke, don't fix it.
How do I upgrade my machine from 4.10 to 5.3 stable ? I mean is there an easy way using CVSup or sysinstall which will upgrade to 5.3 smoothly ? I am a novice to freeBSD world.
Tejas Kokje
There is always a need to be secure.
"I use a Mac because I'm just better than you are."
Well, as far as everyone who knows is concerned, no even hardened Linux has ever competed against any BSD in security. It's just impossible with Linux' development model, and the services in userland (as opposed to the mature services that the BSDs have kept for decades and hardened) are often dirty hacks that haven't had proper auditing, if indeed any.
:)
But if you want security, go OpenBSD, it's the world leader. A close second is NetBSD, which right now is much faster and more stable than FreeBSD 5 (even in many SMP cases, too). FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too. It's a shame to see such a great system degenerate, but it happened.
In my opinion, NetBSD is a good half-way between Linux and OpenBSD. It has a lot of Linux-like performance (sometimes better, sometimes worse) and design, but security isn't far behind OpenBSD in practice. It doesn't have anywhere near as many randomization-of-kernel-data features though, which you might find handy. You can still use cgd for any storage including swap, if you're really paranoid
Sam ty sig.
people who don' have powerpc machine? or maybe people who don't care about pretty interface? (bsd is just fine for server, no need to buy os/x).
You my friend, are a Troll. As an avid user of FreeBSD 4,5, 4.10, 5.1, 5.2.1, and now 5.3RC2, I can personally guarantee that you have no fucking Idea what you are talking about. Lost cleanliness, my ass! The improvements in 5.3 are awesome. The integration of BIND 9 into the base inside a chroot jail is excellent. The separation of Perl from the base also helped to clean it up. The user experience is awesome in 5.3... My Ghz athlon server has 500+ ports installed, every service you could imagine, and runs X.org with OpenGL flawlessly. I notice a distinct increase in performance and functionality after CVSUPing from 5.2.1 to 5.3 RC2. With a streamlined kernel and good old SCHED_4BSD what exactly is so "unclean"? Have you had a personal experience with 5.3 or are you just spouting mindless zealotry? Why are you on a personal quest for schism in the BSD community?
Calling anything so massively successful "crap" is just pure ignorance. Are Linux and Windows, or anything that's not NetBSD also crap? Please share.... The /. mods obviously can't get enough of your idiotic pontification.
To blog is sublime
how is it broken? because it doesn't have an eye candy install process? it gives you exactly what you need and nothing more. unless you specifically can identify why it's broken, like it wont install on your system; your comment is bunk. i prefer the 'fits like a glove' type install.
Could anyone point me in the direction of showing how to upgrade 5.3-RC2 to 5.3-Stable?
Well... I'm sure this is a troll ("niche's variants"), but still:
/usr/ports/audio and /usr/ports/multimedia, I have a very nice workstation, thank you ;-).
I have tried it. OS X is a great desktop/workstation, but it is not the definitive Unix server. I had the pleasure of administrating on XServe running a very large and busy website, and I will take plain 'ol FreeBSD any day, hands down. Apple just tends to overcomplicate many aspects of the server, with non-standard system layout, elaborate extra configurations for standard services, making it hard to turn off services, and for Cthulhu's sake, why would a serious Unix sysadmin want a machine that always has a power-hungry graphical interface running? I'll take consistent, clear thinking and conservative architecture over "superior kung fu" any day.
Sorry... FreeBSD all the way for my servers. Actually, at work I also use FreeBSD 5.3 (since Beta) as my desktop, and with KDE 3.3 plus a few choice packages from
Surprised me too. It's clearly a made-up story. Pot smokers would never get into fistfights.
You are the one who have no idea of what you're talking about.
FreeBSD 5's SMP model is a performance hog on UP systems. This is a well known side effect of the heavy mutex approach. However, fell free to live in denial. FreeBSD 4.10 is still a lot faster than 5.3 on any UP box I've tried. And SMP performance on 5.3 is nothing to write home about. DragonFlyBSD is faster on SMP boxes, which is funny, since they did in 1 year what FreeBSD hasn't done in 3.
I like FreeBSD, I've used it since 2.2.8, but it's no longer the best option for x86 systems. Heck, even NetBSD scales better than FreeBSD 5.3 right now. And NetBSD used to be pretty slow. The NetBSD guys are quite competent coders that know that it's better to have a real solution in 2 years than a quick hack in 6 months. That's why Scheduler Activations work on all supported architectures while FreeBSD's KSE only works on x86 and sparc64. And that's just one example.
The SMPng code cannot be maintained by 2 or 3 people. SCHED_ULE is bug ridden, but only Jeff can fix it. Do you see a pattern here? Instead of fixing the real problems FreeBSD gets useless features like GEOM and devfs. All done by Mr. Kettle himself, aka Poul-Henning Kamp.
Sadly, FreeBSD 5.3 is the worst FreeBSD release ever. I can't wait for DragonFlyBSD to go gold to wipe FreeBSD out of my system.
--
Glass, total pwnage
What sort of "everything" are you thinking of here? I certainly don't do my compiles in a GUI - and, heck, I even move stuff to and from the desktop using mv> from a Terminal window.
Apple didn't change anything - Command+Z/C/X/V existed (Command, not Alt), as far as I know, before Ctrl+Z/X/C/V; I think it dates back to the original Mac (although it might've been called Apple rather than Command). Microsoft may have changed it, as PC's didn't have an Apple or Command key, and they had other uses for the Alt key.
I certainly don't care for that; I don't know whether there's a rationale for it or not.
Actually, the X does mean "Close", as in "Close the window" - the Windows desktop, and many UN*X+X11 window managers, also implement a window button (often with an "X") whose effect is to close the window. You're probably getting bitten by the fact that closing the last window in an application doesn't cause the application to exit (unlike what usually happens on Windows and UN*X+X11) - and that opening a new document with an application doesn't cause a new process to be created if there's already a process running that application, it just causes that process to be told to open the new document. No, I don't know why that's the convention, and it makes it a bit more of a pain to write applications, as they have to support multiple documents, and thus might not be able to keep global information about the document, as they could if each document has a separate process.
The argument in favor of it is that it's easier to move the mouse cursor to the menu bar, as you don't have to aim for an arbitrary vertical position on the screen - but you still have to get the horizontal position right.
...or moving the mouse over the Dock icon for the application and using Command+N.
At least some of the UI design decisions to which you're objecting might be holdovers from pre-OS X Mac OS, dating back to the original version of the OS, which had no multitasking. That might be a reason for the single menu bar; I don't know whether the "one process for all documents" idea comes from classic Mac OS or from NeXTStEP, however.
The issue the grandparent is alluding to is that we've had some performance hits in early 5.x versions compared to our own 4.x branch. This is due to introducing a wider SMP model, and the necessity for locks for this. However, this is infrastructure for a overall speedup, and we are continually moving more of the code over to the higher performance model.
As far as I know (from what numbers I have seen), we're still faster than NetBSD overall in 5.x, but not in all subcases.
Apart from that, the folklore is a simplification. FreeBSD has several platforms, and we have generally had good performance, but it isn't a really specific focus. It's just something we are good at (compared to the other BSDs, and in many cases compared to Linux). We're also good at general support of software (there are over 11,000 packages for FreeBSD), documentation, etc.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and DragonflyBSD has taken a number of different routes for optimization lately. It is not clear which of these will lead to be the best performance over time; it may be that FreeBSD will keep a lead, or it may be that one of the others will overtake us. Speed is a game everybody plays.
Eivind.
Doubting the existence of evolution is like doubting the existence of China: It just shows that you're uninformed.