Slashdot Mirror
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."
hey fp?
Final release?
Let's take a cue from Groklaw -- all posts about *BSD dying, Netcraft, and similar predictions under this thread, please.
Could've fooled me! Can't wait to throw this on VMWare!
That's pretty ancient.
I know, it's a mistake. 3.4.3, or 3.4.2?
Anyway, FreeBSD rules. I'm glad they waited to make 5.3 great.
This is a completely irrelevant milestone. DragonflyBSD is quite close to being production ready, and is already competing against FreeBSD in terms of stability and maintainability.
In five years, either FreeBSD will have adopted DragonflyBSD's model, or nobody will be using FreeBSD.
freebsd rocks!
the one strange thing -- why there is now announcement on the http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/announce.html page????
...we have just learned that it is dead-born.
BSD is an excellent operating system if your trying to lock down a network, or some other coperate enviroment.. Just look at their history with security, which is pretty convincing. So I say kudos to milestone release 5.3, I know I will be trying it. ~matt
I've been concerned lately with the freebsd release cycle...fbsd has been working on a stable 5 relase for over 2 years now. I was **really** glad to see the following mail from Scott Long, an freebsd core developer, regarding a new release engineering cycle for FBSD 6 and beyond. Check it out:
All,
FreeBSD 5.3 is about to be announced this weekend and will signal the
true kick-off of the 5-STABLE and 6-CURRENT series. We are very excited
about this, both because 5.3 is a good release, and because 6.0 will
give us a chance to, erm, redeem ourselves and our development process
=-)
5.x was a tremendous undertaking. SMPng, KSE, UFS2, background fsck,
ULE, ACPI, etc, etc, etc were all incredible tasks. Given that many of
these things were developed and managed by unpaid volunteers, the fact
that we made it to 5-STABLE at all is quite impressive and says a lot
about the quality and determination of all of our developers and users.
However, 4 years was quite a long time to work on it. While 4.x
remained a good work-horse, it suffered from not having needed features
and hardware support. 5.x suffered at the same time from having too
much ambition but not enough developers to efficiently carry it through.
By the middle of 2002 is was very apparent that we needed to start
focusing on getting 5.0 released. Unfortunately, we fell into the trap
of wanting to finish more features in order to feel good about 5.x. We
kept on ignoring the fact that 5.x already had a lot of good and needed
features, and that the number one goal needed to be to get it stabilized
and turned into 5-STABLE. Instead we drew up a road map document that
dictated releases based on features rather than on stability and, even
more importantly, timeliness.
It is also important to consider the injustices of slashdot's editors. This topic
can be researched more on anti-slash
There has been quite a bit of discussion about this over the past week
by the developer community. The proposal that I and Poul-Henning have
set forth is to stop gating releases, both major and minor, or features,
and instead gate them on a schedule that is both reasonable and timely.
New -STABLE branched will be made on a calendar-based time line, and
point releases on those branches will be made at regular intervals. We
are still debating the exact time line, but it will fall somewhere
between doing a new -STABLE branch every 12-18 months, and doing point
releases every 4-6 months.
While as engineers we all tend to hate timelines, this does have a lot
of positive aspects. First, it increases the predictability of the
development both for our users and for our developers. Users can plan
effectively for upgrades and testing/validation knowing that there will
be major and minor releases at fixed times of the year. Developers can
judge when to start new projects and when to focus on bug-fixing because
there will no longer be the temptation to delay a release by a month in
order to slide 'one more thing' in. This is not unlike most commercial
OS vendors, and we've received a _LOT_ of feedback that this method of
planning is desperately needed.
Second, it means that development efforts for major features will
continue to shift out of CVS and into Perforce. This already happens
quite a bit, so it's not as radical of a change as it seems. CVS HEAD
will remain the 'experimental' development branch, but large items will
not be brought into it until they are functionally complete and
integrated. HEAD may still get unstable from time to time, but it
hopefully won't turn into the collision of lots of half-done
experimental things like it has in the recent past. It also means that
if a major feature isn't done in time for a -STABLE branch-point that it
can continue to be developed outside of the CVS tree and be made ready
for the next scheduled branch po
*BSD Obituary
*BSD, 27, of Berkeley, CA died Monday, Sept. 6, 2004. Born July 3, 1976, it was the creation of a cluster of pot-smoking hippies who went to Illinois and came home with a reel of tape. Rather than smoke the tape, they uploaded it and hacked on it a little.
*BSD was known for its C shell and early TCP/IP implementation. After being banished from UC Berkeley, it was ported to the x86 platform, where it fell into the hands of heavier pot-smokers who liked to argue. Soon, the project had splintered into 12 different Balkanized projects. Until its death, there was almost constant fighting in and amongst these groups, sometimes degenerating into out-and-out fistfights.
*BSD is survived by its superior, Linux, as well as several commercial unix implementations. It may be missed by some who knew it, although most of them are said to be mere OS dilettante dabblers.
A funeral will be held at 2 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 9, at the Berkeley Chapel on the UC campus, with interment to follow via the burning of the original *BSD tapes and scattering of the ashes over the San Francisco Bay. The Rev. Lou "Buddy" Stubbs will officiate.
The family will receive friends from 7 to 8 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 8, at the funeral home.
I, for one, welcome our new Antichrist overlord.
After perusing the BSD mailing lists and reading the ERRATA document, there appear to be too many open/unfixed issues for this release to truly be considered STABLE for widespread production use in my opionion. I'll stick with 4.X a little while longer.
I'm getting a 403 on the torrent file. I'd be happy to share my employer's weekend bandwidth for the torrent, but it needs to be fetchable!
I'm sure "SlashdotMedia" will improve on all the wonders that Dice Holdings blessed us all with
Just blew away my testing partition (ubuntu) and installed it it's good to see you my old FreeBSD friend.
;)
ummm although it would have been nice to see a new installer
time to fire up the old burner... has anybody managed to see if the tracker is up?
All the torrents you could want.
I've been running FreeBSD on a couple servers for a while, and with this latest release, I've been thinking about trying it on a desktop. The particular computer I have in mind is currently running Slackware 10. I have a few questions for those of you using FreeBSD on a desktop system:
Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?
Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?
freebsd is DYING freebsd is DYING freebsd is DYING HAHA!!! This delay in the 5.3 release process only CONFIRMS what netcraft had alread.......wait...D'OH!
Recent Compaq/HP laptop users can't run FreeBSD. This problem has been known since July and still not fixed in this release. FreeBSD 5.3 (all betas, RCs, and the release itself), 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, all versions of FreeBSD 4 and 3 cannot run on Compaq Presario R3000Z and similar laptops, in either i386 or AMD64 mode. When is this going to be fixed? How come the patch exists.... works perfectly.... and isn't being commited?
Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
So how is the PPC port coming along? I was hoping it would make it into 5.3.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
November 1st, you know "Day Of The Dead" and all that.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" - BF
"FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, and ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using bootable media or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures are available now."
I thought they were going to relegate Alpha to Tier 2, but I see ISO images on the servers? Thank you FreeBSD team!!!!!
That BSD is dying and Linux is truly the modern progressive OS..
Perhaps the mods should have read the entire post before moding it up. HINT: anti-slash isn't a bsd website.
Yes... looking forward to being able to be lazy and using Windows network drivers when I cannot find a BSD driver. Damn generic chipsets with no indication of chipset.
I've been a linux user for over a year, and I currently have Mandrake 10.1 installed on a Compaq Presario 2100. It's for personal use, so there's no need for the machine to be particularly secure. Everything works. Is there any reason for me to use BSD rather than Mandrake?
I'm also helping my girlfriend with Suse 9.1 on her Hewlett-Packard laptop. She has problems with ACPI, stability, and the linksys wireless card we bought for it. Is there any way she could benefit from a switch to this new BSD release?
Thanks for your input!
When a true genius appears, you can know him by this sign: that all the dunces are in a confederacy against him.
EOM
Look somewhere else for a sig.
2 years? i know of an OS that hasnt released a new version for 2 years and counting...
Debian!
and a few OSs that never did really release something i consider to be fully stable...
Gentoo! SuSE! Mandrake! Windoze!
stability takes a lot of time i guess.
If you aren't ready to install FreeBSD on your hard disk, you can try out FreeBSD 5 with the live FreeSBIE CD. It's currently based on FreeBSD 5.2.1.
wget "ftp://ftp3.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i38 6/5.3/5.3-RELEASE-i386-miniinst.iso" && echo "Wah Hoo!"
1. *BSD is dying troll
2. 500-page GNAA constitution
3. peeeeeeenis bird! (with ascii art)
4. a poem of natalie portman statue covered with hot grits
5. kde vs. gnome holy war (they decimate each other and leave the rest of us to breathe sigh of relief)
6. the evil governemet has allied with microsoft and riaa and they're suing your grandma
LiveCDs are an incredibly useful thing to have for an OS, especially for BSD, which has been really neglected by a lot of Linux users. They don't view it as a an easy or powerful or otherwise compelling alternative to Linux, and I really think that attitude needs to get blown away by some kickass releases and, of course, LiveCDs to actually show them what BSD'S about.--Proud user of Mac OS X since 2001
Take off every sig. For great justice.
Take that RIAA. There is a good use for BT. HA!
I'd been eagerly waiting for this release and at last, it's here! Hmm maybe this time I'll adopt freebsd as my primary OS..
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
From 1988 to 1993 I was a "Sun God," meaning I adminisrated a university's computer lab and network of mostly SunOS (680x0 & SPARC) 4.0 systems, all based on BSD. Root access, god-like powers, you get the drift. About this time, Linux was just a posting in a newsgroup.
After leaving the university environment and getting a real job, I wanted to re-live the Sun environment at home, but goodness, were Sun systems ever pricy. Linux looked like a viable alternative, but FreeBSD had just released 2.0 at the time.
I went with FreeBSD.
It was a pretty easy decision: FreeBSD was the more Sun-like of the two PC Unix-like systems. Specifically, Linux used the System V style of runlevels, and Sun had jaded me against System V ever since they stopped bundling the compiler and called their OS "Solaris."
That was awhile back. Today, I've got rackmount hardware at home running a variety of operating systems. I get most of my stuff done on Linux. But FreeBSD has run, now runs, and will most likely continue to run my firewall and NAT. It doesn't do much else; but what it does, it does with efficiency and grace.
Cheers, Chuckie.
I gave BSD a try for the first time a couple months ago, and as an intermediate Linux user who favors Slackware, I felt right at home with FreeBSD 4.9. I would definitely recommend anyone who is a *nix junkie to give it a try, you might be pleasantly suprised. I know that BSD typically isn't as good with compatibility as Linux, but I haven't had any issues. Long live BSD
I know he's an idiot, but he can't be that moronic can he? Can he? Anyone?
Surely this is just another example of his greed (a la Roland, Phillip, etc) and willingness to use his position at Slashdot to drive cash into his pocket by misdirecting our clicks.
And why aren't you using Mac OS X? OS X is the #1 most popular version of BSD, all the others are niche's variants. It has all the power of the other BSD's but with all the superior kung fu of Apple design and engineering.
Easy there, it might not be that solid. They haven't done much testing outside of x86 and even that is flaky and/or slow for a lot of hardware (including hardware every machine has).
Unless FreeBSD offers something for Alpha that NetBSD and Linux don't and you absolutely must have it, you know where to turn.
Sam ty sig.
My teacher was right. The world collapsed the moment the Rex Sox Won.
/. robot topics scaring the shit outta us
Look at everything that's happening since.
- New releases of *BSD variants.
- Bush re-elected
-
- Half life 2 released in about a week.
What next? Flying pigs? (Name that Simpson episode!)
Let me begin by expressing my genuine thanks at your endorsement of my post. A man of your stature will be a great help to our cause!
:) ).
Consider the following evidence against the infidels: anti-slash has recently compiled a library of injustices that precisely document the abuses of slashdot's editors. From the stupidity to the censorship, you can view and share the facts all recorded in one place.
I'd also like to take this opportunity to invite you to use the database tool. With this database of highly-moderated slashdot posts, you can repost and gain carma for future jihad operations, and suck up mod points and pollute the meta-moderation system. These disruptive activities help lower slashdot's already low signal-to-noise ratio and further discredit the editors.
Again, thank you for your consideration and may Allah grant light the fire of jihad within your soul (now that you're not busy trying to create 5-stable, you should have plenty of time for anti-slash
In Sacred Jihad,
jihadi_31337
It was, tier 2 architectures may have their ISO's generated at the Release Engineering team's disgression while tier 1 architectures *will* have their ISO's generated.
/ article s/committers-guide/article.html#ARCHS
See the following url for more info:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1
What about PPC? I find it amazing that they don't have a stable PPC port. Just insane.
evil is as evil does
FreeBSD 5.3: Resurrection
Moderated.
* Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?
..)
Because it works for everything I need to do and it does so predictably. I need to know very few things to just admin my desktop.
* Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
No. generally hardware is very well behaved if you have normal mainstream or (in sectors) corporate hardware that "everyone has" it will work just fine in both those segments.
* Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
Not more than with Linux as virtually all Linux apps are being ported pretty quickly (and we can run them under Linux Compat as if they were running on a Linux kernel). I run a full KDE desktop with some of the extra apps (k3b. kmplayer,
* In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?
In general, yes. There will always be some problematic cases (usually when software is written solely for Linux) but usually they will be overcome and fixed. See also ports. Linux binaries from current Linux systems ought to run on a FreeBSD box also.
HTH
Gentlemen, I do believe we've slashdotted bittorrent.
1) Why did the BSD user cross the road? He wanted to make sure that truck really did run him over.
2) Why did the BSD user attend a LUG meeting? He got sick of the cold nights meeting up at the local cemetery.
3) What did one BSD user say to another BSD user? Nothing, the undead can't speak.
4) How many BSD users does it take to change a light bulb? It doesn't really matter because the first user will convince the rest of them that the old bulb is still working.
Could anyone point me in the direction of showing how to upgrade 5.3-RC2 to 5.3-Stable?
Worth a try, installs quickly, easy to manage and all... not like it'll take a long time or a lot of effort :)
Well god knows it did last time I tried installing it. Though this was pre-CD rom drives (well, pre-affordable CD rom drives), so I had to try installing from 3.5" floppies...
And unfortunately the lack of nforce network support and software sound mixing might push me towards freeBSD, but who knows, netbsd CDs are cheap, maybe I'll try it for a bit.
Not so amazing. They started with x86 and built a lot of x86-centric code, and just managed to hack in support for a few other major architectures on which they could expect to run. If the code was even half as clean and logical as Net or OpenBSD it'd be easy to port, but this isn't the case.
It wouldn't be useful though. FreeBSD's real strengths are on x86 (possibly amd64/ia64, not sure on the status of those) and those strengths are diminishing as the other systems catch up, without regression. On PPC it would be just like the other systems, but so much slower (try 5.3 and see what I mean) and less matured. Why, then, would anyone want it?
Sam ty sig.
Can you guys change the article icon? I know its only been a recent change for bsd, but come on.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That's unnecessarily harsh. Sure, before the port to Alpha (waaay back) the code had many i386isms, int size dependencies, and byte ordering problems. But after that work was done, there's no longer any particular diffference between FreeBSD and NetBSD in this area. Also, I for one see the amd64 as the future of FreeBSD (NetBSD and Linux too), so that's one port that will definitely succeed.
Easy there, it might not be that solid. They haven't done much testing outside of x86 and even that is flaky and/or slow for a lot of hardware (including hardware every machine has).
As I understand it a pretty large amount of testing has gone into amd64 too. A decent number of developers have amd64 boxes, and that helps a lot.
Alpha support was in 4.x, but has been going down for a while now, especially in 5.x. Port build testing on pointyhat isn't even done for Alpha anymore (according to Kris the Alphas won't even boot). Fortunately , this isn't as bad as it could be, since the Alphas are going away anyway. (and you know NetBSD will always have support for them ;P )
I see a whole ton of architectures as being the future of NetBSD, and in fact, the future of any viable cross platform OS. In particular, I don't see any arch. as the 'future.' Cross-platform requirements keep programmers sharp and honest. Any single-platform focus is bad and negative.
I.e. I think an OS 'succeeds' to the degree that it builds on not just latest-greatest. Does it still build properly on the 68K and ARM? If not, why not?
"What's the frequency Kenneth?"
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
BSD IS dying, take a look at Netcraft.
:-)
I applaud your idealism. I'm a fan of cross platform software for the same reasons as you.
What I meant by the amd64 comment is that plain i386 is dying and amd64 will take over the number one spot. That's all.
Yes, it's early to claim the death of i386, but it will be just a legacy operating mode of amd64 compatible mainstream chips very soon.
im wonderin is my pc-dvd creative (mk5000) is compatible with freebsd?
im thinking about switching to a bsd for quite a moment...
sharing my internet connection (adsl on the win2k/win2k3 side) gonna be easy?
This is good news indeed.
A lot of ISPs and hosting companies will probably start upgrading their FreeBSD 4.x SMP servers next year.
Anyone know how well FreeBSD's jail() holds up against Virtuozzo?
I'm no UNIX expert, I can get KDE to work fairly easily, I can get the sound to work, I can play videos (Totem Player - AVIs,VOBs,FLI ...), I can record music (Audacity - WAV,MP3,OGG ...) as well as the basic things like Web, Email.
I do have a problem with the packages. Some like, OpenOffice, are easy to install but others depend on dozens of other packages, which still don't work after you have got them all - I wish they would create an extra package with everything you need in it.
As much as I would like to see FreeBSD as easy to install as Linux, I have learned quite a lot from my efforts so far. If I ever get back to low-level coding again I would feel more confident on BSD that on Linux (I started on DOS). As for compatability, FreeBSD seems to work on just about anything with a clock-pulse but Linux (Mandrake 10.1) has not been able to drive a fairly new, standard network card (VIA Rhine) but FreeBSD did - and its BSD that now resides on that machine.
My deepest, darkest fear is that Linux will go the way of Windows - driven by marketing & legal objectives not user needs. On that dark day I suspect it will be *BSD that will save us.
In summery, FreeBSD works quite well as a desktop OS but you will need to work at it.
Hope this helps - PJB
Art Makers Just an excuse to show photos of naked women !!
*BSD, 27, of Berkeley, CA died Monday, Sept. 6, 2004. Born July 3, 1976...
Obviously the reporter must be using the superior OS mentioned in his post where not even such basic calculations can be done right. I highly recommend the reporter give FreeBSD a try.
This just in: the said evaluates to 28 on Linux as well, so this must mean the reporter is an idiot. Q.E.D.
Yup, longjmp()ing out of signal handlers sucks. We finally gave up on SIGALRM+longjmp() as a timeout mechanism for IP address to host name lookups in Ethereal, because, in additiona to not being able to use it on Windows (which is where the timeout problem is worst, thanks to inverse NetBIOS-over-TCP lookups), we also can't use it in OS X (because you can longjmp() out of the middle of a send of a Mach message to lookupd, leaving the code to talk to lookupd in an inconsistent state, causing the next lookup attempt to crash) and in at least some versions of some Linux distributions (because gethostbyaddr(), at least with some versions of glibc, appears to grab a mutex that doesn't get released if you longjmp() out of it, so the next call hangs forever trying to grab the mutex).
Traditional folklore said OpenBSD is focused on security, NetBSD on portability, and FreeBSD on performance (on x86). How can NetBSD be faster than FreeBSD now? Heck, if NetBSD is about correctness and portability, and on top of that they manage to beat FreeBSD in terms of speed, then there's something really really wrong with FreeBSD.
So I guess my real question is, is it really true that NetBSD is surpassing FreeBSD at heir own game?
Repeat for effect: Yes.
FreeBSD always achieved performance through best-case-everywhere optimization and scalability of algorithms for everything. Out of nowhere NetBSD beat it in scalability after two weeks' work (everyone knows this now). NetBSD had always focused on making things simple, portable, solid and logical. This kept it slower (much slower) for a long time, but now in 2.0 it's made huge headway with Scheduler Activations (even known to be faster than NPTL!). This makes a huge difference on its own, and the refined hardware support and everything has really topped it off.
I couldn't believe it myself, but every bench and 'sitting and using' observation proved NetBSD 2.0RC4 to be many times faster than FreeBSD 5.3, and about on par with Linux (but a notch behind in some synthetic tests). Disk access especially - everyone who has bonnie'd a FreeBSD 5.x system and compared this to another OS already knows what I'm talking about.
FreeBSD's model for complicating things in the quest for universal performance has now defeated itself, entirely owing to the terrible SMP model which has tangled it all. NetBSD on the other hand has made things much higher performing without complicating it, and so it does work faster in practice and not just in theory, and it works solidly and just as well on all platforms it supports. OpenBSD still needs a good threading system but in other respects it's not far behind, especially given its amazing security and quality-of-release record.
Before anyone labels me for trolling against FreeBSD, try it yourself, in benches as well as interactive usages, and compare it to NetBSD and Linux. Won't take long to see a pattern emerge.
Sam ty sig.
OK, the simple place to start in assessing your claims was to google for "NPTL Scheduler Activations".
l
The first link that comes up has an interesting disclaimer at the top:
http://people.redhat.com/drepper/glibcthreads.htm
I could continue my investigation by googling for "Ulrich Drepper", but I'm sure that would only lead to more interesting disclaimers.
applying a patch takes a great deal of time to review... how bout you get some respect?
Mr. Hawkins,
I'm one of your several Fortune 100 customers.
I know you enjoy trolling on slashdot, but we kinda need some assistance here.
We deemed you trustworthy enough to make our Fortune 100 company migrate to your OS - a decision that has been very easy for us to make, since you're such a reliable person and such a skillful programmer - but enough is enough.
We paid you a lot of money. I have no doubt that *your* HawkinsOS is worth every penny, and that these BSD alternatives are just pieces of junk since they don't have your "patches", but now it's time to come back to work.
Sincerely,
Mr. Joe Moron
HawkinsOS user
Fortune 100 company CEO
That said, I want a unix handheld in a clamshell formfactor. NetBSD seems to be the OS of choice for me to use: see http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/06/05/Big_Sca ry_Daemons.html.
Any recommendations for a ~$100-$150 device to use? I want at lease 640x240 display, 802.11 in either CF or PCMCIA, ability to use a Microdrive, and some decent battery life.
I have found Jornada 728, IBM Z50, or NEC MobilePro 780/800 on eBay seem to be close. Any other suggestions?
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
unless you enjoy switching for the sake of switching.
Hell, I have windows 98 on a laptop that I have no intention of switching OSs on just because I enjoy a working laptop more than I enjoy my favorite OS (FreeBSD, then NetBSD).
Besides, I can't get FreeBSD to see the CDROM during the install....maybe 5.3 will see it.
But as a computer professional, I have to say keep Mandrake on the Presario and advise you to do as I say and not as I do (I break alot of things).
how to update 5.2.1 to 5.3? i suck :)
sharp zaurus + http://pdaxrom.org/
*way* overexceeded all expectations.
can do anything a linux desktop can.
I want a clamshell and except for the price, Zaurus would be perfect. SL-C7xx and SL-C8xx are still in the +$500 price range.
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD :)
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project
maybe the troll has different sources?..
This still sounds like the async i/o vs ordered meta commits, aka softupdates.
FreeBSD uses softupdates which writes the metadata in order, and then write it sync or async i/o.. doesn't matter, and par or better with Linux 2.4.
It's sorta like journaling, and it's been there fr quite at long time, since 2.x at least. Google softupdates.
The base default install used to have softupdates off and plain sync i/o is of course slower, but it's hell a lot safer than async i/o until you switch to journaled async i/o. And then, you're back to ordered metadata commits, or softupdates again.