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."

Comments

*BSD is dying, et al...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's take a cue from Groklaw -- all posts about *BSD dying, Netcraft, and similar predictions under this thread, please.

Re:*BSD is dying, et al...

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

Wake up mods. That wasn't flamebait.

Re:*BSD is dying, et al...

[ulib]

Anything good they come up with will just be copied and made better in all the other operating systems.

Uh.. yeah. Aren't you happy with it? That's pretty much the BSD spirit: academical, not political.
Anyway, since you insist, there are some OS's that *should* get better at copying:
About FreeBSD's Network Stack
Quote:"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps." ;)

And since there have been cases where GPL programmers *stole* BSD code (here), let me add that the BSD code is *not* public domain. So, even who "copies" it, must give proper credits to the author (here's the BSD license, for reference).

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2?

[docbrazen]

Ya, it's 3.4.2. GNU GCC has been updated from 3.3.3-prerelease as of 6 November 2003 to 3.4.2-prerelease as of 28 July 2004. -http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes-i38 6.html#NEW The release notes say the same thing for the other platforms as well.

Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2?

[shlong]

Yes, it's 3.4.2. While 3.4.3 was recently announced by the FSF, there certainly wasn't time to get it tested and properly integrated into 5.3. Anyways, it's one of a couple of typos in the announcement that I fixed in later emails.

Excellent OS

[Ambient_Developer]

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

Re:Excellent OS

[setagllib]

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 :)

Re:Excellent OS

[molnarcs]

Add performance and reliability to that and you get one of the best systems there is. FreeBSD is never missing from the top 10 most reliable sites on netcraft, usually taking more places than any other OS.

In october, the 3 topmost reliable sites were all FreeBSD (4th was either Net~ or Open~ and 8th was again FreeBSD).Read More

Re:Excellent OS

[Ricin]

Hmm, although the gist of what you're saying is probably true, don't be too harsh on FreeBSD5 just yet. Let's see how it stabalizes. I do agree thet NetBSD is awsome in its simplicity and all, and they do have all major packages and it looked to work very well on my SMP (2xPIII-1100) box with 2-current. Great desktop response, really good. But I also get that with FreeBSD and SCHED_ULE.

pkgsrc might be smaller in numbers but in quality it just smokes ports (don't even argue)

No matter what, the *BSDs are on the run and that's just great! The OSS world very much needs the BSDs as much as it needs Apache, Sendmail, Bind, .. etc.

Re:Excellent OS

[HenryKoren]

FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too
Regretfully admitting that FreeBSD 5.3 is crap

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.

Re:Excellent OS

[setagllib]

Desktop is okay. The same software runs (I'm posting from Firefox 1.0 RC1 on a NetBSD 2.0RC4 machine I set up a couple of days ago) and it runs just as well. Responsiveness is very good in all but the highest of high load, in which case your audio might skip for a second or two (but this happens with any OS under enough disk load, and can be prevented by buffering the whole MP3 or whatever into RAM :P).

But as for hardware support, what most consider the defining point of desktop use, it's great. All hardware it does support, it supports basically to full capacity, and the range is good. Right now you'll want standard hardware though, because the NVidia driver is not officially ported (there's an unofficial port I'll have to try) and the xorg one is flaky (but I'm using it now), and there is no NDIS wrapper so standard network cards are your best choice (i.e. nForce networking might not be an option). Fetch a good Realtek and you're set for life. Sound is good, doesn't do software mixing like FreeBSD nor hardware mixing (for most at lesat) like ALSA, but quality is good.

It has good server applications too, not only because it can run on server-centric architectures really well, but more because it is very solid, secure and good at handling load (haven't tried under ultra-high load, but it survived a thrasing from stress(1)). This doesn't affect you since you since you're after desktop, but it's nice to know that it can scale up.

Worth a try, installs quickly, easy to manage and all... not like it'll take a long time or a lot of effort :)

Re:Excellent OS

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:Excellent OS

[ulib]

About FreeBSD disk performance, this message and the thread on the FreeBSD mailing list it points to are pretty clarifying.

Again, instead of bitching and making groundless general statements (i.e. Trolling. You say "every bench shows it to be so": I wonder which one, since FreeBSD 5.3 has been released 2 days ago...), why don't you take a *real* tour of the FreeBSD mailing lists, expose *your* problem(s) (providing all the required details, not a vague/generalizing post like the one you linked...), and then come back here and we discuss the answer they give you? That would make a lot more sense. IMHO.

Re:Excellent OS

[CryBaby]

If you look closely, you may notice that most of my claims are directly against FreeBSD 5.3 (or often 5.x), except those places where something affects the future and past of FreeBSD (like that kbdcontrol/moused stuff).

This is about the physical limit, plus the extras that caching provides. FreeBSD 5 is about half as fast. This is the consensus - every bench shows it to be so.

"Every bench"? OK, let's see them. Show me even one benchmark that proves your point. If there really is a disk performance problem with 5.3 I want to know about it, but I don't see any evidence. If there is a "consensus", it seems to be that disk performance in 5.3 is fine, and not a big topic of discussion (read below). Again, show me some actual posts, not just your isolated, unsubstantiated (dare I say, "trollish") opinion.

Only one of seemingly infinite posts made on this topic: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-October/041009.html

I googled on slow disk performance freebsd 5.3 and the post you mention is the first result. It is an isolated post (no replies). I can find an isolated posted saying literally anything - it doesn't mean much. The poster claims to have seen reports of similar problems in the archives, but I can't find them and he doesn't link to any of them. Beyond that one isolated post I could find only one thread on this topic (where are the "seemingly infinite posts made on this topic" to which you refer?). It contains about 50 posts with actual disk performance numbers from many users and what appears to be a substantial effort to analyze the issue. The person who initiated the thread finally agreed that he had a "weird" motherboard and that other users' results contradicted his own: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-October/041767.html. If you can find anything that contradicts this thread, post the link - don't just tell me about it. And remember, we are talking about issues that exist in 5.3 - I don't need to see discussion of issues that have already been resolved.

been a while

[Pierre]

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 ;)

Re:been a while

[Pierre]

define broke

Re:been a while

[Anonymous Coward]

okay...

#define BROKE 1

this of course, is not GNU/Broke, because if it was it could also read email.

Re:been a while

[chadpnet]

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.

A few questions...

[KillerHamster]

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?

Re:A few questions...

[bcrowell]

Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?
I mainly like it for the ports system. The only things I know of that can compare with it would be Debian's apt-get and Gentoo's portage. However, I was never able to get a Debian or Gentoo system to install. YMMV :-)

Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
I tried to get USB to work in 4.x, and failed, but USB support is supposed to be much better in 5.x. Audio has worked fine for me.

Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
That's the best thing about it: the ports system.

In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?
Well, first check if it's in the ports system. If it's well-known software, it probably is, so you're all set. Otherwise, it really depends on the software. If it's small and simple, and wasn't written with lots of Linuxisms, then it should be no problem. If it's 10^7 lines of code, and was written by people who assumed it would only be used on Linux, then you may have a long, hard road ahead.

Re:A few questions...

[wirelessbuzzers]

Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?

Ports would be the first and most important thing. It seems easier to administer than Linux: pf is a good firewall, and the startup scripts are very logically organized. Built-in ACLs have come in handy; soft-updates and filesystem snapshots are very nice too.

Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?

It auto-configured most stuff on my Mini-ITX box (small/low-power file/web/whatever server, and soon a jukebox too), which is rather strange hardware, including the onboard networking (Via Rhine) and on-die random number generator. I used to have a lot of trouble with spotty USB support, but it seems fixed in more recent 5.x builds. Audio did not auto-configure, but all it required was loading a module or adding it to kernel config.

A nice new trick is Project Evil, which is a binary compatibility layer for Windows wireless card drivers.

Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?

No. It has a Linux ABI, so you should be able to run Linux binaries on it if necessary (or SCO, or Solaris....). Furthermore, Ports is generally quite complete. Sometimes a port will get out of date, but this is often because the maintainers are testing it.

Java was kind of annoying; the port isn't fully automated due to licensing stuff.

In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?

Yes. In fact, software compiled for Linux should (in theory) run without too much difficulty. This is how you get Java.

Re:A few questions...

[molnarcs]

If you like slack you will love FreeBSD (and this is true vice versa - most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware to any other distro). To me, it is easier to configure/maintain (thanks to its excellent documentation: the man pages - better than gnu man pages usually, /usr/share/examples, the handbook of course, the faq, and the very friendly community at bsdforums.org).

Software: most software written for linux would compile without much change on FreeBSD. In fact, that's how the ports system work. Check out freshports to see if your favourite app is included or not. You can also have binary packages, which can be installed similarly to debian packages (pkg_add -r blah is ~ apt-get install blah). If you put linux_enable="YES" into your rc.conf, you'll have linux 'emulation.' Don't worry, it's not really an emulation, linux-apps run with native speed on FreeBSD. Really. (you can try it yourself if you don't believe me, for sometimes there exists both a native freebsd and a linux version of the same program). Finding an app is as simple as cding into /usr/ports and typing "make search name=[progname]" if you know the name of the application you need or "make search key=[whatever]" to search in the short descriptions of each port. Installing that app is as simple as entering it's directory, and typing make install clean (or if you have portupgrade tool installed, you can simply say: portinstall mplayer. Details in the handbook :)

I also have slack on my puter btw (with kernel 2.6.7), and now that ULE is turned off, slack seems to be slightly faster on the desktop (KDE on both), but only if the system is heavily loaded. I think, even for someone who is new to FreeBSD, tracking -STABLE (look up what that means in the handbook is pretty safe, and hopefully they will reenable the new ULE constant time scheduler (whatever that means, I just read this fancy description on OSNEWS :o)) soon.

Hardware compatibility: FreeBSD supports standard pc hardware. There are accelerated binary native nvidia drivers for freebsd. USB support is excellent (my USB mouse worked out of the box, just read the installation messages carefully - you have to say no to mouse configuration if you have an usb mouse) ... except for USB 2.0. So USB 2.0 devices work in 1.1 compatibility mode. Discussion, however, is already started for fixing USB 2.0 support (EHCI driver), and I'm sure it will be ready soon. I also have a tv card (PlayTV MPEG2, an el cheapo card) which works nicely under FreeBSD and with mencoder (and FreeBSD's own native tv app, fxtv). In fact, I have much clearer picture than on windows, thanks to better filters in mplayer I think. This is the command I use to get the best quality btw:

mplayer tv:// -tv input=1:driver=bsdbt848:norm=palbg:audioid=2 \
-vf pp=hb/vb/dr/al/lb,hqdn3d -stop-xscreensaver

Re:A few questions...

[moderators_are_w*nke]

Neverwinter Nights runs fine under Linux emu, fully accelerated with the Nvidia binary driver.

Only time its been noticably slower than on windows was when I left a make buildworld running in the background.

Re:The torrent link is not working

[cpugeniusmv]

Torrent Mirror

FreeBSD on Compaqs

[Black Acid]

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?

Re:Doesn't Matter

[mkro]

In five years, either FreeBSD will have adopted DragonflyBSD's model, or nobody will be using FreeBSD.

Matt? Is that you?

Re:great news!

[cperciva]

The announcement should be up there by now, but it was delayed slightly because nobody knew how to start a rebuild (outside of the usual fixed schedule) of the web site.

FreeBSD 5.0 for Alpha?

[cyberkahn]

"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!!!!!

Re:Future FreeBSD releases

[mtrisk]

It is also important to consider the injustices of slashdot's editors. This topic can be researched more on anti-slash [anti-slash.org] Is this a clever troll? Why in the world would *BSD developers mention anti-slash?

Switch?

[czarangelus]

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!

Re:Switch?

[brilinux]

I would say, no, she would not benefit. I have been running FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 since before Slashdot said that it came out, and it is wonderful; my non-linux compatible WiFi card works fine with the NDIS Project Evil. But as far as I know, ACPI support still does not support CPU scaling, battery monitoring, or orher nice features, so I would recommend a recent Linux distro over FreeBSD (I was using Gentoo, but it was acting up, and I wanted to try 5.3. I have used SuSE on here as well, and it seemed okay). Of course, I could be quite wrong, as I have not looked in to how to do a lot of the ACPI stuff, but I assumed that it was not supported. So FreeBSD is awesome, but for someone who is newer, or wants more support, I would not recommend it.

Re:Switch?

[0racle]

There is always a need to be secure.

Try out FreeBSD on a live CD

[cquark]

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.

obiligatory scriptage

[chadpnet]

wget "ftp://ftp3.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i38 6/5.3/5.3-RELEASE-i386-miniinst.iso" && echo "Wah Hoo!"

BT

[Anonymous Coward]

Take that RIAA. There is a good use for BT. HA!

upgrade 4.10 to 5.3 stable

[tejaskokje]

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

Re:upgrade 4.10 to 5.3 stable

[Bodhammer]

1) read /usr/src/UPDATING

2) read http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/current-stable.html

3) and this: http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/FreeBSD53. html

Ever since I fell from "Sun God"

[YetAnotherName]

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.

Slackware junkies should give BSD a try..

[SnowCrashed]

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

Re:Slackware junkies should give BSD a try..

[wooby]

I was in the same boat. I'd been running Slackware since 8.0 on a Pentium 133 home server, and recently switched to a BSD - NetBSD.

Installation went smoothly. The installer rivaled Slackware's and was easier to tweak to minimize the amount of stuff being installed.

The documentation is good, and I had a custom kernel built within an hour or two.

I haven't used FreeBSD, but if it's anything like NetBSD it's a good alternative to Slackware.

Re:Future FreeBSD releases

[shlong]

Why in the world would *BSD developers mention anti-slash?

I didn't. The post was a clever troll.

Re:FreeBSD, dead at 5.3

[agent dero]

It did

Enjoy ;)

Re:Future FreeBSD releases

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the un-edited email:

http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/ cu rrent/2004-11/0446.html

You'll notice an extra sentence in the above post that doesn't seem to belong.. Rather hypocritical attacking post editing with post editing - maybe they need to look down and see what shoe's on their foot?

Crazy period?!

[Anonymous Coward]

My teacher was right. The world collapsed the moment the Rex Sox Won.

Look at everything that's happening since.
- New releases of *BSD variants.
- Bush re-elected
- /. robot topics scaring the shit outta us
- Half life 2 released in about a week.

What next? Flying pigs? (Name that Simpson episode!)

Encrypted gbde swap! Finally!

[scrod]

The gbde_swap script, which supports gbde-enabled swap devices, has been added. When the gbde_swap_enable variable is specified in rc.conf(5), a swap device named /dev/foo.bde in fstab(5) is automatically attached at boot time with the device /dev/foo and a random key, which is generated by computing the MD5 checksum of 512 bytes read from /dev/random. Note that this prevents recovery of kernel dumps.

Re:FreeBSD, dead at 5.3

[agent dero]

You'll be modded -1 Troll because you lack a sense of humour.

Most people know that MacOS X is not FreeBSD, and that it's based on NeXtStep, with the entire userland (almost) out of the FreeBSD 5.xx branch (10.4 anyways) (not just "some", a good bit)

Lighten up, it's the weekend

Now playing:

[beaviz]

FreeBSD 5.3: Resurrection

Re:Dead?

[RLiegh]

For those of you who, like me, cannot afford vmware, might I suggest qemu?

Upgrading from RC2?

[sejanus]

Could anyone point me in the direction of showing how to upgrade 5.3-RC2 to 5.3-Stable?

Re:Upgrading from RC2?

[drmerope]

Best approach is to upgrade via source.

pkg_add -r cvsup-without-gui
edit the example cvsup file:
so that:
*default release=cvs tag=.
becomes
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_3

Then, do the following (quoted from /usr/src/UPDATING, slightly abridged because this is will be a small upgrade):
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
make installkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE

make installworld

You can omit the KERNCONF business if you just want to use the GENERIC kernel.

Re:Upgrading from RC2?

[Anonymous Coward]

The FreeBSD handbook on htp://www.freebsd.org/ is excellent. It walks you through the steps to do a binary upgrade, or a source upgrade of your OS. Personaly, the way I find easiest is to just drop in the install CD, run sysinstall, and choose "upgrade". I always have a current CD anyways, so I don't mind burning a copy of the release when it comes out. Cheers.

Re:Upgrading from RC2?

[setagllib]

A few things that might simplify life:

-Use RELENG_5, not RELENG_5_3. The latter is just errata/security fixes, the former is the true 'stable' branch for 5.x. It is going to get a lot more attention and MFC's.

-'make world kernel' works just as well, since you don't need to be paranoid about library changes this late in the release cycle.

-You can set KERNCONF=foo in make.conf to never have to type it on the command line. Same goes for every make variable you find yourself passing - this especially applies to Ports-specific variables that you want assumed during portupgrade/portinstall and when seeking dependencies.

Some things (especially the last bit) aren't covered in the handbook because they're meant to be simple enough for many to work out, but then again most don't :P

Happy BSD use! And try the others, too.

Re:Who still uses *BSD...?

[rycamor]

Well... I'm sure this is a troll ("niche's variants"), but still:

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 /usr/ports/audio and /usr/ports/multimedia, I have a very nice workstation, thank you ;-).

Re:In Other News

[Anonymous Coward]

Surprised me too. It's clearly a made-up story. Pot smokers would never get into fistfights.

Re:Off Topic Slightly

[user32.ExitWindowsEx]

wait... only *NetBSD* changed logos. FreeBSD is still Lassiter's "Beastie" (yes, John Lassiter of Pixar fame designed "Beastie")

Trolltalk is trolltalk, facts are facts. :)

[ulib]

FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project
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'.

Re:FreeBSD, dead at 5.3

[Temporal]

The OSX kernel is a merge between Mach and FreeBSD. This is why Darwin 7.x has all the cool features that the FreeBSD 5.x kernel has but most other unixes lack, like kqueue. The OSX kernel includes lots and lots of FreeBSD kernel code. The shared code is not just limited to userland.

Tangent-Rant: I am sad that Linux produces a new event waiting interface with every minor version but none of them come anywhere near being as complete as kqueue. In Linux, if you want to wait on file descriptors and signals at the same time without a race condition, your only option involves longjmp()ing out of signal handlers. ::shudder::

Re:great news!

[arivanov]

Post next time not as an AC.

1. Vinum was released working in 5.0, broken in 5.1, fixed temporarily around patch level 9 of 5.1 and broken since.

2. 5.3 has been released with broken vinum and a half working replacement called gvinum which "may cause system panic on boot". That is quoting from the errata.

3. I have a few systems with vinum around and I am extremely pissed off after recovering them from extreme filesystem corruption three times - twice in 5.1 and once in 5.2.

Does that answer your question?

Oh, and next time when you call someone an arsehole post non-anonymously (or read the fucking release errata before posting).

Re:thanks for the info

[DashEvil]

The thing to keep in mind is that NetBSD is more conservative than FreeBSD. It really depends on what you want. If you need "bleeding edge" features, stick with the latest FreeBSD release, but don't be afraid to bleed. If I didn't need my nVidia drivers (the official ones -- the version that DOESN'T suck :p) NetBSD would be an option for me on the Desktop.

Definitely worth considering too, it's an extremely solid system that I have a lot of faith in.

NetBSD faster than FreeBSD???

[Phatmanotoo]

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.

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?

Re:NetBSD faster than FreeBSD???

[Eivind Eklund]

I'm a FreeBSD developer.

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.

Yes

[setagllib]

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.

Re:Who still uses *BSD...?

[Guy Harris]

B: Mac OS X seems to insist you do everything in a GUI,

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.

E: The keyboard combinations are horrible. I realize that there's no standard with keyboard buttons, but Mac doesn't even try. In fact, it goes out of its way to change everything. Use a Mac for a week, and you get used to Alt+Z/X/C/V, go back to Windows / Unix, and you're screwing up your copy / paste.

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.

F: The system has inherently stupid design ideas. Examples include: Maximizing a window only maximizes it vertically, you get to drag it to fully maximize it. You can only drag the bottom right corner, which is often covered by the dock with the default settings.

I certainly don't care for that; I don't know whether there's a rationale for it or not.

Another example is when you close applications. You would think the X would mean 'Close', right? Nope. You have to right click (again, I kid) the button on the taskbar and click close after closing the application first.

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.

And yet another stupid move is the way the menu bars for each app is only displayed at the top.

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.

What if you minimize Firefox and click on your desktop? The only way to get a new window open is to click on firefox in the dock (the actual application icon that normally launches it initially, but in this case it would remain open), then go through the menu to create a new window.

...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.

Re:pity the fools

[Billly Gates]

I want to see some third party benchmarks. No offense but of course the NetBSD mailing lists are going to be biased towards NetBSD.

I am hoping to see Java and SMP perform better with FreeBSD 5.x and I want to see how DragonFly performs.

Re:Doesn't Matter

[dodell]

And some of us just posted constructive criticism and told you how you could have improved your experience with DragonFly, could have written a better review, and gave suggestions for future articles. You can hold this grudge against all of the users / developers of DragonFly, but you're the one who will end up looking like a lunatic.

I for one, never did or said anything adverse, and you still call me an asshole and lunatic, simply because I use and develop DragonFly BSD.

*claps hands* Great logic!

Re:great news!

[molnarcs]

Would you stop spreading FUD please? greg made a mistake when stated that it doesn't work, and he apologized for it. This:

gvinum on 5.3-RELEASE seems to work fine as a LVM (LogicalVolumeManager)
and for striping (RAID-0) and mirroring (RAID-1).

It does *not* work for *writing* on RAID5-volumes in UP
(SingleProcessor) environments due to a bug which was fixed too late
for 5.3-RELEASE.

I'm not aware of any statistics about the use of (g)vinum - but for
users of (g)vinum RAID5-Volumes in UP-environments 5.3-RELEASE *is*
problematic. Greg remains right here IMHO. RAID5 under 5.3-RELEASE (UP)
only works with 'classic' vinum if loaded *after* the system has come
up.

So you have to work around a bug (already fixed in current) if you want RAID5 on an UP system - and the work around isn't terribly hard. This is very far from your statement of FreeBSD not having software raid.

Re:compatibility

[setagllib]

Won't know until you find out. I don't see why not though. As for internet sharing, FreeBSD's is probably the easiest, because ipfw+natd is very hard to get wrong. Just read the docs and you'll be on your way.