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FreeBSD 4.X Lives On
An anonymous reader writes "In spite of FreeBSD 5.3 going to "production" status, FreeBSD is still planning at least one more full release of the mature production 4.x series. FreeBSD 4.11 Release Candidate 1 has been announced. The complete 4.11 release schedule is here. This is good news for those who can't or don't want to migrate to FreeBSD 5 yet."
Always nice to see another BSD release.
old troll.
move along.
-- Mod me down. I am not a karma tart. ffs,gag
Thanks for the nice work!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Last time I tried I could either have WiFi in 4.x or Bluetooth in 5.x but never the twain.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
FreeBSD 4.x is dead. If you read the schedule, it's being handed over to the security officer, meaning it will ONLY get security fixes from now on. That's it. And given the dubious quality of FreeBSD 5 it means there will be a slice of time where FreeBSD servers won't know what to do - stay with the dead but solid system, or move to the living but flaky one?
/me waits to be called Troll for mentioning 'dead' in a post
It's a real shame they decided to use that SMP model for 5.x, else it would be the best x86 OS in the world. It falls short because the locking slows things down and not many drivers are being rewritten yet (but this situation will of course improve), and there are many bugs introduced into existing [especially network] drivers.
I'd still rather run FreeBSD 5 than Linux for a must-have-reliability server, but not for anything that needed performance. Of course I'd rather still run NetBSD 2 on such a server, but that's tangent.
Sam ty sig.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
FreeBSD is a complete Unix-like operating system entirely developed by a single large team of programmers. This is in stark contrast to GNU/Linux which, as a complete operating system, has no central, cohesive developer base and is packaged in myriad different ways by myriad different distribution projects and companies; and proprietary Unixes, which are closed-source, restrictively licensed, and work on a comparatively small number of usually proprietary hardware architectures. FreeBSD has historically been clean, fast, reliable, and scalable. It's easy to use, learn, set up, and navigate from the command line, has more than 10,000 software programs in the Ports system, runs on a wide variety of hardware, and can easily be used for either a desktop or a server.
The transition to 5.x
Until the release of 5.3, the most recent "production release" was the FreeBSD-4 series, which is presently at version 4.10 and has been deemed the "Legacy" release in the wake of the 5.x branch going to STABLE. FreeBSD-5 was supposed to be a grand introduction of new technology -- a revolutionary improvement to the tried and true 4.x branch -- but soon after it left the gate, it got caught up in developer politics and failed implementations of too-ambitious theories among other questionable design decisions, causing some developers to fork the FreeBSD-4 project into a separate and more focused operating system.
The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned. The mix of threading subsystems still yields problems with efficiency and stability. Also, the networking subsystem may now be multithreaded and therefore faster on SMP systems, but users with some implementations of the 3Com (SysKonnect/Yukon) gigabit LAN chip are now unable to access their network at all because of new bugs that have popped up in the driver; other SysKonnect/Yukon users have problems under heavy network traffic, along with those using Intel Pro/1000 chips. Unfortunately all of our test systems use these network chips for onboard LAN; coincidentally they are two of the most popular gigabit LAN chipsets used on modern motherboards from major manufacturers. We also experienced lockups during boot if a custom-compiled kernel did not have SMP enabled on a Hyper-Threaded computer. A list of these and other errata can be found here.
Considering the long list of significant problems in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, it would seem irrational to recommend that anyone switch a production server from 4.x or any previous known-working 5.x release to 5.3. Just the same, the FreeBSD project maintains a migration guide for this purpose.
A lost lead
FreeBSD 5.x enjoyed an excellent head start in the fully 64-bit AMD64 operating system arena, but now trails
Yeah, eat it, Netcraft!
FreeBSD 4.X still has value, albeit less than it did when it was the flagship branch. When I read the TODO list for this the other night, I saw that the tables only contained the titles. 4.11 seems like it will be good for people who want to setup a low-end do-whatever server with current packages and base system apps, while 5.X will handle everything else. My pentium 200 will be upgraded to 4.11 once it gets recommissioned.
It's good to see that this release is coming to be, and that support for FreeBSD 4 will live for a while longer also. This way, the hardware will die before the software on it does.
Seriously, I'm really holding off on the jump to the 5.X series. It looks like the best migration route from 4.X to 5.X is backup-reformat-reinstall-restore. My system currently does just about everything I need (I've given up on wine as not worth the effort) and I just know that I'll miss some configuration file that took me about 6 hours to tweak into working.
"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, *BSD will die."
"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say it will be spared."
"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here. What then? If it be like to die, it had better do it, and decrease the surplus operating system population."
Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief. It was sad to see any operating system die, even one so obviously flawed and useless as *BSD.
God bless us, every one.
It just looks like one because it's big, copied-and-pasted, and has some 'buts' in it.
It's mostly true. Some things are a bit pessimal (I personally HAVE booted a non-SMP kernel on a hyperthreading machine) but everything about AMD64, network cards, and dubious quality is true. If FreeBSD 5 manages to clean up and escape from the tangled web of crap it's in, it will be great, but so far 5.3-STABLE hasn't made as much progress as you would expect from the long time it's been out. A similar thing is STILL happening in Linux 2.6 on 'less popular' architectures (SGI MIPS...) where it won't even boot, but this is normal for a system with its ideals - for a BSD it's virtually inexcusable to ship a release with many known showstoppers.
Sam ty sig.
.. is here.
There used to be a shop where you could actually buy FreeBSD. Now thats closed down there is no where to get it. I won't order over the net after once my card got duped and another time when something never showed up and I spent days arguing the toss with the supplier, and I can't download it as I have a 56K modem and no burner anyway. So basically even though I would like to get hold of a new version I'm screwed. I can't see why they can't increase their distribution channels somewhat...
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. Both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
that has been disproved countless times...
If you trust Amazon.com with your CC info, do a search in books for FreeBSD. Many of those come with CDs.
I really don't see any reason to stick with FreeBSD, especially FreeBSD 4, instead of switching to DragonFlyBSD.
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