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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."
Thanks for the nice work!
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
gak
:/
just one extra letter & an inadvertant 'enter' will mess this preemptive comment up.
here come the pedants
-- Mod me down. I am not a karma tart. ffs,gag
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
Troll :-P (only joking)
Is there any reason not to "stay with" FreeBSD 4? If it's getting the job done, then security updates are all you really need. If it's not getting the job done, then you should be questioning why you were using it in the first place.
There's a mind set that 'dead' systems, however well working, will be left behind in performance and other improvements - which is true for FreeBSD 4, at least in a couple of scalability points. FreeBSD 5's network stack is a work of art, but some would argue that it doesn't make up for the system's own lack of performance.
I'd probably still be running it if it didn't find some way to make my Realtek 8139 unstable... everything else was 'good enough' to run as a gateway, because FreeBSD has brilliant security and a hardcore network stack.
Sam ty sig.
Man, someone else with the same view I have. The OMGFr33BSD trolls can't see the truth. FreeBSD 5.x is a dog. There's no other way to put it. [GIANT LOCKED]
My production stuff will remain on FBSD 4 until it gets to the point where a) I need new hardware for those particular machines, or b) I need to run new applications that refuse to work on 4.
New stuff going in is NetBSD, or Debian where NetBSD doesn't work (like on a machine of mine where 2.0 mysteriously crashes on heavy I/O....it's fine under Linux). When DragonFly finishes their experimentation and pronounces their kernel redesign "done," I will give it a look, too.
Still, BSD, and all the BSD's need a few things done....
1. Stable binary updates/packages for the things in the base system without moving to the next minor version number. (e.g. a backport of a binary ssh package when there's a vuln).
2. Removal from the base system of unnecessary elements. That Perl is not required to rebuild the system in FreeBSD and NetBSD is a good thing. Now, ditch sendmail and bind....especially sendmail. If you absolutely have to include an MTA in the base system, use Exim or Postfix.
3. Modern filesystem. I do notice a big difference between JFS or XFS and softupdated FFS on the same hardware. Linux's filesystems are much faster than BSD now, and the gap seems to widen every day. FFS2 does nothing to change the way FFS works -- it just allows larger partition sizes. Maybe they can do something with HFS+? Convince IBM, SGI, or Namesys to release one of their FS's under a BSD license?
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.
As OpenBSD devs said, sendmail has had a lot more testing and those security holes have been ironed out, so technically it's more 'reliable' than postfix which is much newer. But I agree to just take out MTAs entirely.
File systems, I wouldn't say FFS is so bad. It's very balanced; its performance is good enough in the real world, it takes very little processor and memory overhead (compared to the journalling file systems...), it survives even during sectors being mangled (ReiserFS dies because it has no superblock backups, and some others too). I wouldn't mind seeing a journalling FS in a BSD (well, there's LFS in NetBSD, which is log-structured and hence even more complete journalling), and in fact dillon has laid the foundations for such a system in DragonFly.
I think the perfect operating system in the world would be the cleanliness of NetBSD, the security of OpenBSD, the support of Linux, the extensive functionality of FreeBSD 5 (including its devfs, hot damn), the package management system of Gentoo Portage but with less kitschy colouring, and some really cool name nobody has yet thought of. The shortcomings of any given system are small (FreeBSD lacks portability and, in 5, cleanliness; NetBSD lacks corporate support and a responsive scheduler; Linux lacks cleanliness and security and a good network stack; DragonFly lacks support and portability) and would be easy enough to fix just by convincing enough people it's worth doing. Perfect systems are within our reach, but the universe won't let it happen.
Sam ty sig.
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.
It is now official. setagllib confirms: You're a tool
One more crippling foot kicked your dumb ass because you never learned to shut up around people stronger than you. Coming on the heels of a recent peer survey which plainly states that you are going blind from beating off to your mother too much, this news serves to reinforce what we've known along.
You don't have to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict your middle mouse button's future. The printoff is on the wall: Your button is worn out from too much damn copying and pasting. As many of us are already aware, you're an assbandit without even as many testicles as required to post with a name or with any original content.
Fact: Slash needs a regexp-based troll filter with automated banning
Sam ty sig.
Haha. Sendmail has the bugs worked out? Mmmmmkay, I'll take their word for it, and keep disabling it in rc.conf before I boot the machine. :-) I tend to use Exim4 with Exiscan on machines that serve Win32 clients (spam and virus scanning), and Qmail on unix-only hosts. And Sendmail is just nasty to deal with. :-D
:-)
LFS looks intriguing, and I think actually OSX uses LFS for its version of UFS. Still, it's not mainline for any of the BSD's. I've used XFS with Linux for awhile now, as well as with Irix, and come to appreciate it. As I said before, I think HFS+ would be an interesting choice if it's license-compatible (I haven't really dug into the APSL to see). It's been a nice stable filesystem on all the Macs I've used, and now supports case-sensitivity and journalling. The only times I've had problems with it were when hardware went bad (nasty IBM Deathstar in a machine at work...argh). It's also a nice, modern design, so it's worlds faster than linear filesystems. B-tree has only been around since 1986, and BSD still hasn't figured it out?
As for the packagers, I actually like pkgsrc quite a bit, even more than Portage. It seems to have fewer packages than FreeBSD's ports, or Portage, but I've rarely missed something. And there's normally a binary package available, too, which isn't the case with Gentoy^Ho.
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...
devfs is crap, and has edge cases that were not cleared. udev is better for sure. FreeBSD may have many strongpoints, but devfs isn't one of them.
Linux doesn't have that great of support, it has some companies with for-fee support, but it doesn't have the support of hardware manufacturers. I'd rather have Windows level of support, you know, where drivers are just there.
DragonFlyBSD actually has a company called FireFlyBSD that supports DragonFlyBSD commercially (which Matt Dillion is advisor to) and NetBSD has Wasabi.
I don't really see any major problem with the plain cut OpenBSD ports system really, would be nice I guess to add upgrading old ports.
Of course, I am just a crackpot that thinks there should be an annual Intersystem Hackathon where there are two seperate areas; the crazed zealots of the systems are in one area where they can fight and drink to the death and only the devs of systems and tools can go into the second area where all the devs can exchange ideas face to face. It's a crazy idea, I know. That's why everything I say needs to be taken with a shaker of salt.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
As OpenBSD devs said, sendmail has had a lot more testing and those security holes have been ironed out, so technically it's more 'reliable' than postfix which is much newer.
Well regardless of if it's "more secure" or not, I'd say it really doesn't need to be there, and bind doesn't need to be either. Taking perl out of the base install was a win/win situation for those who didn't want it and for those who do (no more ancient perl version to contend with). FreeBSD still compels you to install Perl, but it won't fall over dead if you don't. Likewise it would be nice to make things like bind,cvs, and sendmail options - which would speed up buildworld save nothing else.
No, OS X's UFS isn't LFS-based, it's just regular boring old FFS.
BIND and Sendmail definitely, but not CVS, at least not for NetBSD; it's simply the most sensible (and indeed only truly supported) way of fetching the system sources. Its footprint is small enough to make this worth it. Okay, so a binary package would be trivial to fetch, but this is still too much work to be worth it.
.1x as used/useful.
By the same token we could strip anything that less than 50% of the population uses, since the majority benefits. It's not that simple: the minority might just be more important - developers, for instance. The majority might not even notice. How many people cry themselves to sleep every night because gdb is in the base system, but even many DEVELOPERS don't use it? I'd rather take that out than cvs - it's easily 10x larger and
Sam ty sig.
Well I think you miss my point. By moving things to ports you really lose nothing, but gain flexibility. If CVS is that important (and I'm not saying it's not) then make it a port that is always installed. If you don't like it, just remove it later. The only reason I use CVS at all is to fetch the sources, and that is only on my ports building server, all other servers retrieve the ports tree through rsync. By contrast I use RCS all the time, but why in the hell is that a part of the base system? I've used Linux for quite some time, and one of the things I grew to like about BSD was the division of system and software. But they more I thought about it the more I came to realize that there is just a lot of "stuff" that is considered part of they system for no other reason than "it's always been there". I think it's time the BSDs start taking a look at becomming a bit more modular and auditing their needs vs what doesn't really need to be there.
>Linux doesn't have that great of support, it has some companies with for-fee support, but it doesn't have the support of hardware manufacturers. I'd rather have Windows level of support, you know, where drivers are just there.
Rubbish. Linux & BSDs offer true plug and play, for the most part if a piece of hardware is supported its auto-detected during boot with no driver required.
An interesting case in point is Knoppix and Thinstation both of these distributions auto-detect really well and Thinstation is amazing for a 13MB network boot image.
The BSDs in a roundabout way often support more hardware off the install disk due to far frequent releases (3 to 6 months or so).
If I bought a new PC today I'd have to wait for the _next_ release of windows for all my hardware to be supported out of the box. With FreeBSD I'd be waiting 2-3 months and in all likelyhood it would be supported by the previous release anyway.
Support for multi-media gizmos is of course excluded and I'm referring to server class hardware.
Jason.
It's not like it's overly difficult to give a driver to more than one system, the makers just don't care about the other systems.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Active dislike of Sendmail for security reasons, AND a user of QMail?
:-)
D. J. Bernstein, is that you?
http://cr.yp.to/
Okay, I got modded Troll for explaining the release cycle and the current problems in 5.x. You have got to be kidding me. Are the mods here that short-sighted?
Fsck it, SLASHDOT IS DEAD.
Sam ty sig.
Yes
I got modded too tellign the truth about optimizing software for the Itanium or pointing out any weakness under Linux or Unix.
This is slashdot and my guess is a BSD elitest modded you down since this kind of story would attract them.
http://saveie6.com/
I really don't see any reason to stick with FreeBSD, especially FreeBSD 4, instead of switching to DragonFlyBSD.
{{.sig}}
I've got twenty or so FBSD boxes on the net at various locations. The one 5.3 box I have requires more attention than all the rest of the 4.9/4.10 systems out there. I love FreeBSD but I pronounce 5.x 'NOT DONE'.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo