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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
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?
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.
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...