FreeBSD June-December Status Reports

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "FreeBSD just published status reports covering June to December '04 with many interesting details about the work that went into 5-STABLE and a look ahead on plans and projects for 6-CURRENT."

Comments

Wow, this is really great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they released status reports more frequently, the stuff in there is really neat. I follow the FreeBSD mailing lists once in a while and sometimes it's hard to get "the big picture" from the details. As someone who follows the Linux kernel mailing list, I guess the same problem exists there. Have they considered doing something like the lkml summaries? That might help get the word out about some of the cool stuff that's going on.

Re:Wow, this is really great!

[parc]

There's a weekly summary of -current activity posted by Mike Joihnston, mirrored in HTML at http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/ and available as an RSS feed at http://excel.xl0.org/cgi-bin/rss.py. While it's not as exhaustive as Kerneltrap, it's very good.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[sp0rk173]

In fact, I was not initially able to install Linux on my current home system, because at the time I built it (18 months ago) there were no Linux distros that supported SATA out of the box. But FreeBSD did. It wasn't until about six months ago that some Linux distros started shipping with SATA on by default. Many still don't.

Very good point. I have two 120 gig sata drives in a raid array. First I tried windows...it worked, but was a pain in the ass to set up (why the hell doesn't Windows XP x64 have sata support out of the box yet? Ugh). Then I tried Gentoo, because windows got boring. It detected by sata drives individually, but the array? Nope. In order for that to work I'd have to install it on a smaller ata drive, then build a kernel to recognize my particular hardware raid chip, then copy over the base system onto the array and boot from it. "Fuck that!" I said. Then I tried ubuntu...and same thing. So i finally gave up and decided to just say fuck it and install FreeBSD. It detected two identical drives and set them up as individual devices (ad0, ad1) and a raid 0 array device (ar0) - so i could pick if i wanted to use them as individual drives or as an array. Linux may have more hardware support than FreeBSD...but the hardware support FreeBSD has is done correctly and Just Works. Once again, FreeBSD won my heart over...even after I slammed it for not being as technically sound as DragonFly. Regardless, until DFly comes out with 1.0-STABLE, My box will be a FreeBSD box. Less headaches, hastle, and bullshit. It just works.

Re: SMP on the desktop

[caveat]

I beg to differ with your "people dont' need SMP on the desktop" statement; I have a dual G4 and I absolutely love it - it never ever gets hung on a single proc-hungry task; sure, it's probably not as absolutely fast as a P4, but the overall responsiveness of the system is unmatched, at least in my limited experience (and a nice shiny new dual G5 should make up in the speed department, just need to get that mortgage :D).

Now, that rant done with, what about Darwin's SMP code? It seems to be pretty efficient [of course I've never run any other BSD on this box, so I can't say how well it stacks up against them, but I do hear the "BSD SMP sux0rz" line a lot], at least for 2 chips; has anybody considered trying to reuse it in the other BSDs? AFAIK the APSL isn't incompatible with this sort of idea...