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

netcraft

[millahtime]

poking around netcraft you'll find that freebsd is growing at a decent rate. forget death, it's getting bigger having grown at a very high percentage rate in the past year.

BSD vs. Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux users like me, take a look at this to see how BSD compares to Linux from a BSD point of view.

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4l in ux/bsd4linux1.php

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:Text here

[grub]

I'm a big BSD user (Free and Open), it just happens that I can take and make a joke. Lighten up.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Brandybuck]

1) BSD makes a lousy desktop.

It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems.

2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully.

First, it does do SMP just fine. Second, you probably don't even have an SMP machine on your desktop anyway. People don't need SMP on their destkop. And yes, you're talking about the desktop, because that's what your very first question was about. For some servers SMP is important. Good news is that FreeBSD supports it just fine.

3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux

So what? Linux doesn't have the mindshare of Windows, so why aren't you using Windows? All the popular stylish people are using Windows, why don't you to?

4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management.

This is a stupid argument. Replace "BSD" with the name of any Linux distribution. "Oh poor me! I can't use [Debian|Slackware|SuSE|Mandrake] because I would have to learn a new adminstration system. Oh boo hoo!"

5) As of Redhat 7.x, Linux is "good enough"(tm) and getting better fast.

Some of us don't want "good enough." Some of us prefer "damned fine and strutting like she knows it!" Far be it for me to stick up for Linux, but she deserves a lot more respect from you than merely "good enough". Sheesh. ...apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.

Side note: telnet is disabled by default in FreeBSD. It comes secure out of the box. It's not perfect, but for a tenth the work you would have to do on a telnet-by-default distro you could have FreeBSD locked down as tight as anything.

6) BSD has much more limited hardware compatability, and drivers for "cool stuff" can be hard to find.

If you want "cool stuff", then stick with Windows. I understand it has drivers for ALL the "cool stuff". On the other hand, if you want drivers for all the boring stuff you use every day, then FreeBSD will have them.

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.

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:Why don't I use *BSD?

[molnarcs]

It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems. And what did you have to do to achieve this? What did you have to compile?

Well, I don't think grandparent was a troll, but it was (is still) -5 uninformed. What you have to do to run kde is install it from the first CD (takes 5 minutes). Or, you can: pkg_add -r kde. AND you have a choice to install it from ports, compiling it for your specific hardware with optimizations. All it takes is one command: portinstall kde - if you want everything but the kitchen sync, or if you want a streamlined kde: portinstall kde-light.

learn more... it's not that difficult.

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...