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FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE Available
noackjr pastes "'The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Legacy development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE in May 2004 we have made conservative updates to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known security issues, and made many bugfixes.' See the release, hardware and installation notes for more information. Currently there are no errata. FreeBSD 4.11 is available via BitTorrent or one of the many mirrors."
I think it's great that they're maintaining the 4.x branch for a little while longer for those who can't afford to upgrade today. Still, if you're on 4.x and haven't made the jump because you're nervous about it, this is an excellent time to do so. I'm running it on several production servers, and it's at least as fast for everything I've thrown at it (and quite a bit faster at some things).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Please don't download FreeBSD but prefer to buy it on CDROM, preferably from FreeBSDmall.com, which is linked from FreeBSD "Getting" page. This way you can support FreeBSD. Another way to help the project is to donate money.
If you want to download FreeBSD, prefer using BitTorrent">BitTorrent.
Please help to save bandwidth by using BitTorrent to download FreeBSD.
Heh. It wouldn't surprise me to discover that they released 4.11 without having a single bug to fix, and only boosted performance.
Also, the fortune at the bottom of this page now? In the long run we are all dead. -- John Maynard Keynes
How is 5.x on seriously old h/w? Say a 486/66 with 20MB of RAM (not running X!)? Or a K6-233 with 64MB? Both are uniprocessor, if that's not obvious.
Is 5.x as fast as 4.x in those situations? How's the support for the old NIC cards?
The impression I get is that upgrading those from 4.10 to 5.3 will not be an improvement. I'd be happy to be shown otherwise.
Help the effort to port LFS to FreeBSD (or run NetBSD to begin with); it's even more complete than journalling. In performance it still falls short of ReiserFS, but at least there's no fscking. Works as a good /var.
Sam ty sig.
Dude- the only thing sadder than the inevitable/predictable "bsd is dead" comment, is the utterly inevitable/predictable way that a 'BSDer will rise to the bait without any sense of humour or irony _EVERY_ _SINGLE_ _TIME_!!!!!! Just let the trolls be and they will go away...
I think most of the points are right on, although the desktop performance would probably vary with the hardware; on my 1.5 year old system, FreeBSD is noticeably faster than any Linux I've tried.
to see how well FreeBSD holds up as a webserver.
I would also question stability, since there are umpteen versions of the Linux kernel out there, each with their own patches and tweaks, etc. On FreeBSD, developers and testers are now focusing only on 5.x and 4.x (mainly 5.x). Check http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
You're kind of comparing apples to oranges by comparing FreeBSD's point releases to those of Debian. You should be able to easily upgrade between FreeBSD point releases; since 4.0 came out in March of 2000, that's almost 5 years that the 4.x branch has been supported!
That being said, I believe that Linux is probably as good as or better than FreeBSD for most organizations, and there are certainly some distributions that are much better suited for desktop use.
Indeed, if anyone can help with the LFS work on NetBSD, it'd be greatly appreciated. Right now there are basically 2 people who look at that code, and it hasn't really seen any work since the summer.
From what I hear, LFS combined with kernel RaidFrame is a killer combination. But until LFS is stablized, nobody will get to see the benefits of this.
Is it still unstable? I heard it's now very stable in 2.0, and I used it without problems for some time. It has been used for self-hosted world builds (where LFS was for the sources and output) with good results.
Maybe it's another story with RaidFrame. I have heard it is very slow serving NFS, but haven't heard an update on this lately. Should check the mailing list archives.
Sam ty sig.
Last I heard it was stable under normal workloads, but could be thrown off by extreme conditions, such as edge conditions when working with 99% full drives and very high workloads.
So in filesystem terms it is considered unstable, but it does indeed work right now. It just doesn't provide assurances and reliability necessary to be part of a mature OS.
Hey, bub.
Put NetBSD 2.0 on my 25Mhz sparcstation 1. I've never really had that much of a chance to work with NetBSD before, and I've been hearing all sorts of good things about it; it's always been held with high regard in my mind. Anyway, yeah, I've never seen that machine fly so fast before. I even gave my friend a shell account on it because he kept claiming that it was unusable and that "ssh is unbearably slow". That was with Linux/sparc of course, so I want him to personally get blown away by how fast NetBSD 2.0 is on that box.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
However, FreeBSD 5.3 thrashed the asr driver. Now raidutil is broken.
So unless I want to ignore the RAID status of all my production servers or shell out a couple hundred dollars to buy a new RAID card for each server FreeBSD 4 is the only upgrade path available.