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FreeBSD 5.4 Released
FreeBSD 5.4 is out. Reader KFW excerpts from the announcement: "The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Stable development branch. Since FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE in November 2004 we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and device driver support for some hardware, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes." Here are the release notes.
Using CVSup and then Rebuilding "world"
'Go for the eyes, Boo, go for the eyes, aaarrrrrrrr!' -- Minsc
Generally the mailing list comes out with patches much quicker than other flavors of *nix. 24 hour turn around times with patches is not uncommon for FreeBSD (They pride themselves with security)
Here's a few things from the release notes that might help with MySQL and/or SMP: A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE scheduler. A bug in Inter-Processor Interrupt (IPI) handling, which could cause SMP systems to crash under heavy load, has been fixed. More details are contained in errata note A number of bugfixes for libpthread have been merged from HEAD. Anyone from FreeBSD know for sure if the fixes above will help bring FreeBSD up to par with Linux as far as MySQL performance on SMP machines go?
As fast as they are fixed, which in reality ends up being comparable to Linux, just listen on the appropriate mailing lists and follow the step-by step instructions. There are also some automated utilities in the ports collection that ease security updates. The BSD ports system will take care of most of your packaging concerns as well since it is an actively updated collection, although most require compilation from source there is the binary alternative, package, which should be easy enough for most RPM folk I would imagine.
Check out this link regarding packages and ports.
Even if I knew that tomorrow the world would go to pieces, I would still plant my apple tree. -Martin Luther
##### Disk One #####
##### Disk Two #####
Of course, in their infinate wisdom, the coders of slashdot have decided to make my life difficult with their damn lameness filters
Who do I have to blackmail to get some representation around here!?!?!?!?
Help promote their new torrent option, seed it for a bit me me and the 5 others doing it currently.
http://people.freebsd.org/~kensmith/5.4-torrent/
if you can, join the all seeds ; )
Netbsd and openbsd are just as fast as freebsd with the fixes, and so are most linux distros. Its really only commercial unix vendors that are slow with the fixes.
The FreeBSD 5.4 Release is dedicated to the memory of Cameron Grant. Cameron was an active FreeBSD Developer and principal architect of the sound driver subsystem despite his physical handicap. His is a superb example of human spirit dominating over adversity. Cameron was an inspiration to those who met him; he will be fondly remembered and sorely missed.
l
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/announce.htm
Create a standard-supfile with the following content:
/etc). Then you can run the following command:
/path/to/your/standard-supfile
*default host=cvsup2.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_4
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
src-all
(I like to put it under
cvsup -g -L 2
Go make some coffee while your sources are synchronized, then read the Handbook to learn how to build the beast.
Stupidity is an equal opportunity striker.
Fellow slashdotter Bill Dog
That enhancement alone is worthy of upgrading!
Never heard of xtail? It was released in 1989 and does exactly that.
If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.
Not true. Device drivers are usually backported unless they depend on some system difference between 4.x and 5.x. I've never noticed any hardware incompatibilities between versions and i've used both extensively.
The next one is a doosy...
The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking.
I honestly have not encounted a break in any major apps in ports in the past 3 years. It's evolved a lot since you last used it, i guess.
The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS). After a cvsup, you get left wit a system in a state where you can't upgrade one piece of software without breaking a lot of other software. Portupgrade is a disaster -- I've never seen a better way to bork a system than to unleash portupgrade on it.
No, no no. Not true. I had a production system with apache, php, postgresql, gnome, KDE, etc installed (it was a workstation/light-use webserver for a lab i was working in). I installed it at 4.5, last time i touched it it was at 4.11, all ports upgraded (using cvsup and portupgrade), only one install point. After being a FreeBSD user for about a year. If I can do it, in a production environment, without any break in's or security issues, anyone can. My webserver here at home has been running 5 since 5.2.1, same deal - all things installed from ports, only one point of install, all upgraded by cvsup and portupgrade. No problems. Then there's my workstation, it runs Gentoo, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD 5.3. FBSD has been installed since 5.3 first made -RELEASE, runs gnome 2.10 (which hit ports before it hit portage, ~1 week after official release). Only one install point, constantly updated using cvsup and portupgrade. Gentoo? Great little distro, but i've installed it at least 3 or 4 separate times due to major breakages or just aggrivation with portage. I don't hold it against portage, it's just still maturing.
Your report couldn't be further from my experience. Ever since i started running freebsd back four years ago i've been able to keep an up-to-date, stable system without much difficulty.
Let me fill in some holes others left out. New releases are announced as having fixed security problems, but that is a comparison against the previous version's original ISO image only.
/usr/src directory and rebuild. More recently a binary update service has been available.
Security fixes are backported to earlier versions. Those versions still officially maintained have fixes backported by the security officers. Older versions tend to also get fixes but merely by the work of interested committers. Thus it isn't usual to see fixes being backported to releases as far back as 4.3.
What do I mean by backported? Users can update their
Thus there is for example 5.3-RELEASE, and 5.3-p5.
Generally speaking, there is no need to wait for new releases to get fixes. Fixes are painlessly and automatically available almost overnight.
All of this applies to the software officially maintained by the FreeBSD system--i.e., anything in the "base system" Other software generally gets fixes in ports soon after the upstream version has a fix... but backing this is the port-audit database. port-audit is maintained by the security team and lists all the known vulnerabilities against third-party software. A cron job mails you warnings about vulnerable third-party software. The ports system warns you about vulnerable software and libraries when you attempt to install (even when a new install depends on an already installed but vulernable library.
24 hour turn around times with patches is not uncommon for FreeBSD
In all honesty... 24 hours is very unusual for us. I can think of one case where it happened recently, but that was when we rushed an advisory out in order to fit into the 5.4 release schedule.
A more typical time is 3 days, since we want to test carefully to make certain that a "security fix" never ends up breaking something else.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I never noticed a problem with the CLE266 using ukbd(4) & ums(4). I tried umass(4) and axe(4) for a short time, and they seem to work too.
I'm a Linux user myself; but let's give props where props are due. One measure in which most any BSD is better is integration. BSD has been maintained as a coherent system since before Linux has even existed. Their userland has a bit less evolution and tad more design in it. The init scripts are arguably better due to their relative simplicity. As for features that BSD lacks, that can be a feature as well. Simplicity often =='s robustness. The individual flavors also have their own merits. There is OpenBSD's well known penchant for correctness and security. NetBSD runs on even more arches than Debian.
I'll also point out that the BSD's tend to be more predictable in their quality from release to release. There have been some real brown paper bag kernel releases and distros like RedHat and Mandrake have pulled boners on their own.
I'll bet a real BSD fanboy could probably think of a few more.
If you already cvsup'ed your sources,
:)
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
reboot
boot in single user mode, then
mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
Voila, you should be running 5.4-RELEASE at this point
If you read the ext2 notes, it is not supported very well. Nevertheless, I have never had any issues with it - except for dirty filesystems after boot. One of them devs sent a patch (Michael Nottebrock) - download it here. - that will unmount your ext2 filesystem before running the rest of shutdown procedure.
Wrong on both counts:
1) The stable branch does include security fixes
2) The ports collection is not branched, so there's no possibility for "several ports downgraded" in the "4.x series". The only situation in which ports are downgraded is if there are serious problems with the newer version, and a reversion to the previous version is a net gain.
I've had absolutely no problems with 5.2 and 5.3. 5.0 and 5.1 were a bit flaky, but that's long gone. There is no performance downgrade. Stop listening to the DragonFly fudsters, FreeBSD 5.x is fast and stable.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!