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FreeBSD 5.4 Review

Posted by timothy on from the freebers-creepers dept.

gammelgul writes "Jem Matzan has written a review of the new FreeBSD 5.4 release on NewsForge. He writes about enhancements and the 64bit edition of the OS."

12 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. 5.4 Dedication by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/announce.html

  2. Boring by debilo · · Score: 5, Informative

    This is a rather shallow review and has been discussed over at OSNews. Just read the comments and you'll finde you don't need to read the actual review.

    Someone mentioned a better review here. Enjoy!

    1. Re:Boring by wk633 · · Score: 2, Informative

      Also discussed on the freebsd-advocacy mailing list.
      ahref=http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/archive/2005/fr eebsd-advocacy/20050605.freebsd-advocacy.html/http ://docs.freebsd.org/mail/archive/2005/freebsd-advo cacy/20050605.freebsd-advocacy.html/>

      look for "Negative Review of FreeBSD 5.4"

    2. Re:Boring by Brandybuck · · Score: 4, Informative

      Is there a way we can turn off reviews coming from OSNews in our preferences? Please?

      I'm getting sick and tired of reviews that in no way reflect the experiences I have with the very same product. This guy has weird bleeding edge hardware, and then tells us it's not ready for me with my mainstream hardware. FreeBSD WORKS on with my CPU. FreeBSD WORKS with my NIC. FreeBSD WORKS with my harddrives.

      I don't expect operating systems to be perfect and support every piece of hardware ever built, but I do expect reviewers to base their evaluations on hardware that ordinary people out in the real world are using.

      --
      Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
  3. Re:DragonFlyBSD by random_culchie · · Score: 4, Informative

    Parent, Dragonfly is pretty unusable in its current state.
    Most of the entries in ports are broken and the team even insist it is only for development use.
    If it can sustain its initial growth it could be a BSD contender in some time. But not just yet!

  4. Re:Review Formula by debilo · · Score: 2, Informative

    True. I don't know why such absolutely non-informative reviews get submitted in the first place, when there are much better sources of information and reviews. In a post above, I mentioned this one, which I enjoyed a lot.

  5. 5.4 amd64 is seriously broken thread-wise by asserted · · Score: 4, Informative

    the box couldn't run Apache 2.0 (worker MPM) compiled with libpthread for a single day without a panic!
    at some point apache child starts boimbarding kernel with syscalls (500k syscalls/second), soon, if left unattended, the box panics.
    had to get back to i386 for stability.

    this is all on common hardware - Intel (EM64T) Xeons, Pro/1000 (em) network. and mind you, we still use SCHED_4BSD.

    conclusion? 5.x is by NO means -STABLE on amd64 yet.

    1. Re:5.4 amd64 is seriously broken thread-wise by diegocgteleline.es · · Score: 2, Informative

      I've been reading the freebsd mailing lists, and as far as I know there are still lot of "small issues" left in 5.x...the 5.x branch has been quite painful for the freebsd people, and that's why 5.4 took so long, and why 5.4 still has issues, like stability in some places but specially from the performance POV (like the threading subsystem, the freebsd guys would rather release a slow kernel than trying to speeding up and unstabilize everything so they released 5.4 despite of having some patches to speed up things).

      From what I've read, there're lots of ongoing work, the next freebsd release (6.0, for the end of this summer I think) will have lots of performance/polishing changes. IOW, the first real "stable" release of the 5.x brach will be 6.0

  6. Re:DragonFlyBSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    Uhh, code frozen, or feature frozen?

  7. Re:About time by Elf-friend · · Score: 4, Informative

    That might be funny, but only if it were true: amd64 support isn't new in 5.4.

  8. FreeBSD 5.4 64bit Support for Linux 32 Binaries by LogicX · · Score: 4, Informative
    I find the following comments from the article to be not accurate: I was disappointed to find that Linux binary compatibility was still 64-bit only for 64-bit FreeBSD. That means no 32-bit Linux binaries.
    Here's what you need to do:

    1. reference /usr/src/tools/lib32 which will tell you to:
      1. add "WITH_LIB32= yes #This makes buildworld compile lib32 linux code support" to /etc/make.conf
      2. buildworld/installworkd in /usr/src
    2. be sure the following options are in your kernel config:
      options COMPAT_43 # Compatible with BSD 4.3 [KEEP THIS!]
      options COMPAT_IA32 # Compatible with i386 binaries
      options COMPAT_FREEBSD4 # Compatible with FreeBSD4
      options COMPAT_LINUX32 # Compatible with i386 linux binaries
      # Linux 32-bit ABI support
      options LINPROCFS # Cannot be a module yet.
    3. Recompile kernel, install kernel, reboot.
    4. Certain programs may require you add:
      linprocfs /usr/compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0
      to /etc/fstab
    --
    May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
  9. Re:What's the point in FreeBSD? by hugo_pt · · Score: 3, Informative

    "It looks like FreeBSD just tries to follow Linux, ie. make something that tries to do a bit everything without any focus."

    FreeBSD is older than Linux.

    "The software is the same. Running Gnome, KDE, Firefox or Emacs on FreeBSD or on Linux doesn't change anything, it's the same source code.

    The common userland apps are the same. There are minor differences like "cp -a" that doesn't work on FreeBSD, but it doesn't really make any difference, the same things can be done the same way."

    What's the point in running Linux ?

    "So what? Stability? Well... my vanilla Ubuntu workstation never crashed so far. Gnome sometimes did odd things, but it's Gnome, the same odd things would happen on any operating system, running it on FreeBSD won't magically fix these bugs. So what would it change to run a FreeBSD kernel instead of a Linux kernel? Looking at the FreeBSD mailing-lists, I see people who are experiencing kernel panics, hangs, corruption and other badness. Just like on Linux mailing-lists, or just like on any operating system mailing-list in fact."

    FreeBSD is faster on the desktop. FreeBSD can run linux apps faster than native Linux. Let's talk about servers. What's the difference between using the two different kernels? avoid being killed with fork(), not being owned 5 types by different coding errors on the same function, not having a root exploit on the kernel every month. That's the difference.

    "Security? Looking at bugtraq, when a vulnerability is found in Unix software, it usually affects every operating system, FreeBSD is never an exception."

    Really? Tell me how FreeBSD would be vulnerable to a bad implementation of linux's passwd, for example.

    "Linux has some things to mitigate exploitation of these vulnerabilities like SELinux and grsecurity. I don't see anything similar in FreeBSD."

    Have you looked at -CURRENT ?

    "Linux has kernel vulnerabilities that allow root compromises. FreeBSD has the same weakness. Looking at bugtraq archives from 2003 to 2005, there have been even more kernel vulnerabilities (at least disclosed ones, and posted on bugtraq) in FreeBSD that in any other operating system and some were even remotely exploitable through the tcp/ip stack."

    keyword "FreeBSD" -->
    Found: 76 Secunia Security Advisories, displaying 1-25

    keyword "Linux" -->
    Found: 3264 Secunia Security Advisories, displaying 1-25 ...
    outchie...

    Sorry, again you're confusing. It was linux that was crasheable by bugs on the firewall they use.

    "Another thing is that FreeBSD has almost no commercial support. Hardware vendors (like storage arrays) and closed-source software vendors usually support a few Linux distributions like RHES and Novell, but not much. And definitely not BSD. Well, sometimes, but it's rare compared to Linux."

    $ make search key=adaptec
    Port: aaccli-1.0
    Path: /usr/ports/sysutils/aaccli
    Info: Adaptec SCSI RAID administration tool
    Maint: bms@FreeBSD.org
    B-deps:
    R-deps:
    WWW: http://support.dell.com/

    Port: asr-utils-3.04
    Path: /usr/ports/sysutils/asr-utils
    Info: Adaptec ASR RAID Management Software
    Maint: obrien@FreeBSD.org
    B-deps: compat4x-i386-5.3 expat-1.95.8 fontconfig-2.2.3,1 freetype2-2.1.9 pkgconfig-0.15.0_1 xorg-libraries-6.8.2
    R-deps: compat4x-i386-5.3 expat-1.95.8 fontconfig-2.2.3,1 freetype2-2.1.9 pkgconfig-0.15.0_1 xorg-libraries-6.8.2
    WWW:

    in my country we say: 'I ask for forgiveness and leave.'

    "So what? Performance? Everytime I've seen a FreeBSD vs Linux benchmark, Linux 2.6 was faster. Sometimes not a lot, but never slower. Except a special case of routing packets using a specific framework. But not in common cases like running Apache/MySQL/PHP or on a workstation."

    You've been looking at the wrong benchmarks. Linux only recently beated FreeBSD on benchmarks, by very few points, stable kernel vs d