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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."

2 of 120 comments (clear)

  1. Complaints about stability have plagued 5.x by pschmied · · Score: 4, Interesting
    Speaking as a former FreeBSD user, I want this operating system to work again. I was disappointed to find that that didn't happen with 5.4-RELEASE. If you have FreeBSD 4.11 production machines and are thinking of upgrading, I suggest you leave them as they are for now.


    This is sad. I too remember fondly the 4.x days. FreeBSD hasn't made the transition to these "enterprise" features like the ULE scheduler, and getting out from under the "big lock" SMP.

    The 4.x series is still alive and well, but the writing is on the wall. If the FreeBSD 5.x series doesn't start fixing some of those show-stoppers, it risks becoming irrelevant.

    NetBSD and OpenBSD seem to have found their niche to a certain extent. I suspect that some network equipment vendor like HP will start putting OpenBSD in switches and routers. It seems like Cisco and IOS have the most to lose from OpenBSD gaining ground.

    NetBSD seems to chug away at its own pace making solid incremental gains. They tend toward evolutionary rather than revolutionary changes. When they do make more revolutionary changes, they tend to include them in small numbers, and only after a long period of vetting in the current branch.

    The laundry list of improvements to FreeBSD 5.x makes me wonder if that project didn't bite off more than it could chew. That the BSD faithful are starting to raise questions about the long road to stability with FreeBSD 5.x should be a warning to other Open Source projects to stick to regular release cycles with clearly defined and narrowly scoped improvements.

    I suspect that FreeBSD development may have slowed somewhat due to the "fun factor" waning. Announcing Big Gigantic Changes can be good to generate enthusiasm in a user base, but it can be oppressive to the poor developers caught doing the work. Lots of small, discrete tasks can be fun for experienced developers, and a good way to snag novices.

    Despite these problems, FreeBSD has very recently been a very vibrant project. They have traditionally had a level of coordination rarely seen in any other Open Source project. I think this can work, but FreeBSD 5.x may fall into the "lessons learned" category.

    Or, as I mention in my blog, Darwin may see a surge in popularity following Apple's Intel announcement.
    -Peter
    --
    . Penguins Surely Ca
  2. Re:5.4 amd64 is seriously broken thread-wise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I can tell you that I'm running FreeBSD-amd64 since 5.2 and it IS stable on this platform.

    Perhaps Apache 2.0 is not as clean as one might think? That's why I'm still using Apache 1.x.