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FreeBSD 5.4 Review
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."
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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
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!
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!
Here is the formula for the review of incemental updates to Unix-alike OSes.
1) Describe the OS, being sure to mention its Unix origins. If the OS is not Linux-based, mention Linux.
2) Comment on the weird piece of hardware by brand name in your box that made it crash
3) List the new and improved features in the kernel and the daemons. (Note: security patches are feautures too)
4) Base everything else on how easy it was to install.
Why not fork?
..what about the rest of the Holograms?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
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.
Well, I wouldn't normally respond to this but there is one bit of truth here. I have witnessesed the 5.* series corrupt its own file system several times. Usually it tends to fail to write correctly to the master.passwd file thus corrupting it. But I have also seen times where the binaries have been corrupted as well.
That being said, FreeBSD is not all bad. The 4.* series clearly is a top notch OS. I have seen the 4.* take slashdot-type spikes of traffic as a server and not blink an eye when similiar linux based OS have crumbled.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
One employee lost a whole project due to the OS corrupting the filesystem. ... A few days later I was looking for another job
So you were fired because you hadn't been making backups, right?
That might be funny, but only if it were true: amd64 support isn't new in 5.4.
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
Real advice here: don't be a ding-dong and use a test-grade OS for a production-grade job. FreeBSD 4.x is production grade, and it has served me well for YEARS of uptime, no matter the tinkering I do to it.
Here's what you need to do:
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.
linprocfs
to
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
Does anyone who actually has a service provider/network engineering job even care about these fbsd is dead/dying lines of thought anymore? FreeBSD has been quietly running a good chunk of the net for years. If your idea of a solid OS is something to run whatever the latest eye-candy is on your desktop then good for you, go compile Gentoo until you turn blue. For me, and a lot of folks like me, if I can run a web server that never fails, a DNS farm that never fails, mail servers that never fail, etc, etc then I could care less if my iPod doesn't automount or whatever other new technology isn't supported.
Everyone pleae stop reading reviews done by this guy. They're uninformative, biased, and it's blatently obvious he's unwilling to actually learn FreeBSD beyond installing it two or three times each new release and writing a review catering to the already pre-established opinions of Linux users.
scott
"It looks like FreeBSD just tries to follow Linux, ie. make something that tries to do a bit everything without any focus."
...
/usr/ports/sysutils/aaccli
/usr/ports/sysutils/asr-utils
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:
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:
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
It looks like FreeBSD just tries to follow Linux
Actually Linux followed FreeBSD. While older, FreeBSD is also free'er (as in speech). That is its fundamental difference. Which is better entirely depends on what you want to do.
OMG, dense. Please get hit with clue stick.
... and it should all be done with minimul downtime, because their 15k visitors/day don't care what database the data is stored it, they just want the sht to work.
It's not because MySQL is a buzzword. It's because MySQL works, that's what their data is currently sitting in, and their web site it programmed to talk to MySQL.
Switching to PostgreSQL, or any other database, entails a lot of work. Reprogramming anything database specific, and moving about 20GB from MySQL to PostgreSQL without losing *any* data.
Common sense is not so common.
Anyway, here are my humble reasons for choosing FreeBSD over any Linux distro.
The main one is definitely the wonderful ports system. The only thing that comes close to it in the Linux world is Gentoo portage: I didn't try it, but those who did didn't find it as good.
The following four links (the Handbook and three excellent tutorials) contain everything one needs to understand and use FreeBSD ports
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/ports.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/07/FreeBSD _Basics.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/08/28/FreeBSD _Basics.html
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/09/18/FreeBSD _Basics.html
Another not-so-secondary reason is security.
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
And to me, a very important reason is also the license. I have a very strong preference for the academic licenses (BSD, MIT) towards the copyleft licenses (GPL, LGPL).
And it looks like I'm not the only one
Eric Raymond advocates BSD license over GPL (June 2005)
"Freedom and choice are pretty cool. But we should talk about many other things. GPL is based on the belief that open source software is weak and needs to be protected. With it, we continue injuring ourselves, cutting ourselves from the economic benefits of BSD license".
Btw, it seems that *somebody* is sharing my preference, since FreeBSD is used on web servers much more than any Linux distro (2.5 million active sites, against 1.6 million of Red Hat). And from Netcraft numbers (June 2004), FreeBSD had a 25% increase in the last year.
/. BSD section, in the latest 20+ news items, only 2 (two) are about FreeBSD (the 5.4 release, and this piece of crap), notwithstanding its huge user base.
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/06/07/nearl y_25_million_active_sites_running_freebsd.html
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2005/03/14/fedor a_makes_rapid_progress.html
I know, facts like this one are little known on Slashdot - for a reason, I'm afraid. The same reason why lousy "reviews" like this one get produced by NewsForge and posted on Slashdot (they belong to the same company), and the same reason why in the
That alone says that FreeBSD is a strong Linux contender: if it weren't, there would be no point in obscuring it.
Btw this is an observation, it's not a complaint. FreeBSD has already shown that it can thrive even without the hype.
--
Requiem for the FUD