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Looking at FreeBSD 6 and Beyond

Provataki writes "OSNews published an interview with core FreeBSD developers John Baldwin, Robert Watson and Scott Long. They discuss about the upcoming FreeBSD 6 and its new features, the competition, TrustedBSD, Darwin and much more."

16 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. Not much info on Darwin by dancpsu · · Score: 3, Informative

    From the article:

    The TrustedBSD Audit support originated in large part from Mac OS X, and we really appreciate Apple's work with us to develop audit support, and their support in getting it out into open source. One of the outcomes of this will be our (TrustedBSD's) continuing maintainership of OpenBSM, a bundling of the libraries, documentation, and command line tools, which will be portable across a host of operating systems including FreeBSD, Darwin, and Linux. This sort of arrangement can be a strong motivator for companies like Apple to release software under open source -- we're already preparing bundles of documentation and feature enhancements that we hope they will be able to adopt back into Mac OS X.

    I'm glad Apple is helping out, but I was hoping they would go more into the BSD kernel api that's appearing in Tiger.

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    "Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
    1. Re:Not much info on Darwin by DECS · · Score: 5, Informative

      Hardly.

      When Apple aquired NeXT, NeXTSTEP for Mach was Mach+4.2 BSD. Apple used their experience with mkLinux (which was also a Mach kernel combined with a *nix userland) to modernize the kernel.

      Part of this effort involved bringing 4.2 BSD up to date with more modern developments from all of the BSD projects, but primarily FreeBSD. Apple continues to incorporate technologies from *BSD projects, despite Darwin being separately maintained.

      Clearly, FreeBSD has a lot more in common with OS X / Darwin than Windows NT does, even if some parts (the kernel obviously, and Darwin's driver IO Kit) are significantly different.

  2. Re:FreeBSD on the laptop by debilo · · Score: 5, Informative

    My experiences with wireless support have been great. But I run a Centrino, which isn't really uncommon hardware. I have used both NDISulator and Damien Bergaminis excellent ipw driver. I recommend using the latter to anyone using a Centrino-based laptop, it works flawlessly.

  3. Re:FreeBSD on the laptop by failure-man · · Score: 2, Informative

    For video transcoding and rough editing with a GUI check out Avidemux. Runs on all the various *nixes.

  4. Re:FreeBSD and its place in the . . . field by debilo · · Score: 5, Informative

    Are Linux and Free/OpenBSD the only real options now?

    I don't know if you left it out on purpose or merely forgot to add it to your list, and I hardly ever use it, but NetBSD is a damn fine BSD variant too. It just doesn't get the press it deserves, focus seems to be on Linux and Free/OpenBSD mainly.

    Well, then there's The Hurd, but it's barely usable. So, yes, I guess those are the only real options now. :)

  5. Re:FreeBSD and its place in the . . . field by GuruBuckaroo · · Score: 4, Informative

    As another poster noted, there's also NetBSD. I'm a former/current NetBSD user, although I'm moving away from it to FreeBSD.

    NetBSD is great it you have obscure systems - I ran it on my VAX collection, and it worked great. However, it doesn't seem to stand up as far as new hardware support goes next to FreeBSD.

    One thing to note - when you hear of people breaking transfer records, it's almost always NetBSD - they have a great network stack. I currently use FreeBSD for my file servers (nss_ldap/pam_ldap support is lacking from NetBSD), and use NetBSD for my VPN/IPSec routers. I'm probably going to switch over to FreeBSD just to keep things consistant, though.

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    Poor means hoping the toothache goes away.
  6. Re:"Late" by 0x000000 · · Score: 2, Informative

    FreeBSD 5.x certainly does not shine when it comes to I/O intensive stuff. Especially if you have multiple procs, so i am happy to see it move away from the singe lock, to something that is more useful.

    5.x however was still more SMP friendly, in the fact that most of the other kernel code could be run on the other CPU's if available, while the IO code was run on a single CPU. So the trade off was not that bad. As FreeBSD still performed better with 5.x on servers with multiple CPU's vs 4.x. Just IO was still lacking.

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  7. Re:Cool by brilinux · · Score: 2, Informative

    I believe that 616 is actually the Latin numerological number of the beast, whereas in Greek or Hebrew, it was 666. Interestingly, Nero's name in Latin cooresponds to 616. It depends, though, on the Alphabet being used and the translations.

  8. Re:FreeBSD on the laptop by NuclearDog · · Score: 2, Informative

    "The only other thing I could really ask for would be an easy-to-use DVD transcoder."

    MPlayer/MEncoder?

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    This statement is forty-five characters long.
  9. Re:This is my first post . . . by sycotic · · Score: 5, Informative

    Welcome to Slashdot!

    Please refrain from using the played out jokes seen elsewhere on Slashdot, you would do particularly well not mentioning "in soviet russia...", "xyz is dying" and "imagine a beowulf cluster of these!" in the future

    The reason I say this is simple: you will very quickly have a friend to foe ratio that simply does not work in your favour :)

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    -- If I were a fish, I'd be wet
  10. Re:Why Should... by Ded+Bob · · Score: 2, Informative

    Neither uses bash (or even tcsh) as the default shell.

    Huh? csh is the default shell on FreeBSD. It also happens to be tcsh. Personally, I use zsh for my shell on all Unix systems I run.

  11. Darwin? by LFS.Morpheus · · Score: 3, Informative

    I'm not sure if this is even worth mentioning, but there is Apple's Darwin. I know nothing about it so I can't tell you more, but the site seems to be http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ and it does have install CDs.

    Maybe someone else can tell us ups and downs of using Darwin?

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  12. Re:Why Should... by bofkentucky · · Score: 2, Informative

    Pro FBSD: Better old and new x86 HW support, better FS (ZFS is still vapor at this point), Better Package/Port management
    Con FBSD: Support contracts may not be what your sun platinum has provided, supposedly the instant-workstation port is broken.
    Pro S10: Sun JDS makes mass *nix workstation rollouts a breeze, kick ass tech support if you want to pay for it
    Con S10: JDS costs lots of cash, per workstation, for some rollout and management interfaces for free software (OpenOffice, GNOME), HW support might not be good on your hardware.

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  13. Re:Why does it keep going? by linguae · · Score: 5, Informative

    Well, BSD has been along for a long time, since the late 1970s. In fact, here is the Berkeley copyright notice for FreeBSD:

    Copyright 1979, 1980, 1983, 1986, 1988, 1989, 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994

    The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.

    Compare that history to Windows (first released in 1985, although to be fair, Windows development and the release of DOS was in 1981), and to GNU/Linux (GNU project started in 1984, Linux started in 1991). Now, BSD has been freely available for just about the same time as Linux, though. Read your history before you start flaming.

    Secondly, the BSDs have a nice level of integration between the kernel and the userland, since the developers work on both parts. For example, the BSD developers work on the kernel, the userland, the C library, the manual pages, etc. The only parts that aren't developed by the BSDs are the C compiler (from GNU) and a handful of other GNU utilities. This is different from Linux, in which the kernel is developed by Linus and contributors, while the userland is developed mainly by the GNU project.

    Finally, the BSDs have proven themselves over the last 25+ years that they are very stable and capable operating systems, with a lot of merit. BSD was the first operating system to implement TCP/IP. BSD was a major commercial player back in the days of 4.3BSD and the VAX, and it does behind the scenes work in many of the non-BSD operating systems that people use (e.g., the core of Mac OS X and many Windows networking tools). BSD was one of the first pieces of software that went from closed-source to open-source (but not without a fight from AT&T, which explains why Linux, and not BSD, seems to be more popular).

    BSD is a very nice operating system, and developers like working on it because it is well engineered and is proven. Read some BSD history and try a BSD before you start flaming.

  14. Re:Why Should... by Cochonou · · Score: 2, Informative

    You've heard about chsh, haven't you ?

  15. Re:FreeBSD and its place in the . . . field by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    There's Menuet OS and Ada OS to start with. You might also have fun doing some of the Debian experiments with other kernels such as NetBSD/Debian or Debian/HURD. There's a project that runs Linux on L4 (a microkernel). Naturally, since microkernels are far, far superior to monolithic kernels, you should also try Minix. ;)