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FreeBSD Status Report for 2005 Q2
koinu writes "FreeBSD Status Report for the second quarter 2005 has been published by Scott Long. It gives a more precise description of what is being done on the 18 Summer Of Code projects." From the post: "The Google Summer of Code project has also generated quite a bit of
excitement. FreeBSD has been granted 18 funded mentorship spots, the
fourth most of all of participating organizations. Projects being
worked on range from UFS Journalling to porting the new BSDInstaller
to redesigning the venerable www.FreeBSD.org website."
Whaaa.... I just installed 5.4 and they're already thinking of jumping ship to a PRODUCTION version of FreeBSD 6.0 already?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
why does this article have the google logo?
did google buy freebsd?
No but Google did bring in some $90000 worth of support through their Summer of Code project.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
The first guy on the list, Anders Persson, works in the same lab as I do and I had no idea he had a SoC project.
I need to get outside my cubicle more...
- shadowmatter
No, BSD is dead, silly. You can't use their logo.
...Akbar!
*pushes detonator*
You know the Trolling community has really gone downhill when they copy and paste the trolls and don't even put in the effort to remove the extra [somesite.com] information blocks that show up after links...
Are we witnessing the end, or the beginning, of an Era of Trolldom?
Edward@Tomato - /home/Edward/ man woman
man: no entry for woman in the manual.
"Qua!?"
I'm confused. Why is it supposed to be dead?
FACT: BSD Trolls on Slashdot are dying.
Is the wireless networking just someone scratching his own itch?
I had sort of a hazy idea of what FreeBSD is all about and it didn't include wireless. Maybe I've got the wrong idea about wireless. (Wireless == desktop (y/n)) Anyway I thought wireless was not required for a 'serious' OS.
What am I missing here?
I believe the joke is that Netcraft confirms it, or something like that.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I heard Netcraft even confirmed it.
you made it totally worth my time.
I though soft updates made journaling unneeded and everything slower?
Please enlighten.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
I think it's not fair to mark this as Google.
:)
Sure google's doing a lot to *many* OSS projects out theres - but the news article was about BSD, should be marked the reliable 'red' devil (uh.. daemon).
I guess half the comments would be about this
-1: Redundant
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum videtur
I can't believe that this post is already at +2, with Informative mods. This is just another Anonymous Coward trying to post another "BSD is Dying" troll, just in a different way by posting some developer's dissatisfaction with BSD. If this were the real Mike Smith, then he would have signed in. "The End of FreeBSD"? Hardly. FreeBSD is growing in nice numbers, and FreeBSD is getting better with every release.
But in Soviet Russia BSD (Open, Net and Free) confirms Netcraft is dead!!!!
__________ Leave me alone I'm compiling a RPG II program on my S/36...Thanks to metamucil I'm a Regular Meta Moderator
Are these just trolls figuring it would easy to spark a Linux/Bsd or XBsd vs YBsd flamewar here...
Or is there a deeper reason for the dissension that I'm not aware of.
If it's just trolls, they and the moderators are working unusually hard at fighting each other.
I was thinking of putting some flavor of *nix on a spare machine at home. But the more I read /., the more I am leaning towards just letting the spare machine be a piece of non-functional furniture.
It is like going into some mythical hamburger joint intendding to get a burger and being confronted with a menu of 8000 burgers. And many of those burgers have multiple versions. "Chunky Munkey Burger V5.3"
I gotta get more of a real life. Call me offtopic or whatever.
There is softupdates, which orders things a bit. After a crash, there should be (knock on wood) only a few minor errors related to free space not being marked free.
There is sync, the traditional and fairly slow way. This generally provides unneeded determinism for directory operations. Normally we want as many pre-crash changes as possible, not just ones that can be made in perfect order. Some very unportable BSD software relys on sync behavior.
There is async, which plays fast and loose with everything. This works rather poorly on FreeBSD. It is likely that fsck will make a mess on boot, and illogically an async mount is slower than a softupdates mount. Linux has a nearly-true async, the default for ext2, that is very fast. (if an app explicitly requests a sync, the request is not ignored) The ext2 fsck is also extremely reliable, allowing for recovery of async filesystems that would be unheard of in the BSD world.
So that is:
- async
- sync
- soft updates
- full data journalling
- ordered data journalling
- metadata journalling
(and the patented obsolete delayed ordered writes from SysV, if I remember right)The really strange thing is that sometimes heavy-duty journalling can be fastest. This is often the case with mail servers which explicitly sync data to disk. A full-data journalling filesystem (as ext3 can be) may legitimately report completion as soon as the data hits the log, which is a nice big linear disk write. Other filesystems, though faster for normal use, will have to seek all over the disk before they can legitimately report completion.
Modern hardware screws all of this up horribly though. As the XFS developers discovered to their horror, power loss will corrupt data in memory or in transit to the disk before it stops the disk from operating. (yes, even when using appropriate fence or flush operations) Uh oh...
"I've been able to patch boxes running or 4.x for quite a while now, but jumping from 4 to 5, or in this case from 5 to 6 requires a complete reinstall."
It's very hard for me to believe that you've been running FreeBSD servers for years, and don't know that version to version upgrades can be done with minimal pain. Upgrades from one version of FreeBSD to another *do not* require complete reinstalls.
Yes, a 4.x to 5.x upgrade has the potential to be tricky, due to the major changes involved, but upgrading from 5.x to 6.x will not be a nearly as hairy.
Take a look at this email from one of the FreeBSD developers, in response to a question just like yours.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
I think I speak for the rest of the Slashdot community when I say I am tired of the "*BSD sucks" and "*BSD is dying" posts I see. I view at -1 threshold because I don't care for someone else deciding what I should read, but I get annoyed when I see Anonymous Cowards posting these obligatory trolls. Netcraft confirms that *BSD is not dead. Some of the sites with the highest uptimes are running *BSD. I run NetBSD and OpenBSD on servers/firewall, and Gentoo Linux on my desktops, so I am not a *BSD elitest either.
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
aw c'mon, just grab a splat-nix that sounds hip/interesting/mysterious to you and go with it, whatever flavor of splat-nix you choose they'll be plenty of zealots who'll make you feel like you did the right thing. They're all cool in their own way, they're free, and you learn one you've learned 80% of the others. The same software will more than likely run on all of them. I don't know why you got modded down, there ARE more Linux distros out there than any one person could name, and 3 no wait 4 BSD and now opensolaris...I could see why someone would throw up their hands and say WTF??!!
also...With Apple giving up on it, is it really worthwhile to develop a PowerPC port? IBM and others will still sell PowerPC hardware, but it's not going to be a major desktop/small server platform anymore. Big server and embedded, sure, but the middle is going away and FreeBSD lives in the middle ground.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
...BSD users see cvsup, make *world, and mergemaster.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Oh come on. It's no more annoying than any of the many other trolls and LAME jokes here at Slashdot, and certainly LESS annoying than the Gay Nigger thing (and certainly less offensive). It's also less annoying than all the questionable "editing" that goes on here, what with all the dupes and crap stories. Learn to mentally filter out trolls and none of them will bother you, your blood pressure will be lower, and your quality of life will in general be higher. Just let it go, that's the price you pay for surfing a public forum.
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
Yeah, I wouldn't use a car right now, because so many people use different makes and models that it all seems pointless. In the light 99% of them choosing the wrong model, I guess the right decision is not to use any of them at all!
"Old man yells at systemd"
It's not just the write cache. In fact, it's not
that at all, because I stated that appropriate
fence or flush operations are being used.
Power is cut. The motherboard chips start to
suffer a bit, corrupting data as it moves over
the various busses. Meanwhile, the disk is doing
just fine. Corrupt data arrives at the disk, and
is stored as it arrives.
Ouch. Bummer. What are you going to do? Cry?
Really fancy filesystems tend to fall apart
when they get corrupted a bit. Filesystems
with less imaginative designs may be fixable.
Perhaps you'd better checksum your data.
Better yet, do like Google. Replicate your
data at many different physical locations.
(still with a checksum, just in case)
Google did bring in some $90000 worth of support through their Summer of Code project.
Not to mention the remaining 1.91M they spent on other projects. FreeBSD just one of about 40 projects mentoring 400 students. The Nmap Security Scanner project is mentoring 10 of them, who have already produced great work! A list of their credentials and projects is available here. I'll give an update on their progress at my Defcon Presentation this Friday at 10AM.
Meanwhile, many of the other SoC mentors have posted details on the projects being worked on. For example,
- NetBSD
- Gaim
- Inksape
- MozDev
- WinLibre (with pics!).
Cheers,Fyodor @ Insecure.Org
I like to think of FreeBSD as starting to become what Linux could have if Linux hadn't fragmented into a million distributions that did nothing but squabble and spit at each other.
Linux always went with flashy pointless features and many advocates became obsessed with it "taking the desktop" from Windows. I almost feel like Linux lost it's way as it could never shake off the inferiority complex about Windows having a larger install base.
Meanwhile FreeBSD has felt no pressure to compete and has been moving in it's own direction in it's own time. As a result, using it feels more consistent, more of an integrated whole than a grab-bag jumble of distributions that all do things differently. Sure, this means that it's slightly more boring than Linux, but it also gets in the way slightly less. It's the OS of choice for many who just want to get on and do some work (or simply browse the web and write email) in a pleasant and mature Unix environment (which is even capable of running games - with the Linux translation layer it's even capable of running the Linux version of Unreal Tournament with full OpenGL acceleration).
Silly Anonymous Coward Troll, stats are for ids.
With an installed base up from zero five years ago to about 10 Millon today and with another million added each quarter, the users of Mac OS X as well as any real armchair operating system aficionados would be surprised to hear that *BSD is anything but alive and kicking. It's certainly growing faster than any Un*x has ever grown in the past, and has a larger installed user base than any *nix ever.
Regarding the number of NetBSD posts to Usenet... good grief. This correlation can be easily explained by other factors. Most likely, NetBSD users are more mature both technically and emotionally, and don't participate in Usenet any longer. Perhaps they're too busy shipping gazillions of embedded devices to bother with a forum with such a poor signal to noise ratio as Usenet. They probably also have more education, drive nicer cars, and have 1.2 girlfriends (vs. 0.1 for the average AC Troll) .
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
So....Google's secret OS is going to be based off of FreeBSD?
"And many of those burgers have multiple versions."
An OS that doesn't have multiple versions is an OS that died before they could start fixing the bugs. All the survivors have huge numbers of releases.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
For the last time, BSD IS NOT DYING! Hotmail switched to Windows 2000 after MS has bought Hotmail because Microsoft needed to "eat its own dog food." I don't know why Yahoo is using Linux, though. But anyways, BSD isn't dying. Development is going strong, and each new release keeps getting better. BSD is a very capable and complete operating system.
Here-here. It's also much less anoying than the "In Soviet Russia" reports run FreeBSD or whatever comments....
Let's see; recently thigns were "going strong" for netbsd so much they had to beg for donations. OpenBSD is still feeling the fallout from the OSS community over Theo's bombastic remarks in Forbes and FreeBSD has just announced that they are abandoning the 5.x series (presumably in embarassment).
In contrast, HP joins the ranks of luminaries such as Yahoo and IBM as members of the Linux community, drawn by both the quality of enterprise level support as well as the technicnological edge which Linux continues to display over the fragmented BSD camp (which has yet to come up with a fully functional SMP implementation).
As far as capabilities go; BSD is not capable of journalling, SMP OR of maintaining any sort of prescence in the corporate IT infrastructure.
Maybe because it's dying? Seems likely.
Surprising in view of the pleas in TFA for funding, and acknowledgements of where some came from, that nobody here sees a link between this and the true cost of software
Many hosting providers use FreeBSD and swear by it. I don't expect Pair networks, for example to change from FreeBSD anytime soon.
Stop worrying about the risks of nuclear power and start worrying about the risks of not using nuclear power.
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
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."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
If you read article it does not say anything about switching from FreeBSD. Most of servers getting Linux are database servers - meaning Oracle etc. I believe losers there are Solaris and Windows.
I don't usually reply to trolls, but I'm building world right now, so here we go...
Moderators, the parent post is not informative at all. The BSDs have never been about hype or world domination. The OpenBSD developers make OpenBSD for their own use. If you like it you're free to use it. And the same goes for the other BSDs. So NetBSD got new machines thanks to donations. Guess what, the same thing has happened to Drupal recently, and I'd hardly call that project a failure.
HP, IBM, SGI use Linux because they can actually save money by doing so. They sell hardware and services and, by embracing Linux, they save loads of cash on R&D and get geeks to like them. Look, IBM uses Linux, they're the good guys!
You are so wrong about the status of the BSDs. Have you even taken a look at FreeBSD's SMP architecture? And, for your info, Scott Long is working on a journaling layer for FFS. The thing is, most people on BSD land care little about journaling because production BSD systems don't crash, they just chug along. One of the FreeBSD project's mail servers has a constant load of near 100 with very heavy disk i/o as well, and it just works .
I don't know what world you live in, but I deploy OpenBSD firewalls and FreeBSD servers all the time, and people are very happy with them. Oh, and Juniper routers use the FreeBSD kernel. Must be pretty good if it drives some of biggest iron routers in the world.
I have nothing against Linux and use it when it's the best tool for the job, but there's more in the freenix world than Linux distros. Give the BSDs a try, you might like them. For a quick test read the excellent OpenBSD man pages and then compare them to the ones included in your average Linux distro. That alone should show you the effort its developers put on technical excellence.
Yahoo has grown up, and I think they have started to realize that doing everything in-house is not always economically feasible. The way I see it, I suppose with Linux they can get vendor support to take care of more of the headaches. Just my 2 cents.
Seem to remember from Apple's latest quarterly press conference they now have 16 million on OS X, and were growing at about 1.2 million for the last quarter.
The future is in beta
Well, let's look at the big picture instead of the parts that interest you. FreeBSD is dropping 5.x because 6.x is of significantly higher quality, but their 'minimal surprise in incremental upgrades' policy requires a major version number change to accomodate the stable but new functionality. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this. It's a sign of positive growth and recovery from what some thought would be the death of FreeBSD (the less than impressive 5.3 release).
Companies use Linux because it's a market horse, not because it's the best technical option. Remember: corporations want money. If they can lose some uptime but gain a lot of PR and friendliness with developer communities, they'll do it. I can't believe people don't see this yet. It's capitalism, not technological idealism. Deal with it and move on. Linux does have its uses on extremely high-end machines where super scalability is needed, but DragonFly BSD will move in over it in due time.
BSDs are gaining journalling (DragonFly's work being particularly interesting and non-hackish), they all have SMP which is improving gradually (FBSD's system is becoming more fine grained, NetBSD will move to fine-grained locking in a major version or two, DragonFly is resolving the only remaining SMP-related issues and will thereafter receive more testing and acceptance, and I'm sure OpenBSD will move up later). If FreeBSD being one of the most present and reliable serving platforms noted by NetCraft itself is not a presence in corporate IT, what is? Are you telling me all of those sites are mom-n-pop stores that just happen to stay up for years and serve tremendous amounts of data? Not to say it compares with some of the things Linux is being used for these days: but it's definitely a presence it is unwise to ignore.
It helps to know what you're talking about rather than just to listen to what a few Slashdot posts and articles say. If you really believe that everything you read is objective and do no hands-on investigation, you run the risk of ignoring really good options and thinking your mediocre software is a golden fleece of IT. Linux is cool, it has its uses, but it's still nowhere near the universal kernel it aims to be, and its efforts to stabilise and clean up won't work out until the development model changes and the code quality standard is raised. The BSDs' academic nature and elitism may slow progress, but at least the progress (usually) goes solidly. I can't speak for some of the things that FreeBSD has done in recent years, but DragonFly BSD and NetBSD seem to be progressing really well where they want to go (not necessarily where you might want them to go).
Sam ty sig.
Personally, I am a little surprised that Launch.d is being ported to FreeBSD, as Luke Mewburn's rc.d is a very nice startup system. You can read more about rc.d here.
In Soviet Russia, FreeBSD trolls you !!
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There's very little evidence of a Google OS beyond the speculation of Google fanboys everywhere. I love them as much as the next guy, but this is just talk.
Additionally, Google's SoC is supporting other OSes as well, notably Fedora Core, Ubuntu Linux and NetBSD.
A complete list.
"I'm not dead yet!"
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
BSD works and our company's legal department did not even hesitate to approve using BSD licensed code in our systems. Prior efforts to get GPL licensed code into our shop failed to get an approval from our legal department.
I think they have started to realize that doing everything in-house is not always economically feasible.
/always/ more expensive, and it shows that the company is mismanaged.
The first sign of a dying company is when it starts "outsourcing" things that it used to do itself. Outsourcing is
I can't recall FreeBSD saying anything bad about shared libraries. Care to provide some proof?
FreeBSD did not disparage journalled file systems. They said soft updates gave most of the advantages without the cost, and may be faster. For some workloads soft updates are better, for some they are not, but until FreeBSD implemented them nobody knew.
FreeBSD was never against ELF. They just had no need - ELF solved some very real problems in the early versions of Linux, and because it was the standard when the linux developers went to fix those problems (back when linux was only a few years old) they went with ELF at the same time. FreeBSD did linking differently, and didn't have the problems early Linux did. The only reason FreeBSD now uses ELF is the GNU tools support ELF better. Otherwise the old FreeBSD a.out is just as good.
IDE disk drives are still bad. However they are cheap so everyone uses them. (the advantages of SCSI are rarely seen on home machines. High end servers still use SCSI for good reason)
I don't know where you got the idea that FreeBSD ever said anything against X.org, because they never did. The position is We don't care about what X server you run, but the X.org people seem like they might be more responsive to users, and that is a win, so we are going with X.org for all new versions. Because they are conservative about changes in general, they maintain XFree86 for old versions.
Is it just me or does this look like it's trying to implement a bunch of features on top of C for which standard C++ would be sufficient? They want an ingrained list type? Then, uh, use "list" in C++. I didn't look at it in detail, but from what I saw they could just use C++.
Unfortunately there seems to be some fun anti-C++ sentiment among many OSS developers, especially core developers who would probably say "ZOMG BLOAT WTFLOLOLZ." Of course, any remotely legitimate complaints could be addressed just by making your own kernel libs, which is already done with their C language counter-parts anyawy.
bsd has some cool things. Ports KFA (Kick Fu&&& As). pkg_add is awsome. Linux is a little more hackable. Solaris as my unix mentor put it: "it's good because it has stock holders to report to, so it can only start to suck so much before it/company fials". However throught all of this I would like to know a an inteligent reason why on earth most (if not all) software is not open source, not nescosarily any particular licence. And I'd also like to know why hardware is not mandated to be open sourse. I meen think about it No specs meens hard to support, say if your in a shop and need to replace a battery or what not.