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."

Comments

Tired of obligatory *BSD is dying comments

[Zweideutig]

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.

launchd and PowerPC

[ArbitraryConstant]

So far progress has been slow, the autoconf build system has been removed from all of the launchd(8) code, and launchctl(1) is building and semi-functional on FreeBSD-CURRENT (i.e. CoreFoundation hooks have been removed)

I'm currently working on porting "liblaunch" which is the core backend to both launchd(8) (the actual daemon) and launchctl(1), there are some mach/xnu specific hooks and calls that need to be remove and either reimplemented or worked around.

We're also waiting on a response from Apple on a possible BSD-licensed version of the code (it's currently under the APSL) Progress is slow, but steady.

Haven't worked with launchd, but there isn't an init system left that I don't hate so any hope of improvement is welcome.

also...

Florent Thoumie has updated the massively out-of-date platform page. Work continues to creating a 6.0 release of the PowerPC port.

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.

Re:Upgrades do not require "complete reinstalls"

[toadlife]

Understandable. I would be cary cautious at moving a 4.x box to 5.x, (as I've seen the big changes) if it were a very important production setup.

I had the same kind of 'WTF?' reaction back when it was announced that 6.x was coming soon, before reading that the difference between 5 and 6 wasn't earth shattering and updating from 5 wouldn't be a huge deal.

Re:FreeBSD is the new Linux.

[Anne Thwacks]

FreeBSD as starting to become what Linux could have ???

Linux started life as a clone of BSD, because BSD had legal problems. Now you can have the real thing for free, why would you want the cheap imitation?

Re:Yahoo dumps FreeBSD

[setagllib]

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).

Launch.d Vs Rc.d

[Goo.cc]

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.