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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."
No but Google did bring in some $90000 worth of support through their Summer of Code project.
Ewige Blumenkraft.
Did you not read it?
"The purpose of
quickly jumping from 5.x to 6.0 is to reduce the amount of transition
pain that most users and developers felt when switching from 4-STABLE
to 5.x. 6.0 will feature improved performance and stability over 5.x,
experimental PowerPC support, and many new WiFi/802.11 features. The
5.x series will continue for at least one more release this fall, and
will then be supported by the security team for at least 2 years after
that. We encourage everyone to give the 6.0-BETA snapshots a try and
help us make it ready for production. We hope to release FreeBSD 6.0
by the end of August."
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
I see...Less pain, more often.
"A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
I heard Netcraft even confirmed it.
I though soft updates made journaling unneeded and everything slower?
Please enlighten.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
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...
Wireless has worked with FreeBSD for a long time.
What hasn't worked was newer forms of wireless encryption, like WPA-PSK.
Common sense is not so common.
"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
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.
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"
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
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.
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?
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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.
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.