FreeBSD 6.0 Released

Reyad Attiyat writes FreeBSD 6.0 is ready for release! New features, and there are lots, can be reviewed at the official site. One of the biggest and most anticipated features (mentioned before on Slashdot) is wireless support, which has been greatly improved upon. This includes support for a lot more cards, WAP support, and integration into the dhcpd client. This release comes only mere days off NetBSD's release and an OpenBSD release. Version 6.0 was intended to be released way back in August but due to a number of factors it had to be delayed till now. Aside from this major release the FreeBSD project has also had some major changes, including most recently a new logo and also a brand new website."

Comments

Shit...

[TheRealMindChild]

... and I am still back in good ol' 4.4 I think. I guess if it aint broke, dont upgrade till it does!

Re:Shit...

[honeypotslash]

Or... upgrade if it has a feature that you want, which is not included in your current version.
--
Get your Free MacMini's here

Re:Shit...

[ArbitraryConstant]

"... and I am still back in good ol' 4.4 I think. I guess if it aint broke, dont upgrade till it does!"

Doesn't that have a bunch of security bugs? 4.11 is pretty nice.

Re:Shit...

[MrDiablerie]

Yeah, that's a bunch of FUD

Re:Shit...

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm on 4.10-RELEASE. I feel so outdated.

Re:Shit...

[Thalagyrt]

Grrr! The day after we set up our new backend production server here with 5.4, they release 6.0. Go figure! :(

Re:Shit...

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you really want to run a production server on a newly released major version of ANY OS?

Re:Shit...

[Thalagyrt]

No, I wouldn't, which is why I'm not upgrading it. I just found it kind of ironic. :P

Re:Shit...

[linimon]

Please don't try upgrading your ports with a 4.4 system without upgrading to 4.10 or 4.11 first. I severely doubt anything that old will work with the current ports framework; if it fails, you'll be completely on your own. It's been several years and time has moved on and we can't support every possible combination.

Re:Shit...

[Billly Gates]

I have been becoming more and more of a fan of netbsd's pkg's. DrangonFLY recently switched to it with Matt Dillion claiming the problems with the ports is that things change and break. Most DBSD users just used FBSD ports with some patch files. Shudder

I am looking into NetBSD after the fallout with FBSD 5.x but I am willing to try again with 6.x. Pkg's are also available for FreeBSD users from www.netbsd.org and you can compile them from source as well. It takes care of alot of dependancy problems.

Re:Shit...

[NuShrike]

At least cvsup rebuild to RELENG_6 from 5.4 is much easier and painfree than moving from 4.11 to 5.x.

Re:Shit...

[NuShrike]

Does it feel like only the evenly-numbered FreeBSD releases are the better ones? Can't really say until 6 shakes out, but it's been a lot smoother than 5. Hopefully, this isn't the case.

Re:Shit...

[TelJanin]

Slashdot needs a -1, Incomprehensible mod

Re:Shit...

[Billly Gates]

Just tried six. Sigh

Its no 4.x unfortunately.

Re:Shit...

[Anonymous Coward]

You assume he meant FreeBSD 4.4. He could be referring to 4.4BSD or the 4.4BSD-Lite version. Both of these predate FreeBSD.

Re:Shit...

[Anonymous Coward]

He could've been referring to his mother's bra size too but I doubt it.

Live-CD?

[stinerman]

I'd think about trying the BSDs if they had live-cd versions of recent releases.

Re:Live-CD?

[nine-times]

I'd just like to see a single-DVD iso. Ah, well, the FTP install aint so bad.

Re:Live-CD?

[Anonymous Coward]

ug, you didn't even look. Snarl, FreeSBIE, PCBSD . . . . not 6.0 yet but there are several LiveCD projects out there, most have 5.2-5.4 vintage.

Re:Live-CD?

[FunWithKnives]

Alright, can't you google for your own info?

http://www.freesbie.org/ - Latest release is based on FreeBSD 5.3.

It's harder to find LiveCDs of Open/NetBSD, but you can create your own -

http://ezunix.org/modules.php?op=modload&name=Sect ions&file=index&req=viewarticle&artid=88&page=1

http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2005/07/14/openbsd _live.html

Gee golly, and all of that was on the first results page after searching for "Open/Net/FreeBSD LiveCD".. Whooda thunkit?

Re:Live-CD?

[misleb]

What do you think you are going to learn from a Live CD of FreeBSD? Whether or not it supports your hardware? I assume you've run Linux or some kind of unix variant. It'll have a shell and maybe a desktop like KDE or GNOME. What's to see? You can get that on just about any Unixy system. IMO, you don't really know what an OS or distribution is like until you have to actually manage a box.

Unless, of course, you've never run a unix-like system before. Then by all means, try Freesbie.

-matthew

Re:Live-CD?

[linuxfanatic1024]

Hey!

Re:Live-CD?

[JianTian13]

I believe the link you're looking for is Just Fucking Google It!.

I'm still amazed by the number of people whose first reaction is to ask, rather than search. Christ, I'd be embarrassed to ask a question whose answer was on the first page of a simple search...

Re:Live-CD?

[mnmn]

LiveCDs make for quick evaluations. I dont have the partition for openbsd, so I installed it in vmware to check out the ospfd, how to start it and what can it do. I'll continue to spend time on it, to see if I can port ospfd to other unixen, and even cygwin, my eventual goal.

Now if I had a livecd, I'd use that instead to get full CPU on my side.

Now before you call me a newbie, search my name on google, and maybe visit me sometimes. I have stacks of sparc, hp, rs6000 and alpha machines in my room to play with (just enjoy trying out unixen and porting stuff in between). But I highly value liveCD, since you can download the latest version, plop it into any machine and off you go for the more basic stuff.

Try knoppix sometime. "knoppix 2" gives you just the command line.

Re:Live-CD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical *BSD fanatic moderation bullshit...

BSD is dead?

[eric2hill]

Looks like BSD lives to die another day :)

how does this affect OS X?

[boxlight]

Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD, is it not?

How do new releases of FreeBSD affect OS X?

Boxlight

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[wvitXpert]

Why should it affect it at all? Just because Apple used FreeBSD code in OSX doesn't mean that they care what changes FreeBSD makes later on.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[Overly Critical Guy]

Darwin eventually syncs with FreeBSD, which ends up in major OS X releases. You can be sure OS X Leopard will be synced with 6.0, as Panther was synced up to 5.0.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[nine-times]

Well, it's not directly based on FreeBSD. OSX runs on top of Darwin (a different open source project), which was originally based on FreeBSD, but with a different kernel, and other changes. The people maintaining Darwin may choose to bring some of the new things over, but there's no direct connection (afaik) between an improvement being released for FreeBSD and seeing that improvement show up in OSX.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[bugg]

Well, yes and no. Darwin has a mach-based "microkernel" but there's only one thread running under it - the FreeBSD kernel. So while the VM was supplied by Mach, the entire process model, network stack, filesystem code, and system calls all came from FreeBSD. The suite of userland tools that came with Darwin were all also from FreeBSD. They are, or at least were- I'm not sure how actively they merged things, but if the OP is right then they've kept up- very closely related.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX is based on NetBSD, not FreeBSD. In any case, even if NetBSD upgrades it doesn't affect OSX to the least because it is it's own fork now. Darwin (the part of OSX that is based on NetBSD) has developed a lot of differences with NetBSD since OSX's creation; notably the use of the mach kernel.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[mspohr]

It would be nice if Apple would work with FreeBSD to give back to the community...

I know that under the terms of the license they don't have to do anything but it's always nice to share... and all that.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[athakur999]

The core of OS X, Darwin, is already available from Apple:

http://developer.apple.com/darwin/

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[Guy Harris]

Darwin has a mach-based "microkernel" but there's only one thread running under it - the FreeBSD kernel.

Or, at least, kernel code based on BSD - but developed independently; it's not just FreeBSD lifted up and modified to plug into Mach. In Tiger, for example, the MP locking, and VFS layer, are significantly different from FreeBSD.

As for userland, the system library (called libSystem on Darwin/OS X, unlike the libc on most other UN*Xes) is based on BSD, but not identical to FreeBSD's - for example, a lot of the get*by* routines just communicate with lookupd in Darwin/OS X.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[nine-times]

Yeah, well, mostly I just meant, "OSX isn't a pretty interface on top of FreeBSD, it's a pretty interface on top of Darwin, which is based largely on FreeBSD." That much, afaik, is correct and undisputed. It's my understanding that there's a lot shared with FreeBSD, but also many changes, and some things borrowed from other BSDs perhaps. So, updates to FreeBSD don't automatically mean updates to OSX-- there's still work to be done.

No intention of slighting the FreeBSD developers and the extent to which OSX users benefit from their work.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[jonadab]

> Mac OS X is based on FreeBSD, is it not?

Yes and no. Some portions of OS X are based on some portions of FreeBSD.

> How do new releases of FreeBSD affect OS X?

Very little. Apple has their own release timetable. Ongoing FreeBSD development has some impact on Apple, but official FreeBSD releases are pretty much neither nor there for them.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[MrHanky]

But not under a BSD license, so that doesn't matter.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[Fred_A]

The more I look around MacOS X, the more it seems to me it has as much relationship with a normal Unix as Plan9 has. So they are kind of related, but there also are lots of diferences.

The major one being the insane filesystem layout. A number of links to more orthodox locations helps but it still is pretty weird and finding something isn't easy. Expecially since the included search system only looks in $HOME, so enabling locate is a good first move...

For most users who will never see the system anyway, this is a non issue. For all the Unix people who grabbed a Mac because the Unix side was important (for me it was the best value I found for a Unix laptop), it's a bit of a letdown. Of course it's always fun to explore something new. I probably need to find some proper documentation though (OReilly has a site on Unix/MacOS).

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[Eil]

Actually, userland for OS X is primarily netbsd derived, not freebsd.

Wrong. The page you linked to mentions all 3 BSDs exactly once, never specifying which one in particular the userland was primarily derived from.

I'm more inclined to believe the following, straight from news articles and Apple's own documentation:

"Going forward, [Darwin] will track a stable version of FreeBSD, which is the more popular and traditionally x86-only version that claims about a million users worldwide..." (source)

"The Darwin kernel is based on FreeBSD and Mach 3.0 technologies..." (source)

"...the BSD portion of Mac OS X is primarily derived from FreeBSD..." source)

"Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides "OS personality" APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD." (source)

"We should note, however, that apart from a few architectural differences (such as our use of the Mach kernel), we try to keep Darwin as compatible as possible with FreeBSD (our BSD reference platform)." (source)

"Integrated with Mach is a customized version of the BSD operating system (currently FreeBSD 5)." (source)

In fact, practically the only references I can find to NetBSD in Apple's Developer Connection are to the HISTORY sections in some of the man pages. Apple may have borrowed some from NetBSD, but the main BSD player in OS X is clearly FreeBSD.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[TheRaven64]

Darwin has a mach-based "microkernel" but there's only one thread running under it - the FreeBSD kernel

Both the BSD subsystem and the Mach layer of the kernel use a number of threads. IOKit, the third part of the kernel, is also multithreaded. I suspect you mean that they run in kernel space, rather than as multiple userspace servers.

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[halfnerd]

for i in /bin/*; do strings $i | grep BSD; done |sort | awk '{ print $1 }' | uniq -c

Re:how does this affect OS X?

[Mr2cents]

Darwin has a mach-based "microkernel" but there's only one thread running under it - the FreeBSD kernel.

So - in theory - you could add other OSes in other threads? Can this be used for virtualisation? (think user-mode linux under darwin).

Variants.

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a Dead-CD version of FreeBSD that I can boot on my machine, just to try out?

Re:Variants.

[ivoras]

Not yet, but (for some values of deadness) it will soon be available, for example at http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html :)

Torrent?

[failure-man]

Oh hell yes. Anyone know if there's a torrent available? I'd really rather not contribute to the annihilation of the FreeBSD mirrors if I can avoid it . . . . . .

Re:Torrent?

[Just Some Guy]

If you're upgrading a 5.x machine, the usual cvsup / build / install routine will give you a shiny new system. It's a much easier upgrade than from 4 to 5.

Re:Torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/torrents/6.0-REL EASE/

i think someone fails the internet ;)

Re:Torrent?

[cperciva]

Anyone know if there's a torrent available?

Yes. The official release announcement (which for some reason wasn't linked in the story) has a link to the torrent files.

Re: Torrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could always buy FreeBSD on CD. I just ordered mine from http://www.thelinuxstore.ca/

Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

I've been comfortable enough with the release candidates to upgrade my production servers from 5.x to 6 a while back. I really have nothing but good to say about it: it's faster, more stable, and more worthy of the FreeBSD name than 5 ever seemed to be.

Congratulations, Release Engineering team! You've turned out a great product.

And as a side note, we've seen big releases from each of the major BSDs within the last week. Dying, my foot.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[mandreko]

big releases mean nothing. SCO releases all kinds of bullshit all the time. it doesn't mean they're doing well ;)

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't take this as criticism, because it's not meant in that spirit, but I really wish we'd stop even acknowledging the whole "dying" joke. The problem is, I've run into one stupid manager who, amazingly, bought it. Yes, oh yes, he was stupid, but somehow he got the job and I wish that I could say that he's the only guy I've ever met who was in a position he shouldn't have had.

Of course BSD isn't dying. Either that, or it's the longest death in history. Some Linux-based asswads -- and please understand that I'm not equating Linux usage with being an asswad, heck, I use Linux every day and I wouldn't want to incriminate myself; no, I'm just specifying asswads who somehow have found Linux -- just can't shut up. They're like the annoying nerd in the back of the room who has found an expert mix of geekness and insufferable rudeness that, for some reason, he mistakes for wit. Think "Malvin" in WarGames, and you get the idea. They're the guys who think they're experts because they've managed to install Debian and, oh, Gnome maybe, but they only use Synaptic for package management and they're afraid of cron even though they talk about how they use it all the time, even for personal tasks(!).

God.

They're *dying* to appear knowledgable, so they perpetuate this dying joke without ever really knowing what situations the BSDs are best suited for or the philosophies behind them. I mean, the BSD Web sites, have you seen them? That have all that *text*, I mean, God, you have to read and stuff.

FreeBSD has its issues, I'm aware of them. But I've used it for many, many moons now, and honestly, it rocks my world as a server system. I might use something else, but I'd have to have a really, really good reason. My mail servers run on fairly close-to-stock OpenBSD systems, and they're rock solid. Package management and upgrades are a breeze.

Bottom line, the BSDs make my job easy.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[bondjamesbond]

to upgrade my production servers from 5.x to 6 a while back.

Dang, you're brave! Bleeding edge on production servers? Nothing like walking a thin line.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

In this case, not really. I only made the jump after hearing person after person rave about the performance and stability benefits of upgrading. My experience echoes that: we've actually seen fewer problems from the "bleeding edge" systems than the "stable" ones.

I wouldn't have done it if I thought it was a risk. It seems like the real risk in this case was in not upgrading.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[misleb]

Since you mentioned upgrading from 5.x...

I have a 5.4 server that I recently installed and I want to upgrade to 6.0. It isn't in production yet, but it does have some custom configuration and many ports installed (as well as a system disk mirrored with geom). I've never really run FreeBSD before. Do I need to recompile all the ports I installed against the 6.0 system? How do I go about doing that? I'm concerned about running ports built against old libraries. I'm used to running Debian where everything gets upgraded automatically.

Any advice?

-matthew

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[jadavis]

Can you tell me a little more about any issues you had when upgrading? I just installed my first production FreeBSD box (using 5.4) a month ago.

So far I've had a great experience with FreeBSD. Before that my only experience was GNU/Linux (mostly on Debian).

Any useful resources you have would be nice too. I'm still relatively new to FreeBSD, and I'm not familiar with everything about it. If it's not in the handbook, I don't know it.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

Do I need to recompile all the ports I installed against the 6.0 system?

You probably don't need to, but it's a good idea. Here's how I do it:

Use "find" to find and delete all files in /bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /lib, /usr/lib, /usr/libexec, and /usr/include that are older than the day I upgraded the machine. At this point, I have a 99% "pure" base system, but almost all ports on the machine are temporarily broken. Note that FreeBSD 7 has this feature built-in.

Is portupgrade installed?

- If so: cd /usr/ports/lang/ruby18; make deinstall; makereinstall; make clean. This rebuilds ruby against the new system libraries so that portupgrade will work again.

- If not: cd /usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade; make install; make clean to install it.

Upgrade all the ports in one swoop: run portupgrade -fa and walk away for a few minutes/hours/days until it's finished.

There might be trickier ways to do it, but that way's pretty much guaranteed to work. Regardless, this is an excellent time to join one of the FreeBSD mailing lists. Everybody's going through this together, and you're very likely to get some friendly, useful advice.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

It was a pretty simple upgrade. I followed the instructions in /usr/src/UPDATING under "To upgrade in-place from 5.x-stable to current" and it all worked out OK. Then, I ran the steps mentioned to the previous poster for the sake of thoroughness and having a "pure 6.x" system.

As far as resources, I highly recommend joining one of the official FreeBSD mailing lists ("-questions" and "-stable" would be appropriate for this). The people on there are really friendly and helpful. That's the first place I turn when I need human assistance.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[jadavis]

aren't all port files usually in /usr/local?

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[toadlife]

Yep,

5.x to 6.x is not a hard upgrade at all. My desktop at home was running 5.1 when I first set it up, and it's gone from there to 5.2 > 5.4 > 6.0_BETA1 > 6.0_RC1 with no issues at all. As for performance gains, I did do a run of UNIXBENCH on 5.4 and compared it to 6.0_BETA and I saw higher scores accross the board. Though UNIXBENCH isn't exactly real-world stuff, it would indicate that overall performance is somewhat improved in 6.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

Yep, but you don't need to manually remove them. Portupgrade will replace them with new, correctly-linked versions.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[darkgray]

The upgrading section of the handbook could definitely be made clearer, considering how lost I feel. It mentions using the new release's sysinstall, but says nothing of how to get it. Am I supposed to get the new boot disks and upgrade by running through the same procedure as when I did my fresh install, or download sysinstall in a package, or upgrade some hidden sysinstall port, or what?

The other path I can take is apparently to build everything from source, which sounds like fun. This isn't explained particularly well either, though.

Do I first cvsup stable-supfile and follow /usr/src/UPDATING by running:
make buildworld
make kernel KERNCONF=GENERIC
*bootaloot*
mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster -i
*bootaloot*

and then I'm done? Or am I supposed to follow this up by doing a cvsup ports-supfile and update the way you mention? Will that drag along OpenSSH to 4.1p1 along with the rest of the packages that are upgraded with 6.0, or do I need to tell my system to somehow upgrade them through ports? I've never pondered it before, but it seems the ports cvs is unrelated to release version, so I'm puzzled as to how portupgrade is supposed to know I want everything fresh and shiny with the 6.0 kernel.

Perhaps making world in /usr/src will upgrade OpenSSH and the rest along with making a new kernel, and I'm just ignorant as a toad in a dried up well, but the information hasn't exactly jumped at me in the handbook. As far as I can tell, the actual upgrade procedure is sort of missing, covered up with advice to backup things and selecting distribution. Not that I'm told exactly what I should backup (current kernel? /etc? /home? Everything, even the porn collection?)...

Anywho, pardon my ignorance.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[jadavis]

So what are you removing from /sbin, /bin, etc? I think I'm misunderstanding.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

All the old, obsolete system libraries and binaries. For instance, I found some programs in /sbin with timestamps from 1998 - when I installed 3.something on the system. It's just a thorough housecleaning. The base system can't require any of the old libraries, since they were are linked against the new libraries during the buildworld process.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

First, there are two mostly separate steps: upgrading the base system, and then upgrading everything else. Use the process you mentioned of running cvsup, buildworld, etc. (but be sure that your stable-supfile has the line "*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_6", or else you'll end up with the most recent 5-STABLE system!).

You are also correct that the ports tree is unrelated to the release version. The base system in 6.x comes with a new utility, "portsnap", that you can use instead of cvsup to update your ports tree, but it's perfectly OK to ignore that for now and use cvsup as usual.

I'm puzzled as to how portupgrade is supposed to know I want everything fresh and shiny with the 6.0 kernel.

Basically, the portupgrade (and the underlying ports sytem itself) will build everything to run on your current system. Running 5.x? It builds 5.x binaries. Running 6.x? It builds 6.x binaries. So, you'll want to run upgrade the base system and be booted into it before you start upgrading your ports.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[darkgray]

Alright, I'll try that. It's a bit sad that upgrading can't be done via SSH, since the machine in question is running without a keyboard/monitor in my parents' house across the city. Thanks for your reply.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

It's a bit sad that upgrading can't be done via SSH

I bet it can. Although that's not the officially supported method, I do it all the time. I'm not about to drive into work on a Saturday to rebuild a machine when I can SSH in from home in my pajamas.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Steven W00ston]

I just upgraded mine over SSH. It says you have to boot into single-user mode a couple times, but my install worked fine without that.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Erik Hollensbe]

5.x is the first BSD where they actually honor that you can do a direct upgrade. In previous versions, the recommended path was always reformat/reinstall, with the warning that upgrades was asking for it.

Frankly, having several 5.x servers deployed and dealing with the mess that was upgrading from 4.x, I'm happy to hear this.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[darkgray]

Whoopsie. Perhaps deleting all those libraries right away wasn't such a brilliant plan.

It went fine until I tried to reinstall Ruby, upon which it broke out of the make, with a "cpp fails sanity check" error. Of course, after the libraries were gone, bash stopped working (missing libncurses.so.5 or such).

Rebooting into single mode and reinstalling the world (again) fixed that part, and once I'd switched shells to csh, portupgrade appears to be recompiling everything. I had to add -rR for it to do anything, though. Else it would just leave everything unbroken while reporting things were fabulous.

Should be interesting to see how the system works after portupgrade has finished, early next week or so...

In the meantime, what did I do wrong? :)

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

It went fine until I tried to reinstall Ruby, upon which it broke out of the make, with a "cpp fails sanity check" error.

How did you try to install it, ie with portupgrade or directly though running "make" in the ports tree? Had you rebooted after running "make installworld" but before this step?

I had to add -rR for it to do anything, though. Else it would just leave everything unbroken while reporting things were fabulous.

Are you sure you were using the "-f" option to portupgrade to force it to rebuild the ports? Otherwise, it will only built ports that are out-of-date.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[darkgray]

I did the make buildworld-kernel-installkernel thingie, then I booted into single user mode and did mergemaster-installworld-mergemaster-boot.

Everything worked nicely. Then I started doing some insaneo find \! -newercn 'yesterday' -delete, on the directories you mentioned. After that I walked into the ports directory for ruby, ran make deinstall, and tried reinstall, whereupon it crashed out cpp.

And yeah, portupgrade -af was the thing I tried first, to my knowledge. It just found a stale dependency of pcre (because I upgraded it as pcre-utf8 later), nothing else was done. Then I did portupgrade -afrR, and it probably won't stop compiling until 2007.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Just can't help but snipe at Linux, can you?

And you're obviously not even the frothing type of FreeBSD zealot.

You BSD guys - just stop talking about Linux. You guys can't say
the word Linux without an accompanying disparaging remark... and
you usually can't say anything without mentioning Linux somewhere.

If you're so happy about BSD then why does Linux come into it at
all? This is a BSD thread on a BSD forum with mostly other BSD users.

Every one of your paragraphs except your first one (which raises
good points and gives good advice) is utterly useless and makes your
post incomprehensible junk.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[NuShrike]

It was always the case that you can upgrade FreeBSD over SSH within the same major release very painlessly. The special cases of 3.x -> 4.x and 5.x -> 6.x work just trivially also in my experience.

cvsup
make installkernel blahblah
mergemaster
make installworld
reboot
done

There's more detailed and exact instructions in /usr/src/UPGRADING but I went from 5.x to 6.x without any troubles, and without rebuilding everything.

Just don't forget to build/install the compat5x libs which is in /etc/make.conf if you update from /etc/defaults/make.conf or where ever it exists in /usr/src.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[DashEvil]

His Linux "snipe" was well on topic. Do you actually read the BSD is dying posts? How many of them attempt to discredit any BSD success by comparing it to Linux?

Clearly this means that some Linux users, the Linux users he was referring to, are behind it.

Also... Linux comes into "it" because it's in the news all the time. It's like asking happy Linux users to never, ever, ever mention Windows. It's unreasonable and stupid. If you're that sensitive about Linux and friendly competition you should stay off the Internet.

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[halber_mensch]

I did do a run of UNIXBENCH on 5.4 and compared it to 6.0_BETA and I saw higher scores accross the board.

Just for clarification, is that with or without the overhead of INVARIANTS and WITNESS?

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[toadlife]

All debugging was turned off on the 6.x machine.

WAP? oh yeah...

[FlashBuster3000]

Uhm, i don't think that WAP (like html for mobiles) has something to do with wifi,
most probably the article means this sentence:
"In addition to architectural changes, it includes completed 802.11g, WPA [...]"
WPA = security standard (stay back from WEP, guys!)

Re:WAP? oh yeah...

[imemyself]

Wireless Access Point.

Re:WAP? oh yeah...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think they meant Wireless Access Point not Wireless Application Gateway. The inclusion of PF in FreeBSD makes for some interesting wireless authentication options: http://www.bgnett.no/~peter/pf/en/wireless.simple. html

Re:WAP? oh yeah...

[Jaseoldboss]

No, sheesh.

AP == Access point
WAP == Wireless Application Protocol
WAP Browsing == Looking at womens Waps

Re:WAP? oh yeah...

[FlashBuster3000]

The changes-document doesn't mention "Wireless Access Point" but mentions WPA..
And the common abbr. for an Access Point is AP not WAP (and as mentioned, WAP is already known too well for Wireless Application Protocol).
It's just a typo, imho and i just wanted that noone becomes confused..
Any editor can verify and change this?

Re:WAP? oh yeah...

[isolenz]

At my old workplace, which was internet support for over 6000 hotels, everyone reffered to Access Points as WAP's, so it all depends on where you come from, I haven't heard the term AP in a while now thinking about it.

Re:WAP? oh yeah...

[squiggleslash]

There's more than one abbreviation for "Wireless Access Point", as a Google of 802.11g WAP shows. Only the first link refers to the mobile web technology. All the others, on the first page at least, are using it as an abbreviation for Wireless Access Point.

I've seen WAP used to mean the latter as often as I have to the mobile web, and that's heavily biased towards the mobile web technology as I'm interested in mobile phone technologies.

Wikipedia also lists it as a common definition.

So it's not unreasonable that WAP would be used to mean Wireless AP in the FreeBSD documentation.

Sometimes TLAs are re-used. There'd be a lot of angry cops around if every time we hooked our PCs up to the mains, we had to use the original definition of "PC".

6-STABLE?

[Denis Lemire]

So if I'm not mistaken this is not yet a 6-STABLE release, much like 5 was only flagged stable at 5.4.

Looking forward for a new release, but past experience shows it pays to wait for the STABLE tag on a production server.

Re:6-STABLE?

[cperciva]

The 6-STABLE branch starts with 6.0-RELEASE. The 5-STABLE branch started with 5.3-RELEASE.

From what I've seen, 6.0-RELEASE is more stable than 5.3 or 5.4.

Re:6-STABLE?

[Denis Lemire]

Now why did you have to go and tell me that? Now I'm all keen on upgrading my box at home. I was looking for a good excuse to hold off and not go on an excited upgrading spree... :)

Re:6-STABLE?

[MalHavoc]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't a version tagged as RELEASE just a snapshot of a stable tree? With FreeBSD, I'm usually more concerned with what's labelled "production" and what's labelled "development". 6.0 is labelled "production" right now, and the older 5.x tree is still production, but is considered legacy.

There were a lot of 5.x-RELEASE releases. Even the last one was "RELEASE" when you grabbed it from the ISO. But if you cvsup to sync your source and make buildworld/installworld, you always end up with a -STABLE tag if you've sync'ed to RELENG_5. The same thing will probably also apply to 6.

Re:6-STABLE?

[Jason Hood]

That is a very interesting proclamation...

If BSD is so stable then a newer release would be almost impossible to label as "even more stable". If it was so stable to begin with, and 6 just came out, how can one possibly proclaim that the newer release is even more stable? Enough time hasnt passed yet.

This is a moot point of course if the statement is true, but that would mean that 5.3 and 5.4 were really not that stable.

Re:6-STABLE?

[DigitalNate]

There were a lot of problems in the early 5.x releases, which led to a lot of criticizm from everyone who was used to the rock solid 4.x versions. If you browse through the release engineering section on the FreeBSD website http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html, you will find some articles discussing changes to the release engineering process that occured in response to the problems experienced during 5.x.

Re:6-STABLE?

[cperciva]

6 just came out, [so] how can one possibly proclaim that the newer release is even more stable? Enough time hasnt passed yet.

Not at all. I (and many other people) have been running 6.0-BETAs since mid-July, and 6.0-RC1 since early October. This isn't just a random snapshot of HEAD; the code which became 6.0-RELEASE was frozen apart from patches approved by the release engineering team for months leading up to the release.

Re:6-STABLE?

[essdodson]

RELEASE and STABLE are mutually exclusive. Please read up on FreeBSD release naming.

Re:6-STABLE?

[DRue]

The FreeBSD versioning takes a little getting used to. If you want to cvsup to FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE, you'd cvsup to RELENG_5_4. RELENG_5 is always pointed at 5-STABLE, which is the development head for 5.

So, for FreeBSD 6-RELEASE you'd cvsup to RELENG_6_0.

See FreeBSD's releng page for details.

Re:6-STABLE?

[hattig]

I think the interesting fact is that we have an x.0 STABLE.

IIRC 4.0 and 5.0 weren't STABLE until several revisions in. The early RELEASEs were snapshots of CURRENT which hadn't changed to STABLE.

Feel free to correct me, the webpage isn't very useful tbh.

Re:6-STABLE?

[Eil]

RELEASE and STABLE are mutually exclusive. Please read up on FreeBSD release naming.

I'm pretty sure you're confusing RELEASE and CURRENT. STABLE is a CVS branch (as CURRENT is) while a RELEASE is a CVS snapshot, no matter what branch it comes from. So you can have, say, the 5.4-RELEASE snapshot from the 5-STABLE branch.

Re:6-STABLE?

[welsh git]

Haven't you ever seen those adverts, for some product, which is the "best ever".

Nothing can possibly beat it ?

Then after a few months you see the advert for the "new improved" version ?

It's like that.

FreeBSD has always been stable, but is now getting stabler and stabler ! :-)

So many BSD...

[School_HK]

Seems all major BSD has a new version...

Re:So many BSD...

[NineNine]

In Soviet Russia, new version has all major BSD!

Re:So many BSD...

[Homology]

Seems all major BSD has a new version...

Not OpenBSD, though. The development model of OpenBSD entails two releases each year (1th May and 1th November), while until recently NetBSD and FreeBSD had a different model with years between each major release. Very loosly speaking, the OpenBSD model is time driven while the other *BSD is feature driven.

It's a bit funny that NetBSD and FreeBSD is released at the same time as OpenBSD traditionally has been.

Java on BSD

[obender]

Does anyone know what is the current status of Java on BSD today? Last time I looked there were no recent native ports, best you could do was run a Linux version of java. BSD makes a good argument that Java should be free as in freedom.

Re:Java on BSD

[CyricZ]

There is a native port of JDK 1.5.x. Even if it isn't listed as the current release, it still works very well.

http://www.freebsd.org/java/dists/15.html

Re:Java on BSD

[bcrowell]

You can supposedly build the compiler and runtime from source using the FreeBSD ports system. However, due to licensing issues, you have to download a bunch of the files by hand yourself -- when I tried it, it took up basically a whole afternoon of clicking around on Sun's web site, jumping through hoops, and downloading 100-Mb tarballs. After all that, it failed to compile :-)

Gcj is becoming more and more capable, however. I believe it's now possible to build OOo with gcj as your compiler for the java bits.

Re:Java on BSD

[frodo from middle ea]

Aren't the JVM specs free ? Write your own JVM for BSD, no one's stopping you.

Besides how difficult is this to find .. http://www.freebsd.org/java/. If you read closely, although the official release is at 1.3.1 , binaries for 1.5 are also available.

Re:Java on BSD

[CyricZ]

GCJ is most likely unsuitable. Classpath, its Java class library implementation, lacks a serious Swing and AWT implementation. Thus it is basically useless for non-SWT GUI applications written in Java.

Then again, in previous discussion it was stated that Java caused a lot of the startup performance problems noted with OpenOffice.org. So a better idea may to be avoid the use of Java with OO.o.

Re:Java on BSD

[CyricZ]

Writing a JVM equivalent to what Sun or IBM offers would be a very, very difficult task. It's easy enough to write a simple one, even with rudimentary JIT capabilities, but for anything serious you need massive amounts of money, many developers, and a lot of time.

That's much the same reason why the *BSD projects use GCC: it would take far too long and would consume far too many resources to produce a quality C and C++ compiler suite.

Re:Java on BSD

[Dysenteryduke]

There is a native port of JDK 1.5.x. Even if it isn't listed as the current release, it still works very well.
It doesnt work well enough, I was running tomcat on freebsd 5.4 building the JDK 1.4 from source and it crashed and core dumped a couple times a day. That lasted a week before I decided to go with Slackware. I really love FreeBSD, but for java development, the port is just not stable enough. I wish Sun would offer binaries...

Re:Java on BSD

[jallen02]

I had a similar experience. Failed to compile. I didn't have time to tinker with it either. Oh well. I had to use an OS that had a JDK because I needed a system for Java development.
 
Jeremy

Re:Java on BSD

[Eravnrekaree]

Yes Java is available for FreeBSD natively, however it seems like you have to compile it. I am not going to waste however long it takes for that beast to compile. I have to use the Linux binary, which works on FreeBSD fine it would seem, thank goodness. i know this is not FreeBSDs fault. Its Suns fault. Why dont they (Sun) allow a release of a binary copy? And all of this patching is pretty crazy as well. Why does Sun make people jump through hoops to use their language, and furthermore, why do people use thier language when they treat users in such a hostile manner? Why not use Perl, Python. TCL, or one of the other high level language that do not require so much nonsense.

Re:Java on BSD

[EvilTwinkie]

Ive had to build java from the ports several times, and while yes its fairly painful the first time, with the login and accounts with Sun, its always worked like a charm. Outside of the compile time, and the hoop jumping, its stable, and works perfectly. I dont care much for precompiled binaries as thats the lame way of building a box. Personally, its always from source, and from the ground up. I've gone as far as to roll my flavor of bsd which is *exactly* what I want. It starts at 5MB... Shame Sun has to be pissy and moany...

Re:Java on BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Some other people have mentioned FreeBSD, let me also speak for OpenBSD.

OpenBSD 3.8, released on Tuesday, has a native JDK 1.5 in ports, but only on i386.

OpenBSD has also had in ports for some time:

• Native JDK 1.4.2 on i386
• Native JDK 1.3.1 on i386, ARM, and PowerPC

They are kind of annoying to build and for obvious legal reasons the packages cannot be distributed. Extract the ports.tar.gz archive from the OpenBSD distribution into /usr, then try:

# cd /usr/ports/devel/jdk
# ls
1.3 1.4 CVS java.port.mk
1.3-linux 1.5 Makefile
# cd 1.5
# make

From there it will give you instructions about what to download and where to put it, then type make again and make install..

Re:Java on BSD

[Jessta]

BSD also makes a good argument for why java isn't "compile once, run everywhere"
Java is much more "Compile once, run on any platform that Sun microsystems approves of"

Good news!

[Anonymous Coward]

'Bout time.. and it beat Longhorn/Vista :) shame there is no FreeBSD/Xen (officially), yet.

HP zv6000

[Anonymous Coward]

Mentioned this in the NetBSD thread. Does anyone know if they've resolved their installation issues with ACPI on H/Paq laptops?

I've been waiting to try BSD for a while but can't touch it unless they make that fix...

Oh man ....

[gstoddart]

I just burned my 5.4 discs so I could upgrade from 4.8 two days ago.

Bah.

Re:Oh man ....

[SpinJaunt]

Nothing wrong with new coasters :)

ever thought about using CD-RW's instead?!..

Re:Oh man ....

[Anonymous Coward]

It was in RC status a few days ago, as clearly noted on the Web site. You have only yourself to blame.

Re:Oh man ....

[Anonymous Coward]

or cvsup, now portsnap?

Re:Oh man ....

[neafevoc]

I know you're only trying to be funny, but you'll need to at least upgrade to 5.3-RELEASE before upgrading to 6.0.

So those 5.4 discs won't go to waste after all :)

Re:Oh man ....

[Anonymous Coward]

Dont worry!

Source upgrades to FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE are only supported from FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE or later. Users of older systems wanting to upgrade 6.0-RELEASE will need to update to FreeBSD 5.3 or newer first, then to FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE.

Ponc

Re:Oh man ....

[rho]

Nothing wrong with sticking with 5.4 for a while, waiting for a point release in 6. It's less of an issue with FBSD than with some software packages, but still not a bad idea. 5.4 is a good release, and you can migrate to 6 easily enough.

Re:Oh man ....

[arosas]

I'm right there with ya buddy. Burned 5.4: OBSD 3.8 comes out. Burned OBSD 3.8: FBSD 6.0 comes out >.< walmart is making cash hand over fist selling blank cds

Re:Oh man ....

[gstoddart]

I know you're only trying to be funny, but you'll need to at least upgrade to 5.3-RELEASE before upgrading to 6.0 [freebsd.org].

Actually, I wasn't trying to be funny. I really just did get around to burning them the other day. The fact that I've not felt compelled indicates that, for my needs, 4.8 has always just worked.

And it is also factually innacurate that I would need to upgrade to 5.3 before upgrading to 6.0 from a 4.8 system.

Due to the lovely way that FreeBSD does partitions and slices, the way I do an upgrade is to make backups of my config files and data, record which ports I have installed, and for every filesystem which has OS stuff on it, I tell the installer it can do a newfs and completely install from scratch.

That way, my slices which hold only data not related to the OS remain as an untouched filesystem which gets mounted on install, everything is made new. I'd post my fstab, but the lameness filter won't let me. (Breaks down as swap, /, /usr, /usr/local, /usr/ports, /usr/src are all separate filesystems and are considered to be the OS's the update as needed.)

Since with a combination of paritions and slices you get to have a lot more filesystems, if you designed your system right in the first place, things like your /home partition will happily persist across installs.

It takes a small amount of extra work up-front, but once you do it this way, you just go through the list of packages in the ports tree you had installed, and get them back. The end result is a system which has had all of its binaries, packages, libraries, and everything upgraded correctly from the ports tree. It's just bandwidth and CPU time, but it's a heck of a lot less error prone.

It's a really convenient way to set things up, and one of my favourite things about FreeBSD.

Cheers.

Re:Oh man ....

[neafevoc]

Interesting. Can you post your fstab somewhere I can see it? I have a server running 4.11, and I've been wanting to upgrade to 5.x, but never had the guts to. I just didn't want to go down to the colo and spend a few hours rebuilding the OS if I hose it remotely.

Thanks.

Re:Oh man ....

[gstoddart]

Well, the lameness filer doesn't like fstabs, but I'll try and show more details here ...

ad0s2b swap 1G (*)
ad0s2a / 512M (*)
ad0s3e /extra 28G
ad0s2h /home 20G
ad0s2e /usr 1.6G (*)
ad0s1e /music 18G
ad0s2f /usr/local 2G (*)
ad0s2g /usr/ports 2G (*)

The filesystems marked with (*) get newfs'd when I do an upgrade. The other ones get left alone and re-mounted. ad0s1 used to be my Windows partition before I got a dedicated XP box, hence the wierd ordering.

It's an 80G drive with three 'slices' in FreeBSD parlance (partitions for Linux/Windows people) each of which has one or more 'partitions' (no analog for everyone else AFAIK).

Best of luck.

Re:Oh man ....

[Arandir]

Why do people do that? We've known for while that FreeBSD 6.0 was coming out sometime real soon. Did the RC1 give you no clue? Heck, if you were paying attention would would have even seen the announcement that it was coming out this weekend!

Re:Oh man ....

[wembley]

Well, that's $0.20 you'll never get back...

FreeBSD 6.0 = good

[fak3r]

been running 6.0 since I updated from 5.4 -> SNAP004 back in August and I've had no problems. Just updated my system last week (hard drive failure) so I'm now running 6.0-rc1 and the improvements in that time are just polish. I am very comfortable in fbsd now, and can recommend it to ANYONE who wants to run a server. Back in the day I'd point to Slackware, but now it's all fbsd. The idea that 6.0 has even more for desktop focus is interesting to me, but I think that is covered better by Linux, and Ubuntu in particular.

Now for some ATA-133 RAID on fbsd, and I should be able to sit still for some time, while cvsup'ing any updates.

Re:FreeBSD 6.0 = good

[Intron]

Are you running ATA disks? Its crashing here unless I turn off DMA.

Re:FreeBSD 6.0 = good

[fak3r]

from dmesg:

atapci0: <VIA 82C686B UDMA100 controller> port 0x1f0-0x1f7,0x3f6,0x170-0x177,0x376,0xd000-0xd00f at device 7.1 on pci0
atapci0: Correcting VIA config for southbridge data corruption bug
ata0: <ATA channel 0> on atapci0
ata1: <ATA channel 1> on atapci0
ad0: 39266MB <IC35L040AVVN07 0 VA2OAF0C> at ata0-master UDMA100
ad1: 114473MB <WDC WD1200JB-00EVA0 15.05R15> at ata0-slave UDMA100

I haven't had any problems with this setup for months on pre-6.0, so I don't think it's an issue, check your BIOS and be sure it's set to AUTO...also, any advice on RAID? After a failure last week I really want to get a cheap RAID solution for redundancy on this server. heard of some good cards from LSI.

Re:FreeBSD 6.0 = good

[Anonymous Coward]

Stay away from adaptec, lookup atacontrol...you can create a soft raid5 that you can boot directly from without much pain.

Re:FreeBSD 6.0 = good

[Anonymous Coward]

Use software raid. The performance difference is insignificant. The big advantage to software raid is the standard harddrive controller drivers are more widely used, tested, and debugged.

Re:FreeBSD 6.0 = good

[MichaelSmith]

desktop focus is interesting to me, but I think that is covered better by Linux, and Ubuntu in particular.

I run NetBSD on my servers, and Ubuntu on some of my clients. I had a thought that it would be interesting to build an Ubuntu like distribution around NetBSD.

The big advantage of this approach would be install speed. NetBSD untars in about 10 minutes on most systems. A full CD would take longer, but it wouldn't have to configure all its packages like Ubuntu.

Discard Oversize Frame error

[klausboop]

I just recently installed FreeBSD 5.4 and have been delighted with it...except that if I have a lot of read/write network traffic to the box I get a "Discard Oversize Frame" error that I haven't been able to resolve. I'm upgrading to 6.0 and have my fingers crossed that the problem will somehow magically get better. If not, I guess it's time to hit the mailing lists again.

SCO is DYING

[morgan_greywolf]

Netcraft confirms it: SCO is dying!

Re:SCO is DYING

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Or at least the stock market does....

FreeBSD Java(TM) Project

[KlaymenDK]

http://www.freebsd.org/java/ !

There are several ports, one of them being native. Google! :o)

Re:no offense, but give it a rest

[pmike_bauer]

OSX has had wireless support for ten years.
Good grief. BSD was once the great, now its like a garage hobby, albeit at an expensive elite univeristy.

Impossible.
1. A beta of OSX wasn't even released until 1999.
2. Although FreeBSD can trace its roots to the 4.4BSD from Berkley, the univeristy has nothing to do with active FreeBSD developemnt today (unless students & profs do work on their own).

Thanks FreeBSD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for the awsome, stable, super fast operating system!

I've been using it since 1999 and have always loved the speed that it delivers. No, it doesn't support all the hardware that linux does, but I feel that the speed it offers makes up for the lack of hardware support.
Maybe one of these days someone will get their butt in gear and make a graphical installer to help the newbies out.

Re:Thanks FreeBSD!

[Rod Beauvex]

It's not so much hard, it's just tedious and vauge and badly laid out. I have no problem with other text installs on Linux type machines.

It's the desktops and UIs avaliable for these installations that need to be fixed.

Re:Thanks FreeBSD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you ever tried PCBSD or DesktopBSD? Both provide GUI installers and management toolkits wrapped around FreeBSD, with easily downloadable ISOs.

Re:Thanks FreeBSD!

[Anonymous Coward]

Never knew such a thing existed, I'll look into those.

Thanks

pfsense

[Anonymous Coward]

yay - pfsense shall reap the benefits, all others will suffer! muhahaha

BSD/OpenDarwin Questions

[mpapet]

Can someone explain to me where OpenDarwin fits into the OS world?

What I don't understand is how is the security better besides the fact it is a less-widely deployed, but great server OS. For example, could either OpenDarwin or one of the BSD get EAL certification?

Would I be taking too big a risk attempting to run OpenDarwin in production as opposed to a BSD?

Is the deal with the BSD's that they don't have as much driver support as Linux? I'm not really thinking about desktops as much as servers here.

Any help would be great

Re:BSD/OpenDarwin Questions

[CyricZ]

Chances are you won't get OpenDarwin to run at all. It has very picky hardware requirements, and much less support than any of the other BSDs, and even x86 Solaris.

When it comes to running a server, it's probably best to just stick with FreeBSD or Solaris if you want performance, or OpenBSD if you want security. The hardware support is far better, bugfixes are quicker, and support is easier to obtain.

Re:BSD/OpenDarwin Questions

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds to me like you're a fucking idiot and should be running windows .. or playing nintendo ...

that question DRIPPED with stupidity and ignorence ...

you are not ready to run any *nix.

Re:BSD/OpenDarwin Questions

[The Nine]

Looks to me like you're a fucking idiot who can't even spell ignorance.

You are not ready to interact with other human beings. Try reading sometime.

A new release of DFBSD.

[CyricZ]

Unfortunately, we probably won't see a new release of DragonFly BSD until after the new year.

http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/20 05-10/msg00030.html

For those who are unaware, DragonFly BSD is a heavily modified continuation of FreeBSD 4.x. It is done by Matt Dillon and many others who are/were prime FreeBSD developers in the past, but disagreed with the current FreeBSD development path.

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Many others? Maybe four or five other minor developers, with Dillon and Joerg (who was never a FreeBSD developer) doing most of the lifting.. The DFBSD Project is interesting, but has a very small developer base -- it's more of a special interest research project exploring some specific ideas about OS design than a user operating system.

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[jonadab]

> DragonFly BSD is a heavily modified continuation of FreeBSD
> 4.x. It is done by Matt Dillon and many others who are/were
> prime FreeBSD developers in the past, but disagreed with the
> current FreeBSD development path.

Disagreed in what way? What are the primary differences, in terms of focus, between these two distributions? (I'm curious, because I've been thinking of trying out one or more of the BSDs (coming from primarily a Linux background).) OpenBSD, for instance, focuses (from what I've read) primarily on a secure default configuration; whereas, FreeBSD focuses somewhat more on the desktop and usability. Where does Dragonfly fit in? What is its focus?

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[CyricZ]

The Wikipedia article does a good job describing the reasons for the fork:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DragonflyBSD

Put simply, Matt Dillon was a FreeBSD contributor for many years. He was responsible for some of the most important and beneficial work, such as the virtual memory subsystem rewrite.

He did not feel that the direction of FreeBSD 5.x was a good one, and thus did the open source thing and forked his own kernel from FreeBSD 4.8.

DragonFly BSD is incorporating many features useful for multiprocessor systems. It includes a vastly improved kernel memory allocator and improved threading and messaging constructs, for instance.

While it is still under development now, it is poised to become the leading general-purpose desktop/workstation/server BSD of the future. It's partaking in the innovations that will be needed with the advent of multicore and multiprocessor systems.

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, DFBSD is chasing an OS design philosophy that was discarded in the mid-1990's, called microkernel operating system design. It was fundamentally oriented around the idea that modern hardware could context switch fast enough, and had big enough caches, that you could break out the OS into lots of components and not sacrifice performance. Likewise, it assumes that if you break it out into independent components, the system will be easier to debug and more robust. 10-15 years of distributed systems has shown that not to be the case: debugging things in many independent parts is much harder, not easier, because you can't look at the total state of the system. Context switches remain extortionately expensive due to large virtual address spaces, small TLBs, and the size of modern applications and operating systems. Caches, while bigger than they used to be, are now more likely to be shared -- i.e., HTT or multicore. In the early '90s, everyone believed all future UNIX systems would be based on microkernels, but since that time the approach has been almost completely abandoned. Elements of the design approach have been adopted selectively -- Mach VM in *BSD, message passing in clusters and modern operating systems, hard real time microkernels for specialized environments, and so on. The reality is that, today, Linux and BSD are small kernels compared to the size of the application and full operating system. I'm sure that useful things will come of the DFBSD work, but I think the future you suggest is a bit optimistic. Most likely, DFBSD's three or four developers will create some interesting code, none of which will be directly adopted, but that many people will look at and consider the ideas from. That's success, just not the success you're thinking of.

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't buy into the stereotypes of X bsd being good for Y and so forth. OpenBSD for example, yes it is very secure, but the other aspect is that it has a very minimalist and Unix-traditionalist sense to it. I honestly think that's a bigger motivation for me using it than the security. OpenBSD is also very gung-ho about systematic bugfixing, and fixing potential problems in C code before it even manifests itself as a bug.

NetBSD likewise has its reputation for being portable but that is not its only strength; for example they get a lot of good features "first" that other BSDs later merge into their tree, or perhaps should.

My advice to you is to just try them out and forget about what you may have heard. They are each pretty similar and each very good systems.

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

"Most likely, DFBSD's three or four developers will create some interesting code, none of which will be directly adopted, but that many people will look at and consider the ideas from."

I won't bother to address the vast majority of your rhetoric. I'll only point out that the improvements Jeffrey Hsu made to DragonFly's network stack appear to have made their way back to FreeBSD. Of course, that's a contentious issue, but it seems nearly everything is with the FreeBSD folks. And yes, DragonFly imports a lot of updates from FreeBSD current, it's just that they're not embarassed or reluctant to give credit where credit is due.

So I'll leave it up to the original poster to determine if DragonFlyBSD is simply a masturbatory exercise as you seem to imply.

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[rsax]

(I'm curious, because I've been thinking of trying out one or more of the BSDs (coming from primarily a Linux background).) OpenBSD, for instance, focuses (from what I've read) primarily on a secure default configuration; whereas, FreeBSD focuses somewhat more on the desktop and usability.

FreeBSD focuses on a lot more than that. 6.0 introduces a lot of security and performance enhancements, check out the release info page. OpenBSD was my first BSD operating system, then I tried FreeBSD and played around with NetBSD. It isn't surprising that I feel the most comfortable with OpenBSD so I might be biased. But coming from someone with a Solaris & HP-UX background, if you want to experience close to real UNIX experience then try OpenBSD first. There are no menu driven utilities like there are in Net and Free so config files have to be edited by hand using a text editor. Plus there is a new release every 6 months and the developers never fail to push the envelope with more cool networking features to play with. And always advocating simpler code, open source drivers, and ofcourse, convenient security features out of the box.

Re:A new release of DFBSD.

[Anonymous Coward]

good points there, someone should mod this puppy up.

memory management and scheduler?

[bcrowell]

OK, correct me if I'm remembering a lot of this incorrectly, but...

<IIRC>
The 4.x->5.x transition made some major changes in the scheduler and memory management. It was a rough transition, and personally I had some problems with some of the early 5.x releases (e.g., processes hogging 100% of cpu when they shouldn't have). There were complaints that only a couple of the kernel developers actually understood the new code, there were doubts about whether bugs could actually be fixed, and the 5.x series ended up retreating from this major rewrite.
</IIRC>

So how does 6.x fit into this?

Re:memory management and scheduler?

[Anonymous Coward]

5.x didn't retreat from those goals, and as the releases progressed from 5.2 onwards, the code matured and became faster/more stable. 6.0 is arguably a refinement of that work: now it has seen a few years of deployment, the developers have significantly optimized it, applied the refined approach to more components (VFS), etc. Whereas 5.x was about introducing the new architecture, 6.x is all about making it blindingly fast and stable.

New logo on web site?

[bhirsch]

I thought the web site was going to reflect the new logo...

I386 Support Removed?

[HighOrbit]

From the Kernel Changes part of the release notes:

Support for 80386 processors (the I386_CPU kernel configuration option) has been removed. Users running this class of CPU should use FreeBSD 5.X or earlier.

I sorta find that astounding (not that I have a 386 around myself). Oh well, the world has moved on.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[Just Some Guy]

I sorta find that astounding

Out of curiosity, why? This version's big features are increased performance on big systems (where big means "expensive new desktop and above"). I have a hard time imagining an intersection between 386 systems and the new target audience.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[linimon]

The _default_ support for 80386 processors has been removed. Having it on by default was a pessimization of every other later processor in that family -- which is probably 95+% of the install base. You can still cross-build it if you wish; some of the embedded systems manufacturers that base off of FreeBSD do so. But these days even finding an embedded processor based on that old a core is becoming very hard to do. In any case with an 80386 you'll probably have far more trouble coming up against the memory limits than you will with performance.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[mnmn]

So now I can have a cool new project where I port FreeBSD to the 386!!

I'll setup a sourceforge webpage including full toolchains and a weblog on how I did it.

And of course, I'll sell the mandatory T-shirts.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[Just Some Guy]

The _default_ support for 80386 processors has been removed.

Do you have proof of that? I was under the impression that the 386-specific parts of the kernel had been ripped out altogether. You might be right, but that wasn't my understanding.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[archen]

Probably better off anyway. If I recall, you could compile the system against a 386, but in practice running on an actual 386 it would hit a few snags that you would have to work out yourself.

In all honesty I think they'd be better off using the 586 as the baseline cutoff point. If you need 486 or lower use NetBSD. And lets face it, when you are at that end of the spectrum, you should be using the lighter 4x (or NetBSD) over 5x+ anyway.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[HighOrbit]

Because

• embedded systems - there are still some around that are based on 386
• history - it was a 386 based os in the first place
• backwards compatability - it has been standard (well, sorta) to have a backwards compatability based on the basic i386 instruction set with everything else either an extension or optimization option.

I think this represents a true break with past where they are going for "modern" and fast versus the historical roots of the OS (now if only we could get rid of csh on bsd systems...). This could be good, since they get to drop a lot of extra baggage that was maybe holding performance back. But it seems like a drastic change of philosophy for FreeBSD.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[TheRaven64]

embedded systems - there are still some around that are based on 386

AMD makes very cheap 4/586 chips for embedded work.

history - it was a 386 based os in the first place

No, it was a PDP11 based OS. It was (much) later ported to x86 hardware, after the VAX had been the primary development platform for some years. The first x86 chip to be supported was the 386.

backwards compatability - it has been standard (well, sorta) to have a backwards compatability based on the basic i386 instruction set with everything else either an extension or optimization option.

Backwards compatibility is only useful if people are still using the code. FreeBSD dropped VAX support ages ago (although NetBSD retains it). 386s are worthless these days. We had some, and couldn't give them away. About the slowest machines we could give away were low-end Pentiums.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[drinkypoo]

No, it was a PDP11 based OS. It was (much) later ported to x86 hardware, after the VAX had been the primary development platform for some years. The first x86 chip to be supported was the 386.

I think what they meant was that all the BSDs we currently use are descended from 386BSD.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[linimon]

Hmm, perhaps you're right. I know that the default settings were ripped out some time back. I don't have time to check at the moment.

In any case, it's correct to say that 6.0 is not suitable for 80386 machines for any number of reasons. Even with the kernel stuff in place you'd still most likely be unable to run the system installer due to the memory limitations of those old machines. FreeBSD's primary emphasis is to run well on modern hardware. For older systems with limited CPU cycles and/or memory, NetBSD is probably a better choice. This doesn't make one or the other better or worse -- that's one of NetBSD's goals, that's all.

Re:I386 Support Removed?

[Anonymous Coward]

And i have to stick to 2.11 BSD for my pdp-11...

Vast performance improvements.

[CyricZ]

Earlier today a client came to me, requesting that a FreeBSD 6.0 demo box be set up as a potential replacement for their current OpenBSD mail server. Indeed, 6.0 may be the release we have all been waiting for. The performance is vastly improved, and the stability is fantastic.

We found that the server was able to process about 60% more mail when running FreeBSD 6.0, as compared to OpenBSD. That's not to suggest that OpenBSD is bad, but performance wise, FreeBSD has taken the lead. And that was without significant tuning, and running a GENERIC kernel.

I'm not certain yet if it is improvements in the network stack, the filesystem subsystem, or in the scheduling. It may be a combination of all three. Some more time will be needed to determine exactly where the benefits are coming from.

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[Just Some Guy]

That's not to suggest that OpenBSD is bad, but performance wise, FreeBSD has taken the lead.

Erm, has OpenBSD ever had the lead in performance? I really doubt it; that's not what it was designed for. All of those little niceties like ultra-paranoid memory protection, cryptographically random process IDs, etc. take resources. Basically, it's tuned for security and correctness with a nod toward performance, while FreeBSD emphasizes raw performance over watertight security.

That doesn't mean that FreeBSD has bad security, or that OpenBSD doesn't incorporate performance enhancements when they can safely do so. All of the BSDs are heavily cross-pollinated, and the best ideas tend to get broad support from all of them.

Still, it's pretty reasonable to say that OpenBSD is more secure and FreeBSD is faster. I wouldn't be the least surprised that FreeBSD can process more email or web hits, especially when you through SMP or HTT systems into the mix.

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[CyricZ]

This was on uniprocessor, non-hyperthreaded servers.

What astounded me most was the massive performance boost over OpenBSD. 60% isn't a small amount, by any means. That's nearly getting the capabilities of another physical server, without actually having to get any new hardware.

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[Pastis]

The performance is vastly improved, and the stability is fantastic.

You judge stability after half a day?

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[ivoras]

The BETA & RC period was long and many people are running it since the first BETA.

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[justins]

We found that the server was able to process about 60% more mail when running FreeBSD 6.0, as compared to OpenBSD.

Measured how? What were the bottlenecks?

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[Anonymous Coward]

Which version of OpenBSD? Before or after the idle loop improvements?

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[ipso_facto]

Performance on OpenBSD is important but it's not the primary focus. If someone put an OpenBSD mail server in place knowing performance was going to be critical, then they chose the wrong system. If they chose it with security as the most important criteria then the move to FreeBSD will mean that this area isn't as strong as it was with the old system.

We all want the best tool for the job but the poster seems to imply that in moving from OpenBSD to FreeBSD there's a win in the performance arena without any loss elsewhere. OpenBSD focusses on security. On top of the system-wide security features, the in-tree OpenBSD sendmail instance has lots of OBSD specific patches (http://www.openbsd.org/security.html). For example, when OpenBSD chose their MP implementation, they deliberately chose biglock because of it's (relative) simplicity. This is important because the OpenBSD codebase is actively audited. The fine grained locking in the FreeBSD MP implementation is obviously going to blow OpenBSD away but at the cost of simplicity (bugs and security issues are harder to find in complex code).

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[Shanep]

Earlier today a client came to me, requesting that a FreeBSD 6.0 demo box be set up as a potential replacement for their current OpenBSD mail server. Indeed, 6.0 may be the release we have all been waiting for. The performance is vastly improved, and the stability is fantastic.

When I saw "Score:5, Interesting", I thought it was going to compare some performance metrics of 6.0 against earlier FreeBSD versions. That would have been interesting. Comparing FreeBSD with OpenBSD on performance is not interesting. Nobody who has used the three main free BSD's would think that FreeBSD 6.0 or NetBSD being faster than any version of OpenBSD would be interesting.

If I can get away with it (performance feasibility and money constraints), I would rather use OpenBSD and spend more money on faster hardware when it comes to internet facing hosts.

BTW, I love all the free BSD's, I intend to keep seeding FreeBSD 6.0 for the next couple of days and use FreeBSD on some of my workstations where performance really can matter to me most and security is a small issue. Just my opinion of course.

FreeBSD Isn't a Toy

[dazedyugo]

The artist did a good job with this logo and font, I just don't think it's appropriate for the product it's representing. How does this represent what FreeBSD *is*? As other people have already noted, this makes "FreeBSD" look like some new fad, a trendy plastic thing that may never mature. A solid, reliable product shouldn't be represented this way, this logo does it no justice. Though I like the font, again, I don't think it screams FreeBSD. Wouldn't a boxy, bold font be better? Why does there even need to be an icon? Couldn't something artistic (simple but arresting) have been done just with the text?

Re:FreeBSD Isn't a Toy

[Anonymous Coward]

"The artist did a good job with this logo and font, I just don't think it's appropriate for the product it's representing. How does this represent what FreeBSD *is*?"

Umm....and how does the linux penguin do this better, may I ask????

Re:FreeBSD Isn't a Toy

[sixeight]

I thought this was a good take in that direction -- I'm biased, of course -- but I guess people were looking for something else as it wasn't even among the finalists http://www.dustinperkins.com/freebsd_logo/

ULE scheduler?

[pmike_bauer]

The ULE scheduler has been fixed, but is it enabled by default?
Could anyone explain the benefits of the ULE vs. 4BSD schedulers?
Are there real performance benefits?
Thanks.

Re:ULE scheduler?

[linimon]

ULE is not enabled by default. For certain workloads it does better than the 4BSD scheduler, for others it is worse. More testing and characterization needs to go into it before the switch.

Re:ULE scheduler?

[Taxman415a]

If you look at the GENERIC kernel config file for 6.0 Release, it shows the ULE scheduler is not enabled by default, the 4BSD scheduler still is. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/~checkout~/s rc/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC?rev=1.429.2.3.2.1&content -type=text/plain&only_with_tag=RELENG_6_0_0_RELEAS E The basic benefit the ULE scheduler was designed to have is O(1) performace for the SMP case. Here's the BSDcon '03 whitepaper Jeff Robertson wrote about ULE http://www.chesapeake.net/~jroberson/ULE.pdf Yes it's been fixed up a lot, you can read kerneltrap's coverage of it a few times, but you'd have to dig into the mailing lists to see why it is not default still, which I didn't do.

Installer?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone happen to know if this has the new graphical installer from the SoC projects? I looked around the site but couldn't find any info on it.

Re:Installer?

[linimon]

6.0 has the old installer. The new installer is not yet finished and fully integrated even on the -CURRENT branch.

m0n0wall

[Surye]

I can't wait for this to hit m0n0wall's stable release. 6.0's unstable branch was used on the beta for a while, but was then pulled. I need it for wireless so I can eliminate another embedded system, consolidating my network further. (and create a single point of failure ;)

Re:m0n0wall

[Surye]

Correction! They were using FreeBSD 5.3 in the beta, and are now using FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE-p11 in the (now merged with beta) stable release. Man, I should be a slashdot editor for my professional fact checking.

Re:m0n0wall

[Anonymous Coward]

Try http://www.pfsense.com/ which is a m0n0wall fork based on freebsd 6.

Re:m0n0wall

[Anonymous Coward]

Try pfsense instead. Derived from m0n0wall, but much superior already. Also with a better firewall and failover ...

But are the ports ready?

[rwyoder]

When I upgraded from 4.x to 5.0, the OS ran fine, but 2/3 of the apps I built from /usr/ports either wouldn't compile, or wouldn't run properly. In exasperation, I finally gave up and downgraded back to 4.x. I didn't try to upgrade again until 5.3 came out. At that point the ports I needed were fine. I am hesitant to upgrade to 6.0, only to go through this miserable experience all over again.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Anonymous Coward]

When I upgraded from 4.x to 5.0, the OS ran fine, but 2/3 of the apps I built from /usr/ports either wouldn't compile, or wouldn't run properly.

Typical. That's why I use Debian Stable and Redhat Enterprise Linux knock-offs ( CentOS). Everthing works perfectly, at all times.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[ocelotbob]

I've been running the 6 beta snapshots on my test/toy machine at work for the past 3-4 months, and everything seems to pretty much just work. I've had no real problem with any of the ports I've tried, and I've tried quite a few. But YMMV, and it's probably best to bring out the test machine, just to make sure.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Danzigism]

you didn't update your ports collection.. when you upgrade to a completely new version, you have to do so..

check out the handbook.. here's the LINK

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Just Some Guy]

My desktop / server at home has 709 ports installed on it. Since 6 is basically 5++, almost everything Just Worked.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[questionlp]

The upgrade from 4.x to the 5.x branch was a significant change, everything from a major compiler version upgrade, compatibility libraries, and other core files changed.

I have migrated 6 machines from 5.4-RELEASE to 6.0-RC1 without any problems with recompiling ports (including: Postfix, Perl, SpamAssassin, Python, Apache 2.0, PHP 5, PostgreSQL). You may want to go with the stock GENERIC kernel configuration file that comes with 6.0-RELEASE and trim it back down as some of the options have changed.

Also, check out the changes in /etc/make.conf variables.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[rwyoder]

you didn't update your ports collection.. when you upgrade to a completely new version, you have to do so.. check out the handbook.. here's the LINK

It was not an upgrade, it was a FRESH INSTALLATION.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Anonymous Coward]

With the change to 5.0, a new compiler revision (gcc 3.x) was introduced, and many third party developers had not yet updated their applications. Today, the entire world is running gcc 3.x, and applications that haven't been upgraded are probably dead. Last I looked at the FreeBSD web site, there were 13,000 applications compiled for 6.x, which is a pretty big number.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Anonymous Coward]

You didn't exacly make that clear, did you?

To the FreeBSD folks, "Upgrade" doesn't equal "reinstall with a new version", but rather you used cvsup and make world and make kernel to rebuild everything.

Next time you want to bitch about something not working, and someone gives you a working, useful link to what fixes your problem as you described it, and you respond to them by saying "It was not an upgrade. it was a FRESH INSTALLATION.", (and sounding like you meant to add "you idiot" to the end of that sentence), when you just finished saying:

" When I upgraded from 4.x to 5.0, the OS ran fine, but 2/3 of the apps I built from /usr/ports either wouldn't compile, or wouldn't run properly. In exasperation, I finally gave up and downgraded back to 4.x. I didn't try to upgrade again until 5.3 came out. At that point the ports I needed were fine. I am hesitant to upgrade to 6.0, only to go through this miserable experience all over again."

Maybe you should reconsider your usage of the word "upgrade", and say "I obviously don't understand what "upgrade" means in the FreeBSD world, and I'm sorry I didn't make my original complaint clearer. thanks for the link, I'll go RTFM" rather than sounding like a whiny twit.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Anonymous Coward]

Typical FreeBSD "advocates" - blame the user, even though it's clear the user is not to blame.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[linimon]

The FreeBSD developers learned a lot from the mistakes made early in the 5.X line. The only thing you can probably get them in unanimous agreement about is that "we'll never do it that way again".

6.0 -- and all *.0 releases in the future -- will be a much smaller jump than 4.X to 5.0; probably even smaller than the jump from 5.2.1 to 5.3, which had a huge number of new features itself. We learned that the previous jumps were far too disruptive.

Now, granted that 5.0 _did_ introduce a rewritten SMP, changes to the way kernel sychronization was done, the latest gcc (which penalized more uses of sloppy code), and many other things, some disruption was going to be inevitable. But, going forward, there will be more frequent releases with a smaller feature set in each release.

So far the mailing lists seem to support that the 5.4->6.0 upgrade path is relatively painless. OTOH a reinstall and then bringing your files over may be a safer path.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[jadavis]

I'm fairly new to FreeBSD; just installed my first production box (single proc).

What is the status of SMP support? Should I run FreeBSD on a multi-proc system?

What about threading? What about Java?

I'm also a little curious about virtualization (like with Xen), but that's not my top priority right now.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Danzigism]

if you read what he said, it was clear that he "Freshly installed version 4 then upgraded to version 5" and his ports didn't work..

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Danzigism]

here, i'll repost exactly what you just said:

When I "upgraded" from 4.x to 5.0, the OS ran fine, but 2/3 of the apps I built from /usr/ports either wouldn't compile, or wouldn't run properly. In exasperation, I finally gave up and downgraded back to 4.x. I didn't try to upgrade again until 5.3 came out. At that point the ports I needed were fine. I am hesitant to upgrade to 6.0, only to go through this miserable experience all over again.

where exactly did it say Fresh Installation again?

Live CD available??

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a live CD distribution available ala Knoppix for Linux?
I'd like to play with it without dedicating a system to it.

freebsd

[Danzigism]

"make"ing the "world" a better place

Are you sure about that?

[CyricZ]

You do realize that JDK 1.4 is not JDK 1.5, correct? There have been significant improvements.

I recently set up several servers running FreeBSD 5.4, the native JDK 1.5, and Tomcat 5.5.12. They work perfectly, each handling upwards of 9 to 10 million hits per day.

Re:Are you sure about that?

[Dysenteryduke]

I was running JDK 1.4. I used 1.4 because I read that 1.5 was not stable enough. 1.4 took so long to compile and build on my machine that I decided to cut my losses and work with something I knew was stable. Perhaps if I ever find time in the future, I will give 1.5 and FreeBSD 6.0 a whirl.

Re:Are you sure about that?

[Breakfast Pants]

He isn't asking why you used 1.4 instead of 1.5, he is asking why you responded to a post that claimed 1.5 was stable by saying, "no it isn't! 1.4 isn't stable!"

Requiem for the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

// Please *don't* mod this up. It has already been done! Thx

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
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."
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
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 sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)

*BSD in general:
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 last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Re:no offense, but give it a rest

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used wireless in FreeBSD from the 5.x releases. This release simply makes it better.

From what I have heard of FreeBSD

[mysterious_w]

Is that it's hard to use. Basically, I think they need to step up some publicity for this, I'm not sure what kind of environment FreeBSD is deisgned for (servers, desktops?) but the fact that I don't even know that says a lot. Oh well, if I find a liveCD version, I might try it.

Re:From what I have heard of FreeBSD

[Wonko42]

FreeBSD is ridiculously easy to use as Unix-like operating systems go. The installer is friendly and efficient, and generally (in my opinion) much easier and much faster than the installer for any Linux distribution I've ever used. It's entirely possible to go from a bare system to a working FreeBSD install with a generic kernel in fifteen minutes or less.

In addition, the ports system makes installing software a snap, and the online FreeBSD Handbook and FreeBSD FAQ are very well-written and kept up to date if you have any questions.

Re:From what I have heard of FreeBSD

[Eil]

Is that it's hard to use.

Rubbish. It's BSD, which means it's a Unix derivative. If you're familiar with one, you're familiar with them all. There are some differences, of course, but a skilled administrator or gifted hacker could bring themselves up to speed in an afternoon. If by "hard to use", you mean "there's no pointy-clicky administrative interface" then perhaps. However, most system administrators who have to deal with production systems all day long (FreeBSD's target audience) don't want any of that anyway.

I'm not sure what kind of environment FreeBSD is deisgned for (servers, desktops?)

FreeBSD is almost entirely geared toward servers. There are various movements and projects underway to help bring FreeBSD closer to the desktop, but it's nowhere near as strong as Linux in that arena. Linux is a good general-purpose Unix-like OS, but FreeBSD is typically regarded as a more solid server.

but the fact that I don't even know that says a lot

Forgive me for being blunt, but it only says that you didn't even bother looking into it. All of what I've stated here is fairly common knowledge to those who care enough to find out for themselves. We live in the age of the Internet. If you're curious about FreeBSD or any other operating system, go read up on it, don't just sit around to hear about it.

Re:From what I have heard of FreeBSD

[mysterious_w]

I'm just commenting on how little publicity this thing gets compared to other big opens-orce projects like Ubuntu, Firefox and openoffice.org I'd heard about them weeks in advance of their latest big release, but this, nothing. If they are happy with it being underground that's fine, but they are doing much to push it.

Re:From what I have heard of FreeBSD

[Arandir]

It isn't that hard, the reputation is worse than the reality. Two hints though: leave your Linux preconceptions at the door; don't expect anyone to hold your hand.

Re:From what I have heard of FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Right...FreeBSD is "underground."

Why is it that you trolls are starting to move back toward a trend of trying to sound authoritative when discussing blatant falsehoods? Not only is it clear that you don't know what you're talking about, it's also clear that you're deliberately trying to incite an argument regarding FreeBSD's capabilities (which I'll avoid, since that's obviously what you want).

Believe it or not some people just aren't clever enough to troll capably, and you're one of them.

Re:From what I have heard of FreeBSD

[ericcantona]

I know this is preaching to the converted, but anyway, here goes:
I think you're wrong wrt desktop use.
I'm sat here using R6 on my laptop, in favour and instead of linux. Having spent 3 yrs trying, various linux dists (from debian ubuntu to slack), I got fed up with:
a. dependany hell.
b. instability.
For me these factors outweigh everything else, and I suspect that most users are the same.
On these criteria freebsd has, quite simply, got linux beat hands down. 1000%

Digging up grandma?

[GooberToo]

Isn't this announcement like digging up grandma and throwing her a birthday party?

For the humor impaired, this was a joke!

Glad to hear that BSD keeps on chugging along...Linux has a reputation for taking some excellent ideas and even implementation from the BSD guys....BSD improvements often translate into Linux improvements too.

Good job guys!

Re:Digging up grandma?

[plstk]

wasn't very funny

Re:Digging up grandma?

[GooberToo]

Good thing I said, "For the humor impaired, this was a joke!", otherwise, you would of been completely confused. :)

Re:Digging up grandma?

[Anonymous Coward]

For the humor impaired, this was a joke!

You are correct: that was a joke for the humor impaired. ;-)

Re:Digging up grandma?

[GooberToo]

Well, now we know the idiotic troll moderators are out, running around. Too bad you can't legally kill these idiots that moderate stuff with their head stuck up their ass. Oh well....one can only dream....

Only and absolute idiot would moderate the above comment as "troll"! Morons! Unfit to breath the same air us humans do.

Cisco VPN Client

[Phillyboy82]

First, kudos to the team for their release of FreeBSD 6.0. This one seems to be much smoother then the 5.X releases (I used 6.0-RC1 for a bit), so the best to them. My question is pertaining to VPN support. I would love to install this on my laptop (Inspiron 4000, so everything works :)), but at my University they use VPN for wireless connectivity. I can use Bluesocket to connect wirelessly as well, but that only allows access to ports 80 / 22 (one other, for email),so I would prefer VPN. I was wondering if there was a VPN client alternative for FreeBSD, since the Cisco Systems one cannot be installed to my knowledge. Thanks!

Re:Cisco VPN Client

[routerguy666]

I have been using this for quite some time now: [12:49pm exs@kirov /usr/ports/security/vpnd]> more ../vpnc/pkg-descr VPNC - Client for Cisco 3000 VPN Concentrator[12:49pm exs@kirov /usr/ports/security/vpnd]> more ../vpnc/pkg-descr VPNC - Client for Cisco 3000 VPN Concentrator A VPN client compatible with Cisco's EasyVPN equipment. Supports IPSec (ESP) with Mode Configuration and Xauth. Supports only shared-secret IPSec authentication, 3DES, MD5, and IP tunneling. It runs entirely in userspace. A VPN client compatible with Cisco's EasyVPN equipment. Supports IPSec (ESP) with Mode Configuration and Xauth. Supports only shared-secret IPSec authentication, 3DES, MD5, and IP tunneling. It runs entirely in userspace.

Re:Cisco VPN Client

[routerguy666]

Sorry for bad copy/paste. Anyways, I regularly tunnel into cisco 30xx and pix units using that client.

In Soviet Russia...

[arosas]

the logos draw YOU.

Re:FreeBSD Dead??

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny an Anonymous Coward says this yet someone with acount gets a +5 Marked Funny

Good choice for a *AMP stack?

[i_am_profiled]

I want to setup a box to do some php/html development in my spare time.
Is FreeBSD going to be a good solid platform to do this?
Or am I better off using some linux dsitribution?

Re:Good choice for a *AMP stack?

[cerberusss]

Both Linux and FreeBSD are excellent for this work. You might want to take other things into consideration. For example, in my opinion FreeBSD is a lot more stable. However, if you want to use the box for desktop usage, you might find the Linux distributions more up-to-date and user friendly.

And maybe you also have in mind to put that experience on your resume. It might be better to use FreeBSD if you work in the ISP business and for general IT, Linux might be better.

All things considered, Linux is more mainstream but FreeBSD could be worth a lot exactly because of that.

Re:Good choice for a *AMP stack?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally I would use FreeBSD for any kind of development work. It is far more robust than Linux. The I/O system was superb on 5.x, whereas Linux still sucks. Scheduler-wise, whether ULE or 4BSD, you are still getting a mature, solid scheduler. Linux has 3, all of them inadequate for any "class" of work, be it read/write intensive, memory intensive during high-load, etc..

Basically, Linux is just not up to enterprise-level yet.

VMWare image!

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone know if there is a VMWare player image available?

Re:VMWare image!

[Anonymous Coward]

How lazy are you, man? Why don't you download it and install it yourself?

so?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this make Apple the bad guy? The beauty of the BSD license is that they can do this.

I am skeptical

[Billly Gates]

I used to be a FBSD fanatic until 5.x came out.

Lets hope this reverses the trend and the name that FBSD was known for. That is stability and reliability. I do not like linux and think it too has gone down hill from the golden 2.0 days of months of uptimes for the kernel.

I tried out NetBSD but my netgear nic and my wireless keyboard are not compatible. Not to mention the lack of 3d support sucks too. NetBSD is everything FBSD once was as in stable and small and fast.

I am going to try FBSD 6.x and thanks to the FBSD developers for improving it! I didn't mean to insult your work its just been fustrating and lets hope the performance improvements and stability are worth it.

for all of you at theplanet

[Anonymous Coward]

cvsup.theplanet.com

^^they have their own CVSup mirror, give the main mirrors a break :)

>386BSD

[tverbeek]

This is something of a landmark, kind of like when Mac OS stopped supporting 68000 processors. These are the CPUs that these OSes were built for, and whose consistent feature set made it possible to engineer software to run on "any" computer of that kind. The idea of 386BSD not running on a 386 is a bit... eye-opening.

Holy Quick

[ThatDamnMurphyGuy]

I was stunned to see this. After waiting forever in 4.x on a 5.x stable release, the release if 6 seems like it came much much quicker. I wasn't expexting 6 so soon.

Re:Holy Quick

[Anonymous Coward]

6 is "so soon" because it's really just 5.5. The reason they moved it to "6" is becuase 5 was really just an experiment if you will. 6 is the polished conversion to the new ULE scheduling among the other changes they've made as a departure from 4.x

Re:Holy Quick

[linimon]

The easy answer: the FreeBSD developers learned from the mistakes made in the 5.X timeframe. Further major releases will be far more regular (at approximately 18 month intervals) and have less sweeping new features.

Holding off declaring a 5-STABLE until every possible fix was made to SMP and the resulting synchronization rework was finished was clearly too ambitious. This mistake won't be repeated in the future. (Granted that such a thorough rework probably won't ever happen again). There will be more frequest releases of -STABLE branches with smaller feature sets.

As for 6.0 vs. 5.4 or the scheduled 5.5, there is a great deal of work in 6.0 (such as rework of the wireless APIs) that would not have been suitable for backmerging into 5.X. The goal of each FreeBSD major release, once declared -STABLE, is not to touch the APIs again during the life of that branch. 5.5 will mainly incorporate bugfixes to 5.4.

Still broken on Supermicro 5013C-MT

[Nethead]

I've been trying get ANY FreeBSD to work on the Supermicro 5013C-MT server plaform. It wedgies at the bootscreen. I've offered a server to the one that fixes it, no takers. (offer valid to submitters only ;)

Re:Still broken on Supermicro 5013C-MT

[neafevoc]

Same deal with the Compaq EVO 510 workstations. They're cheap workstations, but our university is refreshing them out this year. Looks like a bad kernel dump when it tries to boot the installation CD. :(

Or...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or make sure to install compat5, then upgrade ports when you feel like it.

No mention of WPA in the handbook, however

[MrBoombasticfantasti]

Just checked the handbook, it seems to have been updated to include the 6.0 release. However, it fails to mention WPA, it just describes setting up WEP.

So, is WPA supported or not?

Re:No mention of WPA in the handbook, however

[lactose99]

Several WPA variants (as both a client and host AP) are supported, just not added to the handbook. Since hostapd and wpa-supplicant are brand-new with this release, the docs still need some work. A work-in-progress version is available at http://www.freebsdmall.com/~loader/en_US.ISO8859-1 /articles/wireless/article.html

i'm

[JohnLeFucker]

so happy

Could be problematic

[Just Some Guy]

The general consensus on the mailing lists is that running with a mix of old and new libraries isn't a good idea. For example, it's likely that you'd end up with an application that links against a different version of libc than the other libraries it also uses are linked against.

Also remember the compat5x port actually installs a binary package of the libraries - it doesn't build them from source. That means that you only get the debugging or optimization flags that the package was built with, not the ones that you might have chosen for the rest of the system.

Re:Could be problematic

[NuShrike]

There's a reason why shared libaries have different version numbers such as so.6 so.7, no?

If the numbers stay the same, then there's no API breakage, and no collision.

Has libc even jumped version at all? Considering 6.x is really just a 5.5.x.

Re:Could be problematic

[Just Some Guy]

Yep - they bumped the version of pretty much everything.

AMD64 Torrent

[priyajeet]

http://www.filerush.com/download.php?target=FreeBS D-6.0-RELEASE-amd64

xl 3com driver

[vulcan_pupil]

Does anyone know if the 3com driver was fixed. That was one of the problems I had with a beta release, but I never got the chance to report it (I know, my community mentality sucks). I'll be installing it anyways, but it would be nice to know ahead of time.

Congrats on the release guys, keep up the good work!

Stability problem

[Ben Jackson]

I'd upgrade, but I have a stability problem:

4.9-STABLE #2: Sun Jun 13 01:36:14 PDT 2004

1:00PM up 489 days, 20:21, 9 users, load averages: 0.03, 0.07, 0.07

No way I'm taking down a machine that's been up nearly 500 days to upgrade it!

Re:Stability problem

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE #2: Sat Sep 7 20:50:12 EDT 2002
  4:39PM up 1014 days, 13:15, 12 users, load averages: 0.86, 1.37, 1.62

Wont upgrade, but will actually retire and replace the system completely in the next few months. Don't want to run any hardware that's up 24/7 more than 3 years anyway...

It's broke!

[Anonymous Coward]

There have been many security updates and other fixes rolled into 4.x since 4.4. Check the list of security notices since 4.4 was released.

You should go to at least 4.11, now. And probably start making plans to leap to 6.x when 4.x rolls of the security teams watch list.

Oh come on now

[Anonymous Coward]

"The installer is friendly and efficient, and generally (in my opinion) much easier and much faster than the installer for any Linux distribution I've ever used"

Yea, that's the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Freebsd's installer. User friendly. Afterall, Freebsd didn't beat out ubuntu, fedora, suse, and mandrake as easiest to install *nix because its installer is old and difficult to understand. Gui installers are for wimps right? When is the last time you tried to instal linux? 1993? Because OS preference aside when someone asks about "ease of use" installing, they aren't talking about just getting a base OS dumped onto a partition. By that measure DOS 6.2 was the peak of ease of use.

Your post reminds of some Gentoo user who has drank too much of the koolaide and comes here lamenting the fact that people like Ubuntu for its ease of use when Gentoo is "soooo much easier to use once you learn that its the "one" true way to do things".

Nothing against Freebsd btw, but telling someone who knows nothing about that its the easiest thing under the sun is just mean.

Re:Oh come on now

[Wonko42]

GUI != easy. If you have trouble understanding the FreeBSD installer, you're going to have trouble installing any Linux distribution, no matter how pretty and shiny the installer is. For that matter, you'll probably have trouble installing Windows.

How many times have you installed FreeBSD, anyway? It doesn't just dump a base OS onto a partition (unless that's all you want, of course). The installer will happily install any of thousands of pre-compiled packages for you if you want them. It may not have a pretty GUI, but there's nothing about FreeBSD's installer that makes it any more difficult to use than Ubuntu or Red Hat, and it's certainly easier to install than Gentoo.

In any case, I said it was easier in my opinion. If you don't share my opinion, good for you, but there's no need to be a fucking dick about it.

Why FreeBSD

[kherrick]

I have often thought, if SCO ever made Linux disappear in it's current form, I would move to FreeBSD... however, even now all I ever see are screenshots of KDE/Gnome running on FreeBSD... which of course I assume works and looks exactly like it's Linux cousin... As far as under the hood, all I ever hear about is FreeBSD having binary compatibility with Linux, and less drivers than Linux? Where's the pull? Can anyone give me some compelling reason to switch? I am not trying to troll, but seriously need a reason in order to try it out.

Re:Why FreeBSD

[DashEvil]

If you need a reason to try it out, don't.

Think of all the exploits...

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder how many of those 9 users rooted their way in :)

Re:Think of all the exploits...

[Anonymous Coward]

The system actually has more users logged in, but uptime only shows 9 cause it's been replaced by a hacked version.

Re:386BSD

[evilviper]

The idea of 386BSD not running on a 386 is a bit... eye-opening.

It was a much bigger landmark when FreeBSD (finally) first got ported over to non-x86 systems. Not long ago actually.

This isn't as significant, IMHO.

L4 Microkernels left out

[Kobun]

Some good reading for microkernel education:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L4_microkernel_family

Just installed .... my impressions

[Billly Gates]

The moderators wont like what I am about to type, but its my honest opinion and I really do like BSD. I used to be a FBSD fanatic for years.

GOod things

- My USB keyboard works again! I had problems with this on and off witht he 4.x versions during sysinstall and it didn't work at all during the 5.x versions.

- Java is progressing nicely since the last time I looked. Even version 5.0 is in beta. I remember 1.3x being the working version during 4.11 not too long ago.

- It seems snappier and less buggy then the previous 5.x versions during the install

Cons

- Its quite buggy still. Sysinstall will hang when a package fails to load during an ftp install. A reboot or a kill -9 is needed to restart it. After the installation its fine if a package fails to load. But you do need to resetup your ftp connections for adding packages when they fail after your installlation during sysinstall. Strange

- My usb mouse that worked under previous versions no longer works. Usm0 is reported in /dev but I can not link to it and I can not make any devices like I could under previous versions. I get a device busy error

- kldload umass.ko and camcontrol say umass is loaded for usb mass storage. I plugged my sans disk in and it was detected fine. But umass is not under /dev ?? A bug? Usb mass storage was designed to be plugable plugnplay feature according to the specs by Intel. No automount like under Linux or any otehr modern os. devfs should have reported it but a df shows that devfs only is mounting my keyboard.

Because I couldn't get X going due to the mouse issue I have not played with FreeBSD that much. Its pretty obvious what I think here and which os I am going to use. Its a shame really but I am a student and have no time to track these things down and search newsgroups for fixes. Its not the same as earlier releases but better then 5.x. Personally I would like NetBSD but it too does not like my hardware.... back to Linux. Sigh

Re:Just installed .... my impressions

[Anonymous Coward]

wait? it feels snappier during the install?

am i missing something

results

[r00t]

$ for i in /bin/*; do strings $i | grep BSD | tr -c 'BSDFreNtOpn' '\n' | grep BSD | sort -u ; done |sort | uniq -c
            4 FreeBSD
          18 NetBSD
            1 OpenBSD

The kernel has none of that, though perhaps it is compressed.

Re:results

[kernelistic]

Results for OSX 10.4.3 Build 8F46:

k@reboot$ uname -a; for i in /bin/*; do strings $i | grep BSD | tr -c 'BSDFreNtOpn' '\n' | grep BSD | sort -u ; done |sort | uniq -c
Darwin reboot.local 8.3.0 Darwin Kernel Version 8.3.0: Mon Oct 3 20:04:04 PDT 2005; root:xnu-792.6.22.obj~2/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
    17 FreeBSD
      7 NetBSD
      1 OpenBSD

Is an updated hardcopy handbook due?

[MrBoombasticfantasti]

Good to see WPA is supported and easy to install.

I really hope a completely updated handbook appears in hardcopy. Perhaps it will be ready when the boxed set of 6.0 is released?

Performance on Older Single CPU Systems?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the comments on the 5.x series was that performance suffered significantly compared to 4.x on the same single CPU system, especially on older hardware. I never saw if this was resolved after 5.x went STABLE. So I'm wondering what to do with my 4.11 systems.

Anyone have performace data or ancedotes for 6.0 on 486/66 or P5/K6-233 era hardware, especially relative to 4.x?

NetBSD? Re:Vast performance improvements.

[NuShrike]

How does this compete against NetBSD 2.+? Last time they did a bunch of benchmarks, NetBSD crushed FreeBSD5 and par with Linux 2.6 in UP.

Time to release Damselfly BSD...

[andrewski]

Since Dragonfly BSD was released by a couple people who couldn't stand the thought of FBSD5, can we expect a fork of 5 for the people who can't stand 6?

Inquiring minds want to know!

Re:Time to release Damselfly BSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

5 sucked so bad it can't even be retrofitted with wings.

Re:DragonFlyBSD is the real FreeBSD

[setagllib]

It would help you to know that, although the DragonFly BSD code is cleaner, they still haven't actually lifted the giant lock from most subsystems, so in actual fact a DFly system is probably WORSE in terms of raw parallelism than a FreeBSD 6 system, which has had at the very least many more drivers lifted. But then Linux 2.6 is probably even better in this regard.

However, in terms of cleanliness of the system and the code, and the guarantee of a better future, yes DragonFly BSD is a terrific choice, however you will still need to do frequent rebuilds of everything as system calls and structures are still being added or changed (see http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/ for heads up). DFly will be still undergoing years of restructuring and there is no reason to believe that at any point will it become properly 'stable' in terms of development (though in my experience it is remarkably stable for actual usage), but if you're a BSDophile you're already used to rebuilds and tracking mailing lists or at least blogs like the above.

One final mention is that software availability for DragonFly BSD is still lower than for FreeBSD, which is still slightly lower than for Linux. This situation is greatly improving, but I still haven't heard of anyone running a native Java environment on DFly, which may be a problem for some people (heck I know I would love a JDK/JRE on DFly, I quite like Java as a language). However it's possible that one of the 'Java for Linux' projects (there are at least 10) has bothered being portable. Whether or not it goes so far as to use kqueue for SelectorProviders and so on I can't even begin to guess.