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

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.

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: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: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.