Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 6.2 Released To Mirrors
AlanS2002 writes "FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development."
The release announcement will not be available for a couple of hours. Slashdot jumped the gun as usual.
Torrents are available.
A script for upgrading FreeBSD 6.1 systems is available.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Wasn't development supposed to be delayed or stalled because of license issues?
Is there a point to your at least pedantic, and at most douchebaggy, comment about the difference between x86 and IA32?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
Oh crap! What am I going to do with my cluster of 4Mhz XT machines now!?
I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for this release.
So last night I downloaded 6.1 and installed it.
Voila! 6.2 out today.
Wanna see it rain? I'm going to go wash my car.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
I run FreeBSD 4.11 on a number of machines, many of which I have no physical access to. Those who keep up with such things will know that 4.11 will be EOL'd for security purposes as of the end of this month (i.e. the RELENG_4_11 branch will no longer have guaranteed security updates). Does anyone have any experience with a remote, networked upgrade from 4.11 to 6.x? I dread that this is going to become necessary sooner rather than later, and I'm curious if anyone can give any pointers on the migration, or if it's even possible without physical access and burned media.
Thanks in advance..!
Thanks to the War on Drugs, it's easier to buy meth than it is to buy cold medicine!
Not run FreeBSD on them?
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
According to the latest release notes, not all IA32 processors are supported as the 80386 is not specifically listed. Support for the 80386 was dropped starting with 6.0: http://www.freebsd.org/platforms/i386.html
Yeah, I had the turbo switch fixed and everything...
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
Considering the announcement in the topic...
"I'm not dead yet!"
"I'm getting better!"
"I don't want to go on the cart!"
With 6.2, csup is even better...
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Luckily, FreeBSD has an excellent system for updating the operating system by source code. This guide teaches you how to update to the latest stable release of FreeBSD via source code. It's really nice and works well. Just remember to use FreeBSD-STABLE instead of FreeBSD-CURRENT, unless you are a FreeBSD developer or are interested in the absolute latest development version of FreeBSD, working or not.
FreeBSD 6.2 has now been announced.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
FYI, distrowatch donated the money they made from ads to a handful of open source projects, among them FreeBSD. Someone has to be first, and this time it was slashdot. http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.s html
I think hes thinking of Redhat 6.2
FreeBSD is actually a good OS.
Yes, it's very nice
Mac users use it,
No they don't, they use Mach with a BSD api wrapper
Solaris is based around it,
No it's not, Solaris was on the SysV side of the SysV/BSD Unix wars (not a bad thing, Solaris is nice too)
and most of Linux is a cheap ripoff of it.
No, Linux is a school project based loosely off SunOS & Minix
From the release announcement:
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
..does it run linux?*runs* You probably weren't expecting a serious reply but... yes, it does. Note that this isn't running some kind of virtual machine emulation -- it's running Linux binaries natively on the processor and doing some kind of magical remapping of kernel and library calls that, to be honest, I don't understand that well. More details in this article.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
UNIX is a trademark. It's even a registered trademark. A trademark is not a copyright. (and not a patent either, nor a trade secret)
AT+T's lawsuit ran in to problems becuase they hadn't properly protected their code from unpublished disclosure. At the time, copyright law was very different, so this mattered. The judge indicated that AT+T might not have copyright to some things. AT+T was also caught violating Berkeley's copyright.
On the other hand, the trademark was being violated by BSDI and there may have been some minor problems in the BSD code base.
So the parties agreed to quit and keep things quiet.
If you want to use the trademark, you need a license. Licenses are easy to get, provided that you fully and correctly implement an OS that follows a standard called the Single UNIX Specification. FreeBSD violates this standard in many ways, and is thus inelligible for getting a license to use the trademark.
Linux isn't UNIX either, though it's now close enough that the Open Group can maintain a small list of deviations that need to be voted out of existance.
I downloaded the netboot version of 6.2RC2 some days back and was pleasantly surprised to find that almost all the hardware was correctly recognized. This is a 2 year old compaq laptop with an Ralink PCMCIA wireless card. Not even the latest Linux distros can detect this card but OpenBSD and FreeBSD have the excellent ral driver in the kernel. Moreover the configuration is so simple when compared to the mess in Linux (iwconfig,iwpriv,ifconfig??) not to mention the troubles I had with ndiswrapper
All the BSD's use X.org anyway nowadays, so the folks who are looking for a good GUI environment won't be disappointed. Again, the laptop display settings were correctly detected and I didn't have to touch xorg.conf at all
Give OpenBSD and FreeBSD a try - you won't regret it. Having said that, prepare to actually RTFM in case you run into problems. 99% of the time the answers are in the fine integrated documentation that comes along with your OS install.
However these days, x86 is taken to mean "Current CPUs based on the x86 ISA." If you mosey to nVidia's drive page you'll notice they talk about Vista x86 and Vista x64 drivers. What they mean are 32 and 64-bit drivers, of course, both x86 ISA. They don't mean that the x86 drivers will run on any platform, indeed Vista itself will run on nothing less than a Pentium 3 and thus it wouldn't be meaningful for the drivers to support less.
There's no point in breaking down support by specific chip level unless you just feel like being pedantic for no reason, thus people just say "x86" and use it to mean reasonably modern 32-bit x86 ISA chips.
If you really are concerned about compatibility with hardware that old, well, go get DOS and deal with the limitations.
...this is as good an opportunity as any to discover FreeBSD for yourself. As I wrote in my journal, it's a fantastic OS...very much worth obtaining a copy of and investigating.
I've also noticed how much the comments attached to this article are riddled with trolls, flamebait, and assorted rubbish. Richard Stallman was the first to slander the BSD license and attempt to discourage its' use, and it is obvious that there are Linux users who seek to continue their master's work in that regard, and shame themselves in the process. They tell people a lot more about their own character (or lack thereof) than about that of what they are attacking.
Some differences between GNU/Linux and *BSD from the top of my head:
/dev/hda, OpenBSD and NetBSD call /dev/wd0, and FreeBSD calls it /dev/ad0, I believe.
/dev/hda1 under Linux, it would be /dev/wd0a in OpenBSD. FreeBSD also supports DOS partitions, but calls them "slices". Linux's /dev/hda1 would be /dev/ad0s1 under FreeBSD, IIRC.
1. Device names are different. What Linux calls
2. Partition maps are different. Linux uses DOS (or BIOS, I'm not sure where they originate from) partition tables on the PC, and Apple partition tables on Power Macs. I don't know about other architectures. The BSDs use BSD disklabels, where each partition gets a letter (from a to z), with some letters having special meanings (e.g. a is the root device, c is the whole device). For example, if your root partition in
3. The BSDs do not implement a lot of GNU extensions. This includes library functions (e.g. there's no strndup on OpenBSD), command line switches, and makefile directives. Of course, a lot of software is shared among BSD and GNU systems, but the differences will bite you sometimes. GNU usually implements BSD extensions.
4. GNU make is usually available on BSD systems, but under the name gmake. make is BSD make, which has a different set of extensions to basic make.
5. BSD systems provide third-party software primarily through the ports system (called pkgsrc on NetBSD), although binary packages may also be available. This is not common in Linux distributions, although Gentoo mimics the BSDs in this.
6. There is generally a higher focus on source code. For example, upgrades are typically performed by first getting the latest version of the source code through CVS, and then running "make world".
7. The BSD startup scripts are usually much simpler than those found on Linux distributions, which typically use SysV style init scripts.
8. The BSDs consist of a complete operating system that is maintained as a single unit, whereas, with Linux distros, the kernel, libc, core utilities, etc. are usually maintained and upgraded independently.
9. The BSDs pride themselves on technical quality and good documentation, whereas GNU/Linux is heavier on features and making things work _today_. Complaining about missing features, or asking questions without having read the documentation is likely to rub BSD people the wrong way. Be especially careful with OpenBSD developers.
10. The BSDs have traditional, monolithic kernels. All have some features available as loadable modules, but the modularization is definitely not strong as in Linux. Stability is considered more important.
11. The choice of filesystems is more limited on the BSDs than it is on Linux. All support Berkely FFS, as well as some variations on it, fat, and ext2, but there's no ReiserFS, JFFS2, QNX fs, etc.
12. Among the BSDs, NetBSD focuses on clean code and portability, OpenBSD focuses on security, and FreeBSD is the most featureful. Dragonfly BSD is a fork of FreeBSD that aims to provide a more modern architecture with a microkernel and without the Big Kernel Lock. There are some others, too, but I don't know what they're about.
Just to put this information in perspective: I've used GNU/Linux since 1996, and OpenBSD for about 5 years. My experience with NetBSD and FreeBSD is only sporadic. I've also created ports for OpenBSD and NetBSD, as well as developed quite some new software for them. If you count Mac OS X as a BSD, I've got about 2 years of experience with it, including the creation of pkgsrc ports for it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Noooo.!!!! I hate when people recommend STABLE. Use 6.2-RELEASE and then update with security patches. Have you read what STABLE is ?? It's not what you think.
When the ELF loader sees the Linux brand, the loader replaces a pointer in the proc structure. All system calls are indexed through this pointer (in a traditional UNIX system, this would be the sysent[] structure array, containing the system calls). In addition, the process is flagged for special handling of the trap vector for the signal trampoline code, and several other (minor) fix-ups that are handled by the Linux kernel module.
/compat/linux/original-path directory, then only if that fails, the lookup is done in the /original-path directory. This makes sure that binaries that require other binaries can run (e.g., the Linux toolchain can all run under Linux ABI support). It also means that the Linux binaries can load and execute FreeBSD binaries, if there are no corresponding Linux binaries present, and that you could place a uname(1) command in the /compat/linux directory tree to ensure that the Linux binaries could not tell they were not running on Linux.
The Linux system call vector contains, among other things, a list of sysent[] entries whose addresses reside in the kernel module.
When a system call is called by the Linux binary, the trap code dereferences the system call function pointer off the proc structure, and gets the Linux, not the FreeBSD, system call entry points.
In addition, the Linux mode dynamically reroots lookups; this is, in effect, what the union option to file system mounts (not the unionfs file system type!) does. First, an attempt is made to lookup the file in the
In effect, there is a Linux kernel in the FreeBSD kernel; the various underlying functions that implement all of the services provided by the kernel are identical to both the FreeBSD system call table entries, and the Linux system call table entries: file system operations, virtual memory operations, signal delivery, System V IPC, etc... The only difference is that FreeBSD binaries get the FreeBSD glue functions, and Linux binaries get the Linux glue functions (most older OS's only had their own glue functions: addresses of functions in a static global sysent[] structure array, instead of addresses of functions dereferenced off a dynamically initialized pointer in the proc structure of the process making the call).
Which one is the native FreeBSD ABI? It does not matter. Basically the only difference is that (currently; this could easily be changed in a future release, and probably will be after this) the FreeBSD glue functions are statically linked into the kernel, and the Linux glue functions can be statically linked, or they can be accessed via a kernel module.
Yeah, but is this really emulation? No. It is an ABI implementation, not an emulation. There is no emulator (or simulator, to cut off the next question) involved.
So why is it sometimes called "Linux emulation"? To make it hard to sell FreeBSD! Really, it is because the historical implementation was done at a time when there was really no word other than that to describe what was going on; saying that FreeBSD ran Linux binaries was not true, if you did not compile the code in or load a module, and there needed to be a word to describe what was being loaded--hence "the Linux emulator".
Also there is this, which is another good explanation of the differences between but support for the two OS's in FreeBSD programming.
FreeBSD is an extremely flexible system. It offers other ways of calling the kernel. For it to work, however, the system must have Linux emulation installed.
Linux is a Unix-like system. However, its kernel uses the Microsoft system-call convention of passing parameters in registers. As with the Unix convention, the function number is placed in EAX. The parameters, however, are not passed on the stack but in EBX, ECX, EDX, ESI, EDI, EBP:
open: mo
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
The i386 was the first Intel chip that had the memory protection mechanisms required to run a real UNIX. Although they were released in 1985, it took some time for people to get around to porting UNIX to run on them. It wasn't until around 1990 that the PC was so firmly entrenched that it made sense to run Linux on such an inferior architecture; people who wanted a real computer but were on a budget got a cheap 68K machine.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Hmm... Solaris 1 (aka SunOS 4.x) was BSD based. Solaris 2 ( SunOS 5.x) is SysV based.
I believe his point was to call the other poster a pedantic douchebag. I could be wrong, though.
Stasis is death. Embrace change.
The BSDs don't work that way. Linux distros are made up of lots of separate parts, but BSDs are complete packages (for some definition of complete).
/usr/ports/www/w3m && sudo make install". Typically, binary packages will also be provided for most architectures. The ports tree is only loosely coupled to the OS proper; ports may be updated while the OS stays at the same version, or not be updated when the OS version changes.
I don't know exactly how things work for FreeBSD, but with OpenBSD, it's like this: the OpenBSD team develops and maintains the whole operating system, consisting of kernel, libc, commands, compiler, documentation, X, etc. When you install, you get to choose sets: bsd, main, comp, etc, games, and so on. Some of these are mandatory, others are optional. This allows you to omit certain parts of the OS to save disk space. However, all of these are really part of the same package; you can't, say, use bsd from version 4.0 with comp from 3.8, or from an entirely different BSD flavor.
Besides the operating system, there is the ports tree. The ports tree consists of a ton of Makefiles with some patches, and allows you to install software that isn't part of the operating system proper. For example, if you wanted to install w3m, you could "cd
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
FreeBSD 6.1 and later should support that network adapter with the nve driver.
It updates /usr/src at line speed, as did cvsup. It's not faster, just written in a vastly more common language. I don't think anything will beat portsnap for updating ports since it's downloading a small set of patch files and applying them. There's no filesystem walking required to compare the local and remove versions.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Also falling into the "not necessarily better, but interesting" category, portmaster is a utility much like portupgrade, but it requires no dependencies to build or run. It's worth noting that you end up relying on FreeBSD's pkg_* utilities instead of portupgrade's port* suite. Of course, if you would have Ruby installed anyway, then portupgrade doesn't really cost you anything extra.
On the whole, the goal is to comply with the SUS. As with most operating systems, the difference is in the implementation and the corner cases.
The main difference I notice is 'ps'. The Unix spec wants 'ps -ef'. BSD wants 'ps auxww'.
Some information on current efforts: