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What's New In FreeBSD 7.0
blackbearnh writes "FreeBSD is about to release the much-anticipated version 7, and as usual there's a comprehensive interview with over two dozen of the major contributors over at O'Reilly's ONLamp site. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed the developers to discuss all the details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more."
Apple use it as the basis for OS X for one.
The Mothership
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/relnotes.html#FS
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Umm all those questions are clearly answered in the article.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Contrary to popular belief, it is this parasitic nature that actually ends up profoundly improving the operating system and proliferating it. Think of the following hypothetical scenario:
1. CEO sees product XYZ and thinks to himself "Wow, we can compete with that!"
2. CTO responds to CEO with "We need to research viable means to penetrate this [new] vertical-market with a high profit margin." This all means "I'll get back to you with the cheapest possible implementation after I consult our developers."
3. Director of IT says "Hey, we can use FreeBSD as a platform because it's free and has an open license."
This is where the general populous that conforms to your statement stops thinking and fails to realize the rest...
4. Developers are tasked by the director to learn FreeBSD.
5. Support staff is tasked with inundating themselves with FreeBSD to support the product/customers.
6. Quality Assurance is subjected to FreeBSD to test the product.
and in my experience at Yahoo! (in the beginning days when FreeBSD was but a murmur on the lips of the Directors and CTO), the following happens...
7. Developers, Support staff, and Quality Assurance falls deeply in love with FreeBSD.
which leads to...
8. Developers giving back to the FreeBSD community.
You don't have to believe it, but the arguments for the decision to use FreeBSD do exist. The people that choose it are not always vapid management. Sure, it may start out that way, but if you look closely at the Netcraft, you might just find that BSD even found a niche in the web-server world (where your argument of parasitic license globbing does not and cannot apply as the GPL has no grounds in the argument of which OS serves up your content to the World-Wide-Web).
I am not a zealot. I find that every OS has its place. I for one, for a desktop environment would definitely suggest Linux because it has very good device support. I for one don't think that the BSD's will ever corner that [desktop] market.
Even within the BSD world, there is dissention and each flavor (very much alive and kicking) has its purpose. For example, I believe that the greater and more well-known BSD variants can be summed up into a single sentance (see below):
BSDi Commercial BSD Version. Commercial Support.
FreeBSD Optimized for the Pentium Processor.
NetBSD Runs on almost every platform.
OpenBSD Security and Cryptography. Runs on many platforms.
PicoBSD Fits on a single 1.44MB floppy disk.
That was true, being said in an article from 1999 (by Chris Coleman, author of BSD advocacy articles and unbiased BSD editorials on DaemonNews), I would add the following summations to bring it up to present day:
BSDi
Enterprise-level use (close-source product). This BSD variant intends to compete with people such as RedHat Enterprise Linux and other Enterprise UNIX flavors. Runs on Intel only.
FreeBSD
If running Intel, there is no better choice. FreeBSD focuses on security (not as hard-core as OpenBSD though) and stability/performance on the Intel platform. DEC Alpha is supported but stability/performance may be better on NetBSD for Alpha support.
NetBSD
Bleeding edge hardware compatibility. More often than not, this team has support before any other distribution (before Linux even). Hardest distro in the world to[?] (besides Windoze).
OpenBSD
Security security security (derived from NetBSD).
PicoBSD
Minimalism at its best (maintained by the Fre
Are you asking if you can run FreeBSD in VMware? or are you asking if VMware has vmware-tools for support in FreeBSD?
Either way, the answer to both is "Yes". I've run almost every conceivable version of FreeBSD in both VMware ESX and GSX and they also make vmware-tools to be installed (via the fake CD-ROM that you can mount via the menu bar) so that you can get better resolutions of video etc. etc.
Just a bit of statistics that might help you understand where FreeBSD is used en-masse besides Yahoo! (only other one I can think of right now):
I work for a company that solely employs FreeBSD at financial institutions across the US (and one site in Hyderabad, India). Here's the run-down (warning, these statistics were compiled in less than an hour, solely for this post; I just did a quick head-count via our named DNS records):
3,483 FreeBSD systems employed by Bank of America
1,544 for PNC
872 for Wells Fargo
around 100 or so for Mellon
around 500 or so for JPMorgan Chase
I'm forgetting a few... but you get the point.
Seems to be a big hit in the financial institutions. BTW, all systems mentioned are used for check processing in wholesale lockbox sites.
(crossing my fingers that this information isn't confidential, lol)
Check out page 25 of this document: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/GuestOS_guide.pdf
:-)
According to the Guest OS compatibility table, FreeBSD 6.2 is supported on VMWare Workstation 6.0.2 and VMWare ACE 2.0.2
Having said that, VMWare guest is running on a fairly standard sort of virtualised platform. With VMWare ESX 3.5 you can use a Buslogic virtual scsi controller or an LSI virtual scsi controller. So you may have to do some fiddling to get FreeBSD to load the appropriate device driver (don't ask me how, I've only ever done generic installs of FreeBSD)
VMWare ESX Server 3.5 will (officially) support:
* Ubuntu Linux 7.04
* Solaris 10 for x86
* Suze Linux Enterprise Server 10
* Redhat Enterprise Linux 5
and various other OSs...
I've been using ESX 3.5 on an HP DL385 G2 with dual core Opterons and 8GB of RAM, I wonder if that is powerful enough to run Vista as a guest OS...
Darwin is not a fork of FreeBSD. Darwin has its own kernel that's partially BSD-based. Darwin's userland is mostly FreeBSD and Apple contributes the changes to the FreeBSD-based userland directly to the FreeBSD project. So the relationship between Apple and FreeBSD (at least on the userland part) is similar to Ubuntu and Debian.