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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."
You probably would, if you liked it, if not for any other reason. For most use cases, wether The Right Tool for The Job(tm) is Linux, BSD, Solaris or just about anything else should be determined by asking the people due to be in charge what they feel most comfortable with. And that's it. If you don't expect to push the system to its limits in a very specific way, fear a particular kind of attack vectors or require in-kernel support for this or that newfangled widget, be it hardware or software, and don't consider some platform a burden in the case of staff turnover, the most sensible choice is really what the staff would like to work with.
Actually, in most other cases it's even easier, because there often is an industry standard - e.g. half (warning: that's an educated guess, that is, a number pulled out of my, er, back pocket, representing something close to reality in a simplified, but suitable way) of the banks and other financial institutions tend to use Solaris a lot (the other half using IBM stuff) just because a tried way of doing things for them and there's no point in changing that.
And if you want an OS for personal use, feel free to choose on any basis you like, from the license to the number of lines of code to the project founder's hair color - just be careful not to become a brainwashed zealot...
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
Lots of people are asking why FreeBSD. There's a simple answer. Not comprehensive, not all-encompassing, but a decently accurate and sufficient answer for most cases.
FreeBSD is just plain ol' Unix. No bells, no whistles (except ZFS--Fancy!), just Unix as it always was. And sometimes, that's exactly the right answer to a problem.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I have to answer this seriously, as I recently started using FreeBSD for two specific projects, and I'm loving it. First and foremost, it's great when you know EXACTLY what you need to do. I'm speaking here of FreeNAS and pfSense. Both are designed to be embedded and run on FreeBSD, and both were designed to do very specific tasks. Both will install entirely on and boot directly from any garden variety USB flash drive. Because the memory footprint is so small, they run by loading the entire OS into a RAMdrive, eliminating the need for a noisy and failure-prone hard drive. This results in a quick boot and very speedy application. The base configuration of FreeNAS (at the most recent release) is like 54MB installed and will run (literally) on a first-generation XBOX. From these measly specs, you can get a fully functional device, complete with NFS, Samba, FTP server, full Active Directory integration, iSCSI target, SMART, Software RAID, and many other file-server specific features, all of which are configured through an easy to use WebGUI. The Linux equivalent of the same file server distro is Openfiler, and having downloaded and tried that out, I can say that FreeNAS is light years ahead. Much easier, faster, smaller footprint, etc. Much of these same comparisons can be made with pfSense vs. IPCop. The Linux equivalents are generally larger, heavier and well suited for more general use, whereas the BSD versions are extremely light.
Strangely enough, I had many more hardware compatibility problems with the Linux equivalents as well, which is where I thought Linux should really shine. The BSD versions detect all hardware at bootup, and only load the specific driver modules for the hardware that they actually use. Compiling and installing additional modules, while tricky at first, is actually easier than I've ever experienced in Linux. I actually got my hardware RAID card working out of the box on FreeNAS, and after weeks of fighting, have yet to get the same card working on a separate install of CentOS for a different server. It should be said that I put absolutely no effort into choosing BSD-specific hardware. It may have just been blind luck.
Now, despite all this gushing over these apps, they are clearly designed for a specific purpose. I wouldn't want to use my FreeNAS box as an email server, or run my company knowledgebase off of pfSense. But if you want to dust off an old PC, slap a couple of hard drives in there and make a file server, you can do no better than FreeNAS.
-Arthur
Cave ne ante ullas catapultas ambules
Yes, but it is a part of GNU tools (which you most certainly can use on FreeBSD).
But it's not present in the 'native' FreeBSD userland.
Read and learn.
This fully-conformant UNIX operating system--built on Mach 3.0 and FreeBSD 5--bundles over a hundred of the most popular Open Source products.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?