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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."
Web serving and mail filtering, here. But it's nothing I couldn't use Linux for. It is all the same software, really. Honestly, the only reason I don't use LInux is because FreeBSD is what was here when I got here and I figured I should at least take the time to learn it. Also, if it ain't broke...
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
what for?
Better performance than Linux, that degrades under load much more predictably than Linux (as does Solaris, but FreeBSD is better on commodity hardware). A better written C library (just look at the source code to glibc - it's shockingly bad, unreadable macro soup as though its maintainer hates C). A better documented userland than Linux with complete and accurate manpages.
FreeBSD is popular amongst hosting companies (the tools for security are easier to use and more mature than Linux), and is also used by companies like Yahoo! because of it's reliability and performance. Linux has outperformed FreeBSD for a while, as the fine grained locking introduced in version 5 matured, but the pain getting it right is beginnng to pay off now.
I was toying around with Freebsd 7.0 RC3 just a few days ago, well actually I was testing it to see if ZFS was really working as claimed. A very basic installation to a 40gb disk went pretty quick (5 to 10 minutes). Rebooted into the installed system and everything was fine. Took an old 1.6gb drive I had and plugged it right in, recognized as /dev/da1 or whatever. Ran "zpool create tank da1" and BAM! /tank already mounted and ready to go. No stupid fdisk, no stupid format command, no fstab nonsense.
Now I wouldn't run out and switch everything to freebsd 7 and zfs because work isn't finished. For example there's no ACL support since ZFS supports NFSv4 ACLs while freebsd only supports Posix1e. My next test will involve getting samba working and this may be a little tricky since there are some reports of issues with running samba on ZFS. But all of the available reports are quite old (half a year or older). I don't really care about the ACLs because I just intend to use the system as a single user and a convenient area to dump my files on a bunch of disks that all conveniently appear as one along with some redundancy (better than just a bunch of disks and raid5).
This is kind of old news, but we ran into it at work today. Within the past couple weeks, Firefox 3 has imported FreeBSD 7's (je)malloc for its superior multithreaded performance and non-fragmentation.
http://ventnorsblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/beta-3.html
More info on jemalloc:
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html (near the bottom, under "Userland enhancements")
http://people.freebsd.org/~jasone/jemalloc/bsdcan2006/jemalloc.pdf
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
I can't speak for Solaris, but I've used various Linux distros quite a bit (both for servers and desktops). I absolutely love FreeBSD. Having everything unified and maintained by one group brings consistency that you just don't find in linux. Ports is amazing; it has over 17,000 packages iirc and you can be sure they will 'just work', installing everything in just the right places (consistency!), automatically installing prereqs, and even compiling from source if you wish. Like others have mentioned: it's faster, more secure, and handles load better. It even has a more open license than Linux! I really wonder why more people don't prefer FreeBSD. Using it on a server or a desktop is a breeze. I was using Ubuntu as a desktop for a while, because I was afraid getting gnome to work on FreeBSD would be hard. Turns out it takes two commands: pkg_add -r xorg && pkg_add -r gnome2. That's it! Done! And I was even quite surprised that installing packages via ports automatically created entries in the gnome menus as you would expect on Ubuntu. The docs are also great and provide step by step walkthroughs for just about anything. That said, I do hate the installer -- but at least there are good doc pages for it.
Earlier this year, we (fortune 1000 company) switched from a mixture of Linux/Windows 2003 to Solaris just for ZFS. (We have a few remaining Windows boxes which we may always be stuck with). We were hoping ZFS would make it's way into Linux (we were ready to put up a lot of cash to make it happen). All the dick wagging and license posturing made us re-evaluate our commitment to linux.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.