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What's New In FreeBSD 7.0

Posted by kdawson on from the what-indeed dept.

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."

31 of 103 comments (clear)

  1. no nvidia on amd64 yet by Ojuice · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I wish there were nvidia drivers for amd64 :(

  2. Re:people still use freebsd? by The+Ancients · · Score: 3, Informative

    Apple use it as the basis for OS X for one.

    --
    The Mothership
  3. Re:people still use freebsd? by Drooling+Iguana · · Score: 5, Funny

    It makes an excellent test subject on which to practice necromancy.

    --
    ... I'm addicted to placebos
  4. Re:people still use freebsd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

    what for? Kickin' ass and takin' names, of course.
  5. I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7.0 by mrcgran · · Score: 4, Informative

    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/relnotes.html#FS

  6. I have to ask... by Lally+Singh · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I mean this as advocacy bait :-D

    Why would I choose FreeBSD over, say, Solaris x86 or Linux?

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    1. Re:I have to ask... by misleb · · Score: 2, Funny

      Why would I choose FreeBSD over, say, Solaris x86 or Linux?


      You probably wouldn't unless you were one of those people who gets all excited about the difference between GPL an BSD licensing.

      --
      "THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
    2. Re:I have to ask... by Enleth · · Score: 4, Insightful

      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...

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    3. Re:I have to ask... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

      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)

    4. Re:I have to ask... by debatem1 · · Score: 2

      This is going to sound snarky, but it's not intended that way- if you don't already know the answer to that, you probably aren't going to choose FreeBSD. The reason I say that is because the advantages of FreeBSD are really only relevant at the point where you're making your living off of the care and feeding of servers, and even there it seems to be largely opinions or software availability that drive the decision between UNIX variants and Linux. Some say that BSD is better put together than Linux (I disagree, but that's beside the point), most agree that it has a better security track record, and nearly everybody acknowledges that it has some advantages as a server operating system. Truth in advertising warning: I personally use Linux on all but two of my servers (both are FreeBSD), and advocate it to my clients, while my familiarity with Solaris has bred a contempt entirely divorced from the technical merits of the project, and so I will refrain from comment there. Hope that helps.

    5. Re:I have to ask... by ImustDIE · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    6. Re:I have to ask... by a_nonamiss · · Score: 2, Insightful

      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
  7. Re:people still use freebsd? by misleb · · Score: 3, Interesting

    what for?


    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
  8. Re:people still use freebsd? by LizardKing · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  9. Re:people still use freebsd? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    > Better performance than Linux,

    Heh, don't get cocky :) It's good to have some competition at last, we've only been waiting... for over 5 years.

  10. Re:people still use freebsd? by tverbeek · · Score: 4, Informative

    Apple use it as the basis for OS X for one.
    No they don't. There may still be some cross-pollination between them, by way of packages they both use, but Darwin/OSX and FreeBSD forked a long time ago.
    --
    http://alternatives.rzero.com/
  11. Re:No Xen Support? by nurb432 · · Score: 3, Informative

    Umm all those questions are clearly answered in the article.

    --
    ---- Booth was a patriot ----
  12. Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 by tknd · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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).

  13. Re:And the parasites love it by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    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

  14. Re:FreeBSD Rant by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  15. Some interesting info on jemalloc by bconway · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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

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    1. Re:Some interesting info on jemalloc by ruinevil · · Score: 2, Interesting

      If only FreeBSD's threading didn't break Wine's support for Blizzard games...

      I couldn't play Starcraft D:. I hear WoW works with it though.

  16. Re:people still use freebsd? by auric_dude · · Score: 3, Funny

    If is good enough for Barack Obama (Democrat) - FreeBSD, Apache by pair Networks http://www.douglaskarr.com/2007/06/23/2008-elections-by-server/ then it is good enough for me!

  17. I know this is /. and all but ... by ghostcorps · · Score: 2, Interesting

    After 48 posts, not one has opened a discussion specific to TFA. Other than to say RTFA.

    Linux Vs BSD is a moot argument, I have my preference, and I'm not going to change because yours differs. Similarly, no amount of bible bashing is going to convince me that man and dinosaurs walked together 2000 years ago!

    To get on topic... (no I am not new here) :p

    I am running RC1 ATM, and will upgrade to the final as soon as it is out. I'd like to know if anyone has successfully implemented RAID-z yet, and if so, what should I be aware of that is not documented.

    Also, can anyone confirm the increased performance claimed by the upgraded TCP handling?

    Perhaps an unbiased, or at least well reasoned comparison of Linux Vs FreeBSDs' Multi-thread handling? I would be very interested to know the details here.

    Opinions on STCP Vs TCP?

    If you must, be all 'Linux it t3h gr34t357', I would love to know what upgrades in TFA are old hat to Linux users.


    peas

    --
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  18. Re:FreeBSD Rant by Heavy+Machinery · · Score: 4, Informative

    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... :-)

  19. Why FreeBSD??? by swordgeek · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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
  20. Re:people still use freebsd? by Cyberax · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

  21. Re:I really like the addition of ZFS in FressBSD 7 by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  22. Re:people still use freebsd? by KugelKurt · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  23. Who really cares? by bluefoxlucid · · Score: 2, Funny

    Slashdot shows like all BSD news as just a collapsed article... is that my settings (I get Linux and MS and OSX and Vista stuff), or it it just because nobody gives a shit?

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  24. Re:people still use freebsd? by bconway · · Score: 2, Insightful

    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.

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