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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
It makes an excellent test subject on which to practice necromancy.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/relnotes.html#FS
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.
> Better performance than Linux,
:) It's good to have some competition at last, we've only been waiting... for over 5 years.
Heh, don't get cocky
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
Umm all those questions are clearly answered in the article.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
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).
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.
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.
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)
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.
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!
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...
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
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.
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.