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FreeBSD 7.0 Release Now Available

Posted by samzenpus on from the get-it-while-it's-hot dept.

cperciva writes "The first release from the new 7-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. FreeBSD 7.0 brings with it many new features including support for ZFS, journaled filesystems, and SCTP, as well as dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."

2 of 229 comments (clear)

  1. Re:ZFS? by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It's actually pretty stable. Having said that, there are some issues surrounding it. For starters, FreeBSD 7.0 uses ZFS ported from version 6, whereas Solaris now has ZFS pegged at version 10. There have been numerous enhancements made to ZFS in v10 which aren't in v6. It remains to be seen how the FreeBSD implementation catches up to the Solaris implementation. There is an upgrade command in ZFS that can upgrade the file system to the new version - but no idea how this will work in future FreeBSD versions yet. Secondly, ZFS runs better on 64bit - so using the 32-bit i386 release is not recommended. Thirdly, you need quite a large clump of memory - over 1GB and preferably 2GB or more. It is recommended to tune some kernel memory parameters to ensure that ZFS doesn't cause your system to panic. ZFS seems to like munching on memory in an attempt to scale. Otherwise ZFS is really good and very stable - perfect for use in a file server. Just don't build your file server on old 32-bit hardware, and make sure you have plenty of RAM.

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    READY.
    PRINT ""+-0
  2. Re:STABLE by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Linux has had journaling file systems for years.

    FreeBSD hasn't wanted journaling filesystems for years, since we've had softupdates which solve many of the same problems but with half the writes. The recent gjournal plugin to the GEOM system is a block-level journal. In other words, it handles all writes to a device, whether or not the overlying filesystem supports journaling. Journaled FAT anyone?

    I just said journal a lot, didn't I?

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    Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?