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FreeBSD 7.0 Release Now Available
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."
You don't need to set the disk geometry unless you have weird-ass old disk hardware. Just accept the defaults.
with the announcement of the features last night the following topics were beaten to death already:
Why use FreeBSD? (why not?)
FreeBSD is dead! (clearly its not)
FreeBSD is not dead!
yahoo use freeBSD (nobody cares)
FreeBSD vs Linux (ooh flame ware, but then everybody realized that it doesnt matter some people prefer FreeBSD for stability & the fact its all integrated, some people prefer linux because it has lots of flashy features & there are loads of projects to add extra features to it ( but they're not integrated and don't always play well together)!)
please go about your business there's nothing to spam about here!
IranAir Flight 655 never forget!
Its been easy for the last several releases if you are willing to accept defaults.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
The summary says it has ZFS support but the website says experimental ZFS support. That seems like a pretty important distiction.
Actually, the usual answer is the pre release have extra stuff turned on to help enable debugging. That's why it's not a release where they turn that extra stuff off, or you can recompile the pre release kernels and such.
Hmm. The time I tried to install FreeBSD, the installer choked on my hardware. I tried two different dell desktops. Part of the problem was an inability to deal with a USB keyboard. I hope that has been fixed, and I plan to try FreeBSD again, some day. I'll stick with a more common OS, for now.
A cat can't teach a dog to bark.
It's quite good. Where I work, we've been using the release candidates to store upwards of 15 TB of data, spread over about 50 hard drives. We haven't had any problems, and the performance has been fantastic.
Solaris still offers better support, but the ZFS support offered by FreeBSD is production quality.
Slated for 7.1 is support for booting GPT partitioned disks. This will make the whole partitioning thing even easier, since it will make BSD labels and the MBR go away entirely, and partitioning will be done entirely using LBA addressing.
There is a good interview with many key FreeBSD contributers about new technologies and improvements in 7.0. It is quite technical.
http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2008/02/26/whats-new-in-freebsd-70.html?page=1
*I love how STABLE just sticks out, like BSD wasn't stable before. Ha!*
"7-STABLE" is FreeBSD-speak for "this implements the FreeBSD 7 API/ABI, and any program you write or compile for an earlier release will work just fine on a later release". In other words, the Application Programming/Binary Interfaces won't change in incompatible ways.
This is in contrast to Linux, where updating to a new kernel (belonging to the same "stable" kernel branch, or even applying security patches) can make programs break until you recompile them.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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.
READY.
PRINT ""+-0
I have a dual-Opteron rackmount Dell with a ServerWorks HT1000 chipset, running 7.0-PRELEASE from January 15, that was having DMA-related fits. Does anyone know if they've got that problem under control yet? I had seen it discussed a lot on the mailing lists but lately haven't had the time to follow closely. Either way that server's staying on the 7-STABLE line because it's so much faster that I can live with running the drives in PIO4 (and with 4GB of RAM those drives don't get touched a lot).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I've never needed to know any of those things to install FreeBSD. We run a number of FreeBSD virtual machines and physical servers. I installed them all myself. The most complicated part was entering network information, since all of these systems had static IPs and weren't using DHCP. Unless you're doing something out of the ordinary, you can just use all the defaults and have a fully working system in 15-20 minutes on an average machine.
I've been using FreeBSD since version 2.2.7. I've been using Linux and other OSs even longer. Operating systems that have been around as long as these weren't just created from the start to be a breeze to install. Linux used to require a lot more manual configuration than it does now... just because something like Ubuntu makes it easy doesn't mean it always was. Linux has progressed in this area, and so has FreeBSD, and so have most other mature operating systems.
Also, FreeBSD is not targeted at the same audience as something like Ubuntu. A better comparison would be PC-BSD and Ubuntu, as they are targeted at desktop users. I guess maybe FreeBSD could be compared to the server or alternate editions of Ubuntu, in which case the install process (using text screens) is fairly similar.
I'd gladly give it a go. Let me fix that for you. I don't want to have to figure out something worthwhile to say...it's not my favoritest Linux so I'll just discredit it.
I refuse to willingly evaluate it without preconceived prejudice.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
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?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
LBA adressing -- brought to you by the RAD Redundant Acronym Department.
Press "A" for auto partitioning and then "A" in the disk layout section for auto-defaults.
As it has been since at least FreeBSD 4.0.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I haven't run FreeBSD since 6.0, but the problem with Dells, IIRC, is that the AT controller acts like there's a keyboard there even if there isn't one.
I had no problem using the clearly labeled "boot with USB keyboard" menu option.
It's a moot point -- with the at mux that came in I believe halfway through the 6-series, you can have as many keyboards as you feel like.
Is when FreeBSD and wine will start to care about each other.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
If FreeBSD doesn't have a driver, you can use the Windows driver. Geom will allow disk encryption, to an even greater degree than TrueCrypt.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Please look at PC-BSD or DesktopBSD; they would be the equivalent to Ubuntu.
http://www.pcbsd.org/
http://www.desktopbsd.net/
Disk Geometry trolling isn't funny or have you confused this with partitioning. So, are you trolling or are you stating that you don't like to partition drives. If it is partitioning then you may want to check out the above links; if you're trolling, then continue with what you're doing
Ubuntu easy to install? Perhaps. But does it meet the quality standards of FreeBSD and esp OpenBSD? I dumped Ubuntu and over wrote the partitition with OpenBSD because everytime I tried to manually enter in my network encryption parameters manually, the next time Ubuntu booted it just ignored it and locked onto the strongest unencrypted signal.
GREAT article - it is interesting for a non-programmer to read this type of technical detail, presented in an understandable way. For me, right at the edge of my theoretical-only knowledge. A detailed summary, I guess. (oxymoron)
Similar article on NetBSD: Waving the flag: NetBSD developers speak about version 4.0 (1/30/2008)
Linux focused links:
Current discussion:
LWN: Kernel
KernelTrap
KernelNewbies: Summary of Linux Changes
---
The Wonderful World of Linux series are excellent history - in-depth for outsiders:
WWOL 2.2
WWOL 2.4
WWOL 2.6
---
Towards Linux 2.6 - A look into the workings of the next new kernel(2003)
Kernel Comparison: Linux (2.6.22) versus Windows (Vista)(2007)
Reminds me of a
Do not meddle in the affairs of geeks for they are subtle and quick to anger
I've been reading about zfs for awhile and recently started implementing it on some Solaris servers and really getting into it. It's nice. Really nice. I am anxiously awaiting being able to run it on linux (not via FUSE) in production. Has anyone heard anything on the objections over license compatibility and stepping beyond traditional filesystem areas of the kernel?
"Does ZFS really require that much memory?"
No, but if it is available it will certainly use it. The upside of ZFS using more memory is that disk IO will be lower so better overall performance.
So you have not used ZFS yet? If so, you would know "why not just use Linux and lvm2?" It is just so easy and fast to add extra storage and provide data security across many different devices. For one thing, newfs is redundant.
And before anyone asks:
All the docs I've read on the subject tend to suggest that the Real Way to keep a FreeBSD system current is to download the kernel and userspace core every so often and recompile them. And that's fine, sorta, except that it doesn't address how to deal with the "leftovers", such as config files that have been moved or eliminated. (I mean, honestly, compiling the world is not a realistic way to keep current on X.org.)
Who has practical experience doing this? How do you keep your machines current, particularly with security patches?
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
There's something about Dells, USB keyboards and any non-windows installer... Tried about 5 os boot disks on a vostro before I discovered you need the keyboard in just the right socket - and then it screwed up after you chose the kbd type in the installer, necessitating a different machine to install on. Once installed it's worked well.
You underestimate my capacity for wrongness.
Softupdates don't solve the important unclean shutdown fsck problem very well. Background fsck is a nightmare for any production system with non-trivial amount of spinning rust.How's that? I mean, I'd rather not have to fsck my terabyte RAIDs, but if I have to, at least the system can be running live and undegraded while the loose ends get cleaned up.
Wrong. Half the writes as compared to the naive gjournal journalling. Real modern journalling filesystems usually have the option to journal just metadata. What's more, journalling is far more flexible than softupdates. You can journal to a small battery backed RAM device for example.If you're just journaling metadata, then you're not getting the full benefit of journaling (and definitely not anything more than softupdates offers, as it's basically an in-memory ordered journal of metadata transactions to be committed). As far as the battery-backed RAM: that's like saying cats are better than dogs because you can give them medicine if they get ringworm. BTW, with FreeBSD's GEOM system, you could journal to an encrypted RAID on a remote host if you wanted to. You might have already known that; others might not.
Wrong. There has to be some filesystem support work done.Wrong. gjournal is a generic journaling provider. You can use it to wrap any other GEOM component. From it's own man page:
Pretty neat, huh? You can wrap it around your RAID to make it crashproof. If you think background fscks are bad, then you've probably never watched a few terabytes of mirror resync itself. Anyway, what you misunderstood is that filesystems have to be altered to interact meaningfully with the underlying journal. UFS has been so modified. That doesn't mean that other filesystems won't work on top of it (which would be silly because a gjournal looks just like any other block device), but that they're not optimized for it.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
No, you read that right. The reason is mainly that FreeBSD users have been enjoying something called "softupdates" for the last decade or so, which is sort of like an in-memory journaling. Rather than writing metadata directly to disk, it's queued in memory, grouped into an efficient order, then transactionally committed to the underlying drive. The disk is never in an inconsistent state, even without a journal to fall back on. If the system crashes, a special fsck that can run while a filesystem is mounted read-write comes along and deallocates any space that's no longer used but hasn't yet been marked as empty.
Because of that, there hasn't been much need or real drive to get journaling into FreeBSD. The solution they're going with is actually nicely abstracted, in that you configure a journal for a whole device through GEOM (which is kind of like a Lego set for building drive setups). Although you'd probably never want this, you could theoretically have two "drives" that reside on remote machines (via ggate) bound together with RAID1 (via gmirror), encrypted (via geli), and with a local journal (via gjournal).
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
I happen to have a very similar setup on my FreeBSD 7-STABLE system right now, and it works great.
You should have no problems at all. It'll work perfectly.
However, is there a compelling reason for you to switch? Debian is a great operating system, and unless it's not working out too well for you, you should not just switch for no good reason. You risk being unproductive for a few days, running into issues you don't know about, etc.
Seriously, jump! I switched from Debian (2.something, I think) to FreeBSD 4.5 *years* ago. I haven't been happier.
:-)
I'm still running FreeBSD 6.3 on my server, and I will upgrade to 7 soon, but I found PC-BSD to be the better desktop system (DesktopBSD had strange quirks, and wasn't as polished).
PC-BSD uses the "stable" FreeBSD as it's base, so although it's currently FreeBSD 6.3 based, that'll no doubt change to 7.0 soon. PC-BSD also uses KDE as it's desktop environment, so you'll have no trouble with your apps.
Good luck!
No, it's not production quality. Not when there's bugs which can deadlock the entire system when copying large sums of data between UFS and ZFS filesystems:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSKnownProblems
The "this is experimental" tag should remain until all of the issues on the ZFSKnownProblems page are addressed.
I don't know the results of the "pissing match", but I can attest to the re-written ULE scheduler (NOT the same ULE that was in 5.x and 6.x! This scheduler is referred to as ULE/SMP2.0) being both stable and greatly improved. The scheduler was tested *specifically* against MySQL, and the benchmarks exceed that of Linux. Here's the details you want:
http://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/mysql.html
How does one install new software on BSD? (do you compile everything from source?)
/usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile > /root/7-supfile /root/7-supfile
/usr/src
/etc and other config files:
/etc is backed up ready to merge later. Install new kernel
/usr/src
/etc files with old ones:
/usr/ports/x11/kde3
I upgraded from 6.2 to 7.0-PRERELEASE by doing the following:
It's a convolouted process, but I wanted to follow FreeBSD 7 development. It's easier when you do it from a binary CD. Basically you restart from the CD and upgrade and it's automated.
Start by updating my system source:
$ sed -e 's/RELENG_6/RELENG_7/'
$ csup -h cvsup6.freebsd.org
Now the source is updated. So we build:
$ cd
$ make buildworld buildkernel
Now the system is built from source, ready to go into my temporary directory. Back up
$ mergemaster -p
Now my
$ make installkernel
$ reboot
Now I start up in single user mode. Install new system just build from source.
$ mount -a
$ cd
$ make installworld
The binaries are all installed. Merge new
$ mergemaster
Now the machine is up to date.
As for installing packages, you have several choices. I prefer to build from source, but you can use packages. Packages are usually a little behind the ports tree. So for example, to install KDE the way I would do it:
$ cd
$ make install
And several hours later you have KDE 3, Xorg, and a host of other apps that aren't included with the base install that KDE3 needs.
Take a look here for more info about FreeBSD's package management. The main repository of FreeBSD packages is at ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/packages.
Installing from CD is easy, but it's all text based so don't be shocked. I recommend installing the "X-Developer" package and the ports tree. That should include all the base system and developer tools.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
# make quicksearch name=whatever
My feedback as an user of "current" Linux distros.
.0 release of distros.
- I found the same sysinstall that I saw 4+years ago when I last tried installing Freebsd.
- I found that the official way to configure is to generate the config file template using 'Xorg -configure' and then hand editing the xorg.conf config file!!!!
- I found that the standard install still installs TWM and doesn't even ask for KDE/GNOME (I know you need to install the packages *after* the install, and yes I know I can use sysinstall) and you are dropped to a text login after install.
- I found that my amd64 cpu with the nvidia integrated card doesn't have an nvidia driver. And the default nv driver can't make use out of DDC to configure my brand new widescreen LCD monitor.
- I found that my mouse pointer is invisible in X.
Now, before other start, please understand why I am saying this - I know Freebsd has a different approach to building a distro. I also know that reasons like prop. drivers are not its fault. I also accept that I probably am facing some system specific issue inherent in any
My point here is simply to let how a typical user who thought of migrating to Freebsd thinks. I for one, value using my relatively new hardware to the fullest, so I am going back to Ubuntu.
I still have tremendous regards for Freebsd as a server. I have found them to be much more stable than any current Linux distro, and capable of much more punishment too.