Slashdot Mirror
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!
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.
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.
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'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.
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?
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