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FreeBSD 6.4 Released

Posted by timothy on from the unsung-but-nicely-free dept.

hmallett writes "FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE, the fifth release from the 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, is now available. In addition to being hosted at 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."

64 comments

  1. Re:FP by Roland+Piquepaille · · Score: 1

    Sorry, only Netcraft can claim anything about bsd, and it doesn't look good...

  2. Oblig by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Alive! It's alive! It's alive!

    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  3. Wow, tells you about the popularity by ByOhTek · · Score: 2

    I can't remember (and am too lazy to look at the timestamps on the website), but the ISOs were out the day before or after Thanksgiving (US). Pretty sure it was the day before.

    I think it's only a month or two behind schedule, that's not bad for the FreeBSD team. Then again, they make a good product, between their releases being on time, and their releases being their usual high quality, I'm glad to have the high quality instead.

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    1. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by hmallett · · Score: 1

      Yes, the announcement was on 28th November, but no-one had submitted it here. 7.1 has been delayed a bit further due to a couple of problems, but I'd rather they fix them than release prematurely.

    2. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by TheRaven64 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      No one really cares about 6.4. The people who really, really, care about stability might decide to run 6.4, but most of the stability-conscious people will just run 6-STABLE and not care about releases. The people who want new features are running 7.0 or 7-STABLE and are waiting for 7.1. The people on the cutting edge are running 8-CURRENT.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    3. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by Ded+Bob · · Score: 4, Informative

      Actually, stability-conscious people will be running either RELENG_6_4 or RELENG_7_1 (once 7.1 is complete). You may call them the super-stability-conscious people. :) -STABLE branches just refer to the ABI being stable, but they are still development branches. They do tend to be more stable then CURRENT since the code must survive CURRENT for an amount of time before being merged into STABLE.

      Personally, I run 7-STABLE (RELENG_7) on all my systems with HEAD in a VM or two.

    4. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by Deagol · · Score: 1

      I'm tracking RELENG_7_1 at the moment (7.1-PRERELEASE). I actually jumped from RELENG_7_0 when I saw a post on some list from pjd saying that the ZFS v13 stuff had been committed. Needless to say I was disappointed. Are the new ZFS updated in 7-STABLE, or would I need to track HEAD to test that stuff?

      --
      Method of processing duck feet
    5. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by Fweeky · · Score: 1

      Yeah, the latest ZFS is in 8-CURRENT; it's far too new for RELENG_7, never mind RELENG_7_1.

      If you don't want to bother with the commit mailing lists, you can track this stuff using FreshBSD. You could have an RSS feed which tracks commits to RELENG_7 mentioning ZFS in the message, if you wanted to.

    6. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by setagllib · · Score: 1

      Actually what do you use for VMing on a FreeBSD host? I thought the only thing that worked was un-accelerated qemu. KVM is barely usable, Xen dom0 and VirtualBox aren't even betas. I'd use FreeBSD for a lot more hosts if it at least supported kvm properly, and that project is nowhere near done.

      --
      Sam ty sig.
    7. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by trouser · · Score: 1

      Like when you're with a lady.

      --
      Now wash your hands.
    8. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 2, Informative

      KQEMU has had a FreeBSD port for a long time. There's even an OpenBSD port now.

    9. Re:Wow, tells you about the popularity by setagllib · · Score: 1

      Is there a solution to the Linux guest disk IO slowdown on FreeBSD qemu? kqemu or not, I can't get a usable Linux guest. Even a minimal Debian install takes almost an hour, as opposed to 5 minutes in KVM on Linux. This bug has been reported for over a year, and it's believed to be a qemu bug, but the same version on Linux is unaffected or already fixed.

      --
      Sam ty sig.
  4. Takes a licking by stox · · Score: 1

    and keeps on ticking. It is a robust little devil. Of course, a few admins will be torn whether to give up a couple of years of uptime for the new patches.

    --
    "To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
    1. Re:Takes a licking by Rod+Beauvex · · Score: 1

      I've never understood the whole I-never-rebooted-for-this-long penis measuring contest.

    2. Re:Takes a licking by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've really only seen uptime boasting as a linux thing. Although BSD can obviously do the same, I think it's just taken as a given and not something special to point out.

    3. Re:Takes a licking by larry+bagina · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Sometimes it's because you're running critical shit. Sometimes it's because you're running critical shit and the last person with reboot experience retired 10 years ago.

      --
      Do you even lift?

      These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

    4. Re:Takes a licking by ld+a,b · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It is supposed to be good for servers, it comes from an age when an uptime of a day was pretty good for a UNIX system(see the unix haters' handbook). Now it is a measure of the amount of widely known security holes the admin is willing to leave open.
      Your servers should have an uptime of 365/6 days a year, but that should be achieved by having a redundant array of servers that you update regularly, not by having a single server that you never reboot.

      --
      10 little-endian boys went out to dine, a big-endian carp ate one, and then there were -246.
    5. Re:Takes a licking by trouser · · Score: 1

      The rules are really simple.

      1. uptime * some arbitrary multiplier = cock length
      2. some crap about fight club
      3. .....
      4. profit

      --
      Now wash your hands.
    6. Re:Takes a licking by Drinking+Bleach · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Use CARP and update each server individually. Just because individual hosts go down for a reboot (which should be very quick anyway), doesn't mean your service should.

    7. Re:Takes a licking by Shooter6947 · · Score: 1

      Evidently you are a Windows user with a small penis length, then, I infer :)

      - a FreeBSD server admin with 250-days uptime

  5. Where is VMware host support? by Cthefuture · · Score: 2, Interesting

    VMware is the one application I simply can not do without. Is there anything equivalent for FreeBSD?

    I used to run BSD a bit back in the 90's and I have long wanted to run it as my workstation OS, especially now to get ZFS. However, without a good virtualization solution there is no way.

    --
    The ratio of people to cake is too big
    1. Re:Where is VMware host support? by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

      QEmu with KQEmu works nice, but I don't think it has all the features of VMWare, if it has the features you want/need, it is an excellent app though.

      --
      Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
    2. Re:Where is VMware host support? by paulhar · · Score: 1

      Run FreeBSD inside of VMware instead? In my case I'm on a laptop so get much better hardware support from Windows, but can run BSD quite happily full screen, and you can run other VMware images at the same time, memory and CPU permitting.

    3. Re:Where is VMware host support? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I'm a big freebsd user (not desktop but server). I'm waiting for zfs to become MATURE on the non-sun boxes. from all I've read it is NOT ready for prime time. some really bad memory problems seem to still be there and they are throwing horsepower at it but it sounds like a losing game. its not ready yet (not for my multi TB home video/audio collection!). I do trust raid5 and jfs and that's been doing fine for me but zfs will totally replace that - ONCE it gets ooops-proof on intel/amd and bsd.

      not sure if solaris/x86 is more stable for zfs (I would hope so) but freebsd does not seem like its 100% ready for zfs. maybe in a year?

      also, I'm seeing poor samba/cifs performance compared to my gentoo linux boxes (both going from an xp box to the back-end server). on linux, my network led lights are solid on and the thruput is fabulous. on bsd, there are more wait-states and lights being off more often than on. not sure what the blocking is (similar hardware on linux and bsd) but bsd has disappointed me big-time the last few years on samba. I won't run it seriously and have had to let my linux box do nfs/samba/raid for me.

      linux seems to be overtaking bsd and that's a very sobering thought from a mostly die-hard bsd fan, here.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    4. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Interesting

      ZFS memory problems are on 32bit architectures. It was developed for 64bit and it needs some room. Some hard limits on 32bit platforms need to be tweaked so it fits. Use a 64bit system with zfs.

      Samba is optimized for the linux network stack and you need different options for your FreeBSD6. Seems to work better with FreeBSD7. I d wish the developer wouldnt assume that everything works like on their local linux box.

    5. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Mooglie · · Score: 1

      I've had problems with Samba under FreeBSD 7.0 with my new server. As the onboard network adapter (Atheros L1E) wasn't yet supported (the driver appeared 1 week after I got the hardware), I installed a cheap RTL8139 adapter. It ended up that the driver of this network adapter had problems under load and it's what caused Samba to be slow. With the onboard adapter that is now supported, there is no more problem with Samba.

    6. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Interesting. I have been running ZFS-FUSE on Linux and it seems pretty stable (at least in 64-bit mode and of course the FUSE layer). I especially like the gzip compression mode, it compresses way more than any other compressed filesystem I have used. It doesn't work too well with MySQL (which seems to hammer the disk) but it compresses the hell out of SQLite databases and there is not much of a performance hit.

    7. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Ded+Bob · · Score: 1

      I wish VMWare would consider FreeBSD for host-support, however, I think Qemu is catching up with VMWare. This is referring to Workstation. For servers, FreeBSD jails are advancing quite a bit. If the plan is to run FreeBSD servers, I would prefer jails over VMWare.

      Speaking of jails, they now have support for multiple IP's per jail as of revision 185435. It also adds support for IPv6 addresses to jails.

      For a nice front-end to Qemu, I recommend AQemu.

    8. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Just+Some+Guy · · Score: 3, Informative

      However, without a good virtualization solution there is no way.

      This doesn't directly address your problem with VMWare, but FreeBSD's self-virtualization (aka "jails") is outstanding. Our standard deployment now is to build a beefy server with a minimal install, then use jails (via "ezjail") to carve it into multiple production servers. When the system starts to slow, we shuffle the jails around to different hardware as appropriate.

      The only thing I dislike about jails today, in practice, is that each can only be assigned one IPv4 address. The new virtualized network stack should allow multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses per jail but it's not available on -STABLE yet. Once that's in place, FreeBSD jails will be the perfect virtual server arrangement for our workload.

      Again, that doesn't help you if you're needing to run Windows or Linux VMs (although you can make a jail based on, say, Debian running on the native FreeBSD kernel's emulation layer), but it's extremely useful for consolidating multiple servers onto a machine.

      --
      Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
    9. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Fweeky · · Score: 1

      The kmem exhaustion issues are mostly if you fail to tune the ARC cache to not, er, exhaust it. CURRENT has largely resolved the issue by making kernel VM space much larger; previously it's been limited to about 1.5GB, even on 64bit.

      If it does exhaust kmem, it's not at risk of nuking the filesystem, especially with the ZIL, it's just an irritating reboot.

      Other than that, well, people are using FreeBSD/ZFS in production today; even the FreeBSD package building cluster uses it, making use of snapshots to provide clean build environments.

    10. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Fweeky · · Score: 1

      (I also haven't experienced any problems with Samba; I easily break 60MB/s. what NIC do you have?)

    11. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It has great userland virtualizations. So, it makes an outstanding webserver host, because you can run many independant virtual userland webservers on commodity 4core Phenoms. Each jail/vm can run their own MySQL and Apache/PHP daemons, along with anything else like an imapd server, or a samba server. This is rather effective because the most important security vulnerability for this type of environment is one user interactive with another negatively. Then you can lock down users memory capabilities by modifying their php.ini and my.cnf files to limit their memory allotments. Then, give each virtual machine owner its own user access via ftp or ssh. That's pretty much virtual machines. It might not be as simple as some of the integrated solutions out there, but it's rock solid.

    12. Re:Where is VMware host support? by TheGratefulNet · · Score: 1

      the right kind of nic! seriously. I use eepro1000's when I can, usually pci-e based these days.

      bsd sees it as em0 (of course). mobo is a badaxe2 975x system which is typically stable as can be.

      I see LOTS of timeouts but only on samba. scp and the others seem to fly ok, so its in the samba/cifs stack I would think.

      both linux as a client and xp as a client show bsd (as a samba server) to be really slow. I have not tuned the system but I don't tune it for linux, either.

      --

      --
      "It is now safe to switch off your computer."
    13. Re:Where is VMware host support? by dgym · · Score: 1

      Jails are great, but if you do need to run other operating systems on the same machine then you can always run Linux KVM, with FreeBSD as a guest.

      I've just tested this release and the installation went flawlessly under KVM.

    14. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I've been told that Yahoo! has Redhat running FreeBSD running RedHat. Supposedly Redhat has better drivers, but FreeBSD is the basis of most of their infrustructure. Since FreeBSD only emulated kernel 2.4.x (7.x supports 2.6.x kernel), they needed to jail Redhat for certain tasks (jail'd for infrustructure to be able to manage). Quite convoluted, but understandable, if true.

    15. Re:Where is VMware host support? by Fweeky · · Score: 1

      I use a quad port PCI-X Intel Pro/1000 in this machine, and Samba with UFS2 or ZFS is mostly limited by the disk. The only tuning I've done is "socket options = TCP_NODELAY".

  6. Re:FP by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Troll

    Go fuck yourself, pigpile.

  7. Re:qemu by nitsnipe · · Score: 1

    It's true, qemu works excellently, the only reason that it is not as popular as VMWare, virtual box or virtual PC is because of the crappy mouse support. The choppy mouse can be annoying, but it's not a problem at all if you're not running X.

  8. Re:qemu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    And the performance. QEmu is a lot slower than pretty much anything other than Bochs.

    It may seem "good enough" if that's all you're used to and you have limited needs but if you run a lot of VM's and use them heavily then QEmu is just too slow.

    It just serves a different market. Things like VMware are for professionals trying to get work done. QEmu is for people messing around on their computer in their spare time.

  9. I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by dtfinch · · Score: 2, Funny

    This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
    This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
    This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
    This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
    This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
    This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
    * repeat 50+ more times *

    1. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by hedwards · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Or you could just try installing a more common set of packages. Or you could just use the DVD release. Or you could always just use ports, packages aren't really meant to be used except in the case of excessively large programs or on boxes without a whole lot of memory or processing power.

      I've been using FreeBSD for nearly a decade and I've never encountered that particular problem.

      That being said, it's not like Linux installers are that great. The fact that they can't seem to get partitioning correct after all these years ought to be fixed pronto. There's absolutely no excuse as to why the Linux partition manager needs to suck far worse than the Windows one does.

      I should be able to clear a partition and then have it automatically sliced up into useful portions without having to boot in the middle of the process. At least with Windows the worst problem is it's pickiness about which partition and it's one size fits all MBR, hardly difficult at all to fix, doesn't even require an extra boot if you're prepared.

    2. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Default install does not install anything from CD2.

    3. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I remember doing a *minimum* Fedora installation a few years back, and it went through all 4 or 5 discs twice before unpacking some 200Mb onto the hard drive.

    4. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by Conley+Index · · Score: 1

      Your problem is outdated. (Well, kind of.)

      There is a DVD installer and there is this commit that is supposed to fix excessive disk swapping: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/svn-src-stable/2008-October/000079.html

      (It is in 6-STABLE, 7-STABLE, and 8-CURRENT. It will be in every upcoming REALSE including 7.1. 6.4 barely got missed, but who does new installs from 6.X anyhow?)

    5. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by dtfinch · · Score: 1

      Good to hear.

    6. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 2, Insightful

      Ahem. You not having encountered the problem doesn't make the parent's complaint any more or less valid.

      Also, your attacks on "Linux installers" are uncalled for and off-topic. We're talking about the FreeBSD CD installer here.

      I guess there is a part of your post that is insightful, but most of it is off-topic, and I would have modded it accordingly.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    7. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by Hatta · · Score: 1

      I should be able to clear a partition and then have it automatically sliced up into useful portions without having to boot in the middle of the process.

      Use Debian, this works just fine. I haven't installed anything but Debian recently, do other distros installers really suck that bad? Given all the shit Debian gets for its installer, I'd figure other installers would be at least as capable. Which distro are you talking about specifically?

      Debian even gives you the choice of using one big partition with swap, separate / and /home swap, and seperate / /home /tmp and /var with swap. Of course you can manually partition any way you want as well. It even automatically sets up LVM and LUKS encryption if you want.

      --
      Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    8. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by MLS100 · · Score: 1

      And if he is installing to a low CPU power machine with no DVD drive and no/slow net access?

      This is the only reason people are even interested in the CD installer in the first place.

      Just because Linux installers can't handle partitioning in the way you'd like automagically (what the hell does this have to do with the OP's problem?), doesn't mean BSD shouldn't have to fix their CD installer.

    9. Re:I wonder if the cd installer still sucks by IronWilliamCash · · Score: 1

      Hmmm, don't know about 6.4, but I installed it a few months back and I can say I ran into this problem :) Had lots of fun swaping cds.

  10. Re:qemu by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

    QEmu is incredibly slow, if you don't use KQEmu. With KQEmu, as long as you aren't doing 3D, it's actually rather fast.

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
  11. Re:qemu by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

    I don't have any choppy mouse issues with KQEmu under X. QEmu (without the kernel mod) did, but it was incredibly slow.

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
  12. Re:qemu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Even with KQEmu "rather fast" is not the same as VMware's nearly native speed. Like I said, it's OK for the casual user but it's far behind the other solutions in terms of features and performance.

  13. Re:qemu by cpghost · · Score: 1

    Running qemu without kqemu here on FreeBSD/amd64 7.1-PRERELEASE with XP as guest (kqemu caused some BSODs in XP, interestingly more in 64-bit mode than in 32-bit mode), and even on a modest 2 GHz Phenom 9350e, I didn't have the feeling that the emulation was extra slow. Actually, I'm quite satisfied with its performance. Maybe because I'm not doing anything CPU intensive on XP like games etc, and merely using Visual Studio C++ and similar apps?

    --
    cpghost at Cordula's Web.
  14. Re:qemu by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

    2.4Ghz Optron (dual core) 185.

    I mostly use it for VPN into work and Visual Studio. It's still fairly slow with out kqemu.

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
  15. Re:qemu by RLiegh · · Score: 1

    Kqemu seems to make more of a difference on Linux than any other platform, as far as I can tell. (not having performed benchmarks of any sort). Frankly, VirtualBox seems to be the best of the lot, at least as far as disk I/O is concerned (I'm basing this on how long it takes to boot pkgsrc using OpenBSD in a VM; in VirtualBox it's near native, VMWare it's quite sluggish and takes a long-ass time, I wouldn't dream of trying this in Qemu).

  16. Re:qemu by ByOhTek · · Score: 1

    What would be some good tests? I don't notice any slowdown, but I don't do a lot of intensive stuff on the VM.

    VM
    1280x1024/32bpp screen
    Windows XP
    Firefox + Flash (mostly youtube type stuff)
    VPN + Remote Desktop
    Visual Studio 2003
    MS Office
    A few OLD non 3D games

    --
    Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
  17. Re:qemu by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    I had this same problem running Win4BSD. It turns out the early Phenoms have a problem (Mine being a 9750). The solution is, of all things, to update you bios. Once I did this, no more BSODs. With kqemu it's much, much faster (on the verge of being close to native).

  18. Re:qemu by cpghost · · Score: 1

    That's interesting! I'm using the most recent BIOS version available though, so no chance for improvement here. What's puzzling, is that qemu-0.9.1_10 with kqemu-kmod-1.3.0.p11_9 actually don't BSOD XP as often when I run i386. On amd64, it does. Perhaps it's related to this? I don't know, but it's strange.

    --
    cpghost at Cordula's Web.
  19. Get your facts right first. by zartacla · · Score: 1

    Err...where's the DVD "release" ? All I could find was some stuff on *creating* dvds and some discussion shunning the idea of having a dvd release. Nothing on their official site as per a dvd "release" is concerned. And Sherlock, when was the last time you installed a linux distribution ? You got baseless arguments against installation of linux distros ( fuck, you just used a windows analogy to hide the problems caused by freebsd installation.)

    1. Re:Get your facts right first. by kace · · Score: 2, Informative

      6.4 included official DVD images! (For i386 and amd64.) See the release announcement. You can get them via ftp. Or some torrents are here.
      .