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FreeBSD 7.1 Released
Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:
The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."
This is one of the better parts of this release. The lack of speed/clue on putting out both CD sized and DVD iso images has been highly frustrating, telling the users to basically "roll-their-own". I've already upgraded a few systems and things appear to be going well.
There are official Java packages for FreeBSD available.
-- Sig down
Also, reading the developer blogs is fun and informative!
-- Sig down
Netcraft is not reliable anymore. From the site:
Why do you not report uptimes for Linux 2.6 or FreeBSD 6 ?
We only report uptimes for systems where the operating system's timer runs at 100Hz or less. Because the TCP code only uses the low 32 bits of the timer, if the timer runs at say 1000Hz, the value wraps around every 49.7 days (whereas at 100Hz it wraps after 497 days). As there are large numbers of systems which have a higher uptime than this, it is not possible to report accurate uptimes for these systems.
The Linux kernel switched to a higher internal timer rate at kernel version 2.5.26. Linux 2.4 used a rate of 100Hz. Linux 2.6 used a timer at 1000Hz (some architectures were using 1000Hz before this), until the default was changed back to 250Hz in May 2006. (An explanation of the HZ setting in Linux.)
FreeBSD versions 4 and 5 used a 100Hz timer, but FreeBSD 6 has moved to a customisable timer with a default setting of 1000Hz.
So unfortunately this means that we cannot give reliable uptime figures for many Linux and FreeBSD servers.
FreeBSD fanboyz shouldn't go mouthing off about "half-assed" considering the way since 5.x it's crappy smp and threadlocking would seize up tighter than a great-grandma on a straight brick cheese diet with lock-mgr panics. Problem persisted in 7.0, who knows if 7.1 will finally put the issues to rest?
Are you talking about this SMP?
5.0 was released in January 2003, I think 6 years of passage should have allowed you enough grumping time that you can let it go now. I think you could also take a look in your wayback machine and remember that Linux was not exactly perfect at the time either. FreeBSD 5 did have its teething problems with all of the new technologies introduced, especially KSE and the ULE scheduler, but progress has continued to be made and your unsubstantiated claim otherwise is just the pathetic grumblings of a troglodyte.
perl -e "eval pack(q{H*},join q{},qw{70 72696e74207061636b28717b482a7d2c717b343 637323635363534323533343430617d293b})"
I'm sorry, those KDE and Gnome versions are some random software the FreeBSD people maintain that have nothing to do with the third party KDE and Gnome systems available on Linux?
How about SSH? You don't use the OpenSSH maintained by the OpenBSD guys then? This is some other version of SSH that is completely maintained by FreeBSD?
Stop with the FUD. Maintaining a local code base for applications doesn't change what they are. The Fedora people do the same thing, so does Ubuntu and many other distros. Slackware and Debian are pretty hands-on in their code maintenance as well.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
Everything in the ports tree is essentially random crap. The only thing FreeBSD does is wrap the source code with a (really nice) build system. Ports aren't "stable" the same way the core is. That said, a lot of the big-name stuff like apache has separate ports. For example apache-1.3, apache-2 and apache-2.2 have separate ports (I think there is a port that follows the trunk too).
The difference between the BSD's and Linux's are in scope. In FreeBSD there is a whole lot more junk that is maintained by a single group then in most linuxes.
But still, you are correct in the "real applications" are all ports.
A significant improvement on a crappy OS is still a crappy OS. No flame intended, but really... who uses FreeBSD anymore?
I do. On my servers as well as on my workstation and my laptop. It's a solid and stable operating system that has earned its place.
Apart from that, only some some smaller companies use it.
No flame intended, but really...who critizes operating systems that are not sold by Microsoft on /. anymore?
Hi!
I'm one of the Squid developers and I have some experience with FreeBSD :)
FreeBSD-6 and FreeBSD-7 both rock for Squid (and my squid-2 fork, cacheboy.)
FreeBSD-7 is pretty scarily scalable when it comes to web stuff. I'm working on threading cacheboy/squid-2 over the next few months enough to take advantage of the parallelism that the FreeBSD guys have introduced into -7 and -current. I've got some test code here for fully transparent web interception caching with FreeBSD-current, and some stuff to use FreeBSD's fantastic POSIX AIO support.
Its all lookup up, up, up from here. :)
It was covered on Slashdot. Here is a detailed write-up. Basically, the problem occurred when seeking to the second entry in a block when the first one had been deleted due to some mismatch between what the kernel did and what libc did. The bug was around 25 years old, and was fixed in May. It only occurred in a very small number of cases, but these cases were common enough for the Samba team to have encountered them and worked around them.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
You want clickable man pages? Take a look at man.freebsd.org and choose the HTML output format.
... :-)
What was that quote again?
Those who don't know UNIX are doomed to reinvent it -- badly
FreeBSD is the only distribution, other than Solaris, to have ported and implemented the ZFS filesystem (and no, a FUSE port doesn't count).
I've been looking forward to build a file server for personal use, and I'm eager to try out ZFS, which really puts FreeBSD high on my small list of candidates for an operating system. I'm going for consumer-grade hardware, and I'll be experimenting with stuff like using CompactFlash cards to store the OS.
OpenSolaris was my initial choice due to its higher maturity on the ZFS implementation, but I feel it's too constraining. I tried searching around for information about installing the system on flash mediums, information about wear-levelling, filesystems for flash media, and their forums and mailing lists fall short on these topics. The OpenSolaris installer doesn't even allow one to customize the installation, forcing me to install X.org, Gnome, and a ton of other stuff. No thank you, I'd very much like my file server to be command-line only, and to be smaller that your 3.1 gigabyte minimum for an installation.
As soon as I feel that FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS is stable and feature-rich enough for my needs, I'll definitely be rolling a file server with it. And I don't care if Netcraft disagrees with my decision; I really do feel BSDs deserve more and more notoriety these days.