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FreeBSD 7.1 Released

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the for-the-1337-amongst-us dept.

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."

5 of 324 comments (clear)

  1. At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi by coryking · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.

    Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code". In fact, better they do. The BSD licence makes it easy for those companies to contribute because they can use FreeBSD and contribute only the parts that aren't special-sauce. Companies *want* to merge their changes in with the mainline, it is expensive to apply patches to every version of FreeBSD. The BSD licence lets paid employees of these companies send in bug-fixes and patches without ensnaring the companies IP in a legal mess. Other licences have a tendancy to be all-or-nothing--either you hold on to your bug-fixes and merge them in for every version or you release your entire codebase to the world. BSD lets you pick and choose what bits can go into the world. Very flexible.

    Bottom line... if Apple wants to use BSD code, who cares. Code is code. It isn't like it has feelings.

    1. Re:At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi by nschubach · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Um... maybe I read it wrong, but he was disgruntled that Sun didn't offer to pay for accommodations... not code. It's pretty fair for him to ask Sun to foot a bill here or there to enable interoperability for their own products. It doesn't sound disgruntling at all really. More of a "shame on you Sun" post as he ended that quote.

      Of course, people read whatever they want to read into things.

      --
      Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
  2. Hmmm by coryking · · Score: 5, Insightful

    There are more important things in the world then how well an operating system does in some assholes random benchmark. If you are standardizing your servers around an operating system based solely on "speed", I question your abilities as a server dude.

    I'll just name one thing, out of many, that are vastly more important than "speed". Stability. No, not "never blue-screens". I'm "does the maintainers of the system make major changes in every single release and then stop supporting older releases". Under this definition of stable, FreeBSD wins over linux hands down. Especially after the "we can't be bothered to maintain a stable branch of the linux kernel, so we will add new shit in with the old all the time". You might get a dozen exciting new bugs and security fixes when you "upgrade" between 2.6.1114492 and 2.6.1114493. In fact, this was one of the major reasons for me dumping linux in the first place. The 2.4.x kernels are the last stable linux kernels out there.

    That is just one example of something more important than "passes 4*10^30 fps in WoW" benchmark.

    As for security? Which is easier to audit and verify? A random pool of code and libraries distributed across hundreds of websites and maintainers, or a cohesive operating system whos entire codebase is in exactly one place?

  3. Benchmarks?!??!!!!11one!!? by CarpetShark · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Benchmarks between competing free software projects? Don't be silly! Next thing, you'll be advocating some sort of sane system, like choosing the best of breed technology based stats like benchmarks, and uniting behind it! Think what kind of chaos Free Software would be in, if everyone decided that OpenGL was THE low-level graphics layer, that gstreamer was THE codec API, that Vala was THE high-level language, that Git was THE modern version control system, or that FUSE was THE place to develop filesystem stuff. Why, you'd have a straightforward stack, with very little bloat, and tons of people honing a single implementation.

    Pandemonium, I tell you.

  4. Re:Man pages are not a quality control technique! by Brad_McBad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    The next time I'm remote managing a system on a command line, and need to use a new command I've not used before, I'll be sure and reflect on how it would be better if it were in HTML.

    You'd really happily build window manager dependencies into Gnu/Linux? I mean, you could use lynx, but the presentation would be a lot worse than the current man / info pages...