Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 7.2 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: Support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory; Support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails; csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository; Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2; Sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list."
Adds another anonymous reader, "You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors or via BitTorrent. There is also a quick review of the new features and upgrade instructions."
ZFS + Ports, take that Ubuntu!
I dunno about ZFS, but I've recently been playing with a freebsd install (7.1 I think), and ports, while a cool idea, seems pretty creaky in practice.
My main beefs were not with the infrastructure, which seemed OK, but that the package maintenance seemed pretty spotty: many many packages (even fairly "major" ones) were pretty out-of-date, even compared to e.g. debian stable, and in many cases they were installed as monolithic chunks where a bit of judicious splitting would have been very helpful -- for example, an otherwise fairly dependency-free library that happens to come with some demo apps that drag in all of OpenGL and X (it would have been better to put the apps with their heavy dependencies in a separate package, or make their inclusion easily configurable)!
Sadly, the ports collection felt kind of like a 2nd-class add-on (and I gather, that's essentially what it is). Even though there are many packages in debian where the maintainer should probably be doing a better job, on average debian's package collection feels a lot more solid to me that what freebsd has in ports...
We live, as we dream -- alone....
Obviously you have not actually used 4.2.2. Simply put it fixes the vast majority of the complaints with the 4.2.x branch.
Is ZFS production-ready now? With 7.1 it was 'more or less stable' if you increased the amount of kernel memory. This increase has now been made by default on x86-64, but not on i386. The release notes don't say anything about whether the remaining bugs have been fixed, nor about whether it works with 32-bit platforms without tuning.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
http://freebsd-image-gallery.netcode.pl/_daemonette/111143969_35533831ab.jpg
http://freebsd-image-gallery.netcode.pl/_daemonette/freebsd-002.jpg
http://freebsd-image-gallery.netcode.pl/_daemonette/freebsd-003.jpg
http://media.photobucket.com/image/penguin%20mascot%20girl/twistedliza/signature%20pics/blog/DSC00767e.jpg
http://images.celebrateexpress.com/mgen/merchandiser/38199.jpg
http://z.about.com/d/raleighdurham/1/0/u/8/-/-/Fat-Penguin-Clowns-at-Ringling-Bros-Circus.jpg
and not trolling, ive had great luck with BSD subversion servers and mailservers... but ive been transitioning away from BSD in our corporate environment because of a nasty 16 group limit in the kernel, the quirkyness of ports, and mostly its inability to be deployed and managed site-wide easily (ex: redhat has cobbler, koan, satellite, and kickstart but where is BSD in all of this?)
still waiting for autofs support as well, as converting from my autofs to amd on local machines is a pain.
if i have 3500 servers i need to deploy, pxe is still not supported without a kernel hack. makes for long nites.
Good people go to bed earlier.
First of all, I'm not trolling.
Most successful open source projects have some kind of corporate backing, whether it be developers, funding or both. Linux has IBM, HP, RedHat, etc. Sun sponsors and manages a number of open source projects.
The community behind FreeBSD have put together what seems to be (I've never used it for more than a few minutes at a time) a solid server operating system whose command-line code forms part of the basis of what is IMO the best consumer operating system (OS X). From what I understand, this is due to a small but devoted group of developers.
Still, not to bemoan the FreeBSD community's efforts, but I'm wondering if there's some kind of corporate backing, seeing as I'm certain several companies use it in critical production situations.
There was nothing about this in the Wikipedia entry.
This space left intentionally blank.
In 7,2, you still get the "ZFS is cosidered to be experimental" message when you boot. As mentioned, elsewhere, the 7.x branch retains the ZFS v6 code, and v13 will be in 8.0.
That said, I've put ZFS through its paces on the amd64 platform, and it works great (at least w/ the 2- and 4-GB RAM configurations I've had on my workstation). I don't think I've ever had a ZFS-caused panic on amd64. However, I couldn't find a stable config under i386 to save my life, but I don't really feel that's a problem because ZFS is truly a 64-bit subsystem and should be treated as such. If you're competent to administer large data sets to begin with, you'll be competent enough to take care of any tweaking ZFS may need (which is minimal under amd64, if needed at all).
Method of processing duck feet