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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."
You know that those binary nVidia drivers also run on Solaris and FreeBSD, right? And that PC-BSD includes them on the install CD?
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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...
I don't mean to slam your dick in the door, but one cannot compare ports (apples) to packages (oranges).
Now before you fire back with, "But Debian says packages are both source and binaries !", allow me to reply, "Damn you, Debian." Seriously, though -- apt-get from Debian uses either source packages (equivalent to freebsd ports) or binary packages (equivalent to freebsd packages), depending on the commands you feed to it.
Here's how FreeBSD separates source installs from binary installs:
Ports: Slower source installs compiled on your machine with make.conf optimizations for your system's architecture. Gentoo (portage/emerge) and Debian (apt-get) have Jordan Hubbard (now working for Apple on Darwin) to thank for these. Quick explanation below in the code quote:
Installation process for installing imaginary app "slashdot" (assuming you have the ports tree installed on your system):
Packages: Fast binary install that is compiled on someone else's system with their choice of "make config" options, for their architecture; usually a very generic build. These use pkg_tools to install, delete, get info for these binary packages.
Installation process for installing imaginary app "slashdot":
When i say slow and fast for install speeds, these comments are relative to two things: source install and binary install. Source compilation time for monolithic packages like firefox3, openoffice.org, xorg, gnome2, etc. take upwards or 6 hours to several days depending on the system doing the compiling. The loss in program responsiveness by using a generic binary package install may be worth it(unnoticeable) to save 3 says compile time. With computers getting faster, optimizations are less noticeable, etc., however, programs also demand more resources as time goes on, andso this may be a wash; and one STILL may want to compile certain programs for their own machine.
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
The reason for binary package apathy on FreeBSD, as I see it, is as follows. Most people that use FreeBSD don't care about binary packages beyond the base package for a RELEASE branch install from ftp or cd/dvd. For all other programs, most users will compile from source using ports and fetch new versions using portsnap, and lastly upgrade to said new versions using portupgrade. For aforementioned monolithic programs like openoffice.org, one may want to just bite the bullet and avoid a 3 day compile (which currently takes up ~12 gigs of space) including several license agreements, etc. to compile the beast, and just install a precompiled binary package from the "ooo" site.
With that said, most ports maintainers are fairly quick to release the latest version of a port, and some even maintain not only the release port of a program, but the beta. e.g. there is a firefox3(curren
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.
The problem with ZFS on OpenSolaris i386 is that ZFS is very heavy on 64-bit arithmetic. The only way of doing this on x86 is to store the 64-bit value across two registers, meaning that each calculation uses 4 registers in total, dramatically increasing register churn. This makes performance suck.
The problem on FreeBSD is that the adaptive replacement cache runs out of memory and the kernel panics. This is a much, much more serious problem. I'll take slow-but-working over crashes-and-loses-data any day.
Still, I'm looking forward to 8 RELEASE if it includes ZFS v13 and the improvements to the sound subsystem (per-vchan volume, faster mixing, and so on).
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