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FreeBSD 8.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights:
Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here. You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release."
I was going to put Win7 on my HP dv7, but now this!
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
Most of this could be from a Linux distribution list of new features... Slightly ahead in some ways, slightly behind in others.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I was intending to install RC3 on a new desktop machine a few days ago, but got the error message "this version not available on this server". So I went to the options screen and changed it to 8.0-RELEASE just on a hunch and happily it was there and installed without a hitch. Definitely several good performance improvements over 7.2, especially when copying large amounts of data from a USB disk. So far this seems like a nice, solid release and I look forward to migrating my servers to it (after a month or so, just to be sure).
Caveat Utilitor
If only for the improvements to ZFS I'll give it a shot.
512 MB RAM, 20 GB disk, 200 GB transfer, five datacenters. $19.95/month.
PF + AltQ, a ZFS raidz array, and booting from a CF card. Excellent job, kudos to the FreeBSD team!
Since when have BSD's been known as primarily "desktop" operating systems?
s/Linux/Windows/g
s/FreeBSD/Linux/g
There will be your answer.
Congratulations to all involved!
FreeBSD is a great Free Unix system.
Nothing yet on the website. Only 8 rc3 released on November 12th.
But on the FTP there is something on Nov. 22 labelled as 8.0
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i386/8.0/
Personally I was rather disappointed to find out the installer doesn't support ZFS. For a ZFS-only system, you need to do some manual partitioning. I found it a bit hard-ish, even with their instructions.
FreeBSD is a very nice, clean system which is a pure joy to use as a server or desktop -- especially if you like to build your own software. But to each her own. :)
For quite a few years now we've had the ability to run linux binaries via a kernel module called the linuxulator. Handy for flash and a few other things.
Caveat Utilitor
wpa_supplicant needs to either be dumped and replaced with something better or the people that work on wpa_supplicant need rework it to support a wider variety of wifi cards
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
But to each her own.
Well, aren't you hip and and with it.
Seriously - some anonymous person makes vague claims about how it's "higher quality" - without defining "quality" or providing any citations, reasons, or examples, and it's modded "insightful"?!?! TWICE!??!!
What. The. Fuck!??!!
Here's my refutation of this post - containing just as much "insightful" commentary as yours:
Nuh-uh!
So, where are *my* "insightful" mods?
Her? This is Slashdot you know.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
If ZFS is what you want (and on a desktop that's unlikely), Solaris has more mature ZFS support than FreeBSD.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Support for more hardware, especially workstation oriented hardware?
Greater availability of applications? (Most desktop oriented apps are written for linux first and later possibly ported to bsd, many closed source apps cant be ported to bsd at all).
When i tried to use FreeBSD as a desktop, admittedly a few years ago, it worked well on my desktop (which was self assembled and intentionally bought using well known hardware) but wouldn't boot on my laptop (an ibm thinkpad 600e) and wouldn't run vmware (which was very new at the time if i remember and had no other alternatives)...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Sound works. That's why I switched for FreeBSD. Back in the 4.x days (around 2001) multiple applications could write to /dev/dsp (back then they needed to have /dev/dsp.1 and so on, but that was fixed with FreeBSD 5), and all could play sound even though my cheap AC97 on-board sound didn't support mixing in hardware. On Linux, apps needed to be rewritten with ALSA to take advantage of mixing, or needed to use sound daemons which gave horrific latency. Meanwhile, I was playing music with XMMS, getting sound effects in BZFlag, and having my mail and IM clients go bing in the background when I got a message. FreeBSD 8 improves this with a full OSSv4 implementation, including per-application volume channels. Unlike the 4Front OSS implementation, there are some hacks that let apps that use the old OSS 3 API (and ABI) use these by faking a mixer device for each app. It also has the highest-performance mixing algorithm around and supports a few things like encoded digital pass through (for AC3 and similar on an external decoder) without disabling the in-kernel mixing.
ZFS is pretty useful to a desktop user. Run hourly / daily snapshots as cron jobs to guard against accidental deletion and then use zfs send to transmit them to your backup server.
The ULE scheduler originally provided better performance on latency-sensitive workloads (a typical desktop) at the cost of throughput. As a result, it wasn't enabled by default. With FreeBSD 8, it's been improved and now does better on all workloads (including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks) and scales linearly to 8 cores (I've not seen tests beyond that).
Jails probably aren't useful to most desktop users, but they are to power users. With ZFS, creating a new fail filesystem is just a matter of cloning a fresh install, which is an O(1) operation (and very fast) and that gives you an isolated install to work with. Great for running untested or untrusted apps; just install them in a jail and they can't get out. With FreeBSD 8, you can now assign a CPU to a jail and each jail has a complete virtualised instance of the network stack, so FreeBSD jails are effectively very lightweight VMs.
DTrace, again, is more useful to developers than end users. It lets you insert probes into running applications (using binary rewriting tricks, where function prologs are replaced with unconditional jumps to JIT-compiled code that does the profiling). This is by far the most powerful profiling and debugging framework I've come across.
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
No, because Linux does add features not available on Windows.
factor 966971: 966971
Your blog has been a great resource for me for a very long time. Thanks for all the informative posts... you were the only set of instructions that made sense for doing a binary upgrade :-)
Thank you sir!!!
Meet the new Boss, Same as the old Boss.
.deb vs .rpm? Debian & BSD they can now handle each other's packages (like KDE apps can run in Gnome and vice versa if the right libraries are installed) and I stand back and wonder if Google and others might be right where the apps are everything and the underlying OS means very little to the average consumer.
Maybe it's me, or are we starting to see BSD & Linux become the new Gnome vs KDE or new
Irregardless, cheers to the OpenBSD crew on another release, even if I'm a Kubuntu user. When one of us does well, we all do.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Why on earth would a desktop user run FreeBSD instead of Linux, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Linux?
I'm not staying FreeBSD is better than Linux but FreeBSD is a more consistent system.
Linux, even with the best distributions, is a bunch of separate bits stuck together with 15 ways to do any given thing.
FreeBSD also does have some stuff Linux doesn't like PF, Jails, and better ZFS support.
I did not read your blog using freebsd-update this time, but as far as I see, it would not have saved me needing hands on assistance for the system that I tried to update remotely with the last connection being a wlan. I added the appropriate lines to rc.conf before the update, but after the first reboot with the new kernel and old userland, the wlan did not come up. Thinking about it, nothing else could be expected...
It appeared on the main ftp server on Monday and only an hour later on some of the mirrors. Now most of them got the bits. This is really not the time to stress the main ftp server more than necessary. The checksum files from the main server might be worse getting -- or better yet, wait for the official announcement that will contain them, too.
Well said. I agree with everything except one bit:
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Laptops. Power usage.
FreeBSD isn't (AFAIK) tickless. Furthermore, a lot of my laptop's power saving features (SATA power saving, FB compression) aren't supported at all. My WiFi card is, but I'm not sure if the power-saving stuff is supported for that either.
With Linux, all of the above features are supported. As soon as FreeBSD gains support for those, I'm switching.
The real litigious bastards...
Seems pretty roundabout... to make youtube work they needed Flash. To make Flash work they got Fedora 10 compatibly going.
I'm almost convinced. I've been toying with FreeBSD 7 on a vm a while ago, and I liked it. There's a certain "feel" about the whole system, and I really like that feel. Now I'm considering putting it on my laptop. I'm just wondering about a few possible showstoppers. Tell me about...
- Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt? I like installing&testing new stuff, trying out various funny Python libraries, etc. I need the process of finding, installing, upgrading, removing packages to be quick and efficient.
- Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.
- Full disk encryption. This is a must and I'm not going anywhere without it. I suppose it's there; but can I have swap on encrypted logical volume and still be able to do suspend to disk? (suspend to ram is also really handy)
- NetworkManager? Or something equivalent. I don't want to go to commandline unless a task that I'm performing demands by its very nature a command-oriented user interface.
- 3D support on Intel graphics?
- read&write support for ext3, ntfs, etc for Linux and Windows inter-op?
That'd be all for now...
The solaris implementation of DTrace is also significantly better than the one found in FreeBSD. If these are the features you are interested in, you really should be using OpenSolaris, not FreeBSD.
Yet cheers on the new OpenBSD release of FreeBSD?
FreeBSD has support for /dev/null which, in my experience, is faster than xfs and just as reliable.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
I've been using FreeBSD as a secondary desktop environment for about two years now, having used some flavor of BSD since I ran NetBSD 1.0 on my Amiga 3000.
For the most part, the experience is not dissimilar to using Linux as a desktop. I use WINE to supplement a few programs that have poor equivalents in the POSIX/GTK/Qt world, just as I would under Linux. Otherwise, most of the programs I use would be the same ones I'd used under either Windows or Linux.
FreeBSD as a desktop environment shines over Linux in that the sound management is easier. I also find the package installation, at least under the i386 branch, to be easier as well. Whatever doesn't have a package, ports seems to do a superior job than under Linux.
However, in my opinion, FreeBSD will never beat Linux as a desktop replacement until Adobe Flash, hardware video and 3D acceleration and library management are better handled. Linux has FreeBSD beat in most of those respects. Most of the core FreeBSD team is aware of this, but the work required to fix it just seems to be above what people are willing to donate. So, FreeBSD goes without.
What? You can emulate Linux binaries?
Yes, FreeBSD has been able to run Linux binaries for years. A little effort on your part to do some research before you post could have saved you from looking like a fool. Oh, wait..
Another day closer to redwood heaven
If apps were "coded like console games"... *Every application would need to include device drivers for every piece of hardware on the system. For every system you want your app to run on. So that boils down to coding (or getting from the manufacturer) drivers for every computer device in existence. *There would be no multi-tasking. Let's say you are working on something in Microsoft Office. In order to look up something on Google real quick, you'd need to save your work, unload Office, load up Firefox, look up whatever you needed to, unload Firefox, re-load Office, and open your file back up. I could go on, but I don't feel like doing so in a reply to an AC. Simply put, there's a good reason that operating systems to exist. They act as an abstraction to the hardware, making development of applications *way* easier since you only have to code your program to interface with the APIs of an operating system, which in turn has drivers installed to work with whatever particular hardware is on a machine that you are trying to run your app on. I'm pretty sure all the game consoles developed in the past decade have their own pseudo-OS, to let Xbox Live etc. run concurrently with all the games. Or maybe they just have libraries for that stuff that they give to the developers to include in their games. Either way, it works because all PS2s/Xboxen/Wii are the same. That is not true of personal computers.
Is there some WaterRoof (OS X utility for IPFW) equivalent for FreeBSD?
A more complete feature list :
-> ZFS ... you know what to do)
-> DTrace (if anyone tells you SystemTap is equivalent, take them out and shoot them in the head. Twice. Carefully make sure they're dead. Shoot a few more times to make sure)
-> jails (if anyone tells you chroot or even vserver is equivalent, see above)
-> pf, and even other options (anyone tells you iptables
-> faster routing code (all juniper routers run a modified version of fbsd, for good reason)
-> actual coherent system (ever worked on a busybox linux system ?)
-> drivers are not so plentiful, but they are better quality. Rare hardware simply doesn't work, instead of sort-of working and then crashing your system every now and then
-> binary compatibility, not just with linux, but SCO and System V
-> sensible network defaults
-> default filesystem supports snapshots. It's not impossible with linux, but still this is nice
-> netgraph : there is no such thing as a way to mangle packets that fbsd doesn't support. Plus : easy to add stuff to. Fast (if not perfect, but faster than doing stuff in linux user space), and ultimate flexibility
-> application-level firewall (meaning applications can push firewall rules into the kernel that only apply to that one application. Helpful for stability and ddos mitigation)
-> coherent, existing organisation, polite even (try getting something done via lkml. I hear it's been known to cause nervous breakdowns. (jokingly) Even murder)
So, personally, I'd agree with "better quality". Especially for network servers.
If you want to use it on a laptop ... better look elsewhere. It will run, though.
Because it has a BSD license and not a GNU license.
-- I ignore anonymous replies to my comments and postings.
Anyone post an image to run on VMware Player?
"I might have made a tactical error in not going to a physician for 20 years." -- Warren Zevon
FreeBSD 4.x was hot back in the old days of 2003ish. After pulling my hair out with Gentoo FreeBSD was well integrated and stable.
I know there is experimental 5 year old patches for java 1.3x which I successfully compiled which looked like a bootstrap hack with an emulated jvm just to compile it. FreeBSD 5.x was just terrible and i kept using 4.x until 4.12 before switching back to Windows. I hope it got better as not even my simple usb keyboard that was supported with FBSD 3.,x and 4.x would not work with 5.x and 6.x
http://saveie6.com/
Sound works
So does package management. Video, networking, performance.... The FreeBSD was much more organized environment then the feathered alternative was at the time, which is why I also switched over back in the 4.x days.
Sure, everyone has advanced over the years, but i still haven't seen many reasons to leave the bsd camp.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks
No, it doesn't. However, beating Linux was one of motivations for rewriting the old O(1) scheduler.
What's the point in the screenshots? It looks like every other GNOME desktop. (or KDE desktop for the KDE screenshots)
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt?
Install portupgrade and then installing from both source and binary works nicely. I've never had uninstalling fail, but if you like testing and uninstalling stuff then just create a cloned copy of the base system (with ZFS), set it as a jail, try it there, and then delete the whole jail later. It's fast and easy, and will definitely clean up anything that's left over (temporary configuration files and so on).
- Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.
Depends on the machine. It's been a few years since I tried to run FreeBSD on anything that wasn't 100% supported out of the box, but your milage may vary.
- Full disk encryption. This is a must and I'm not going anywhere without it. I suppose it's there; but can I have swap on encrypted logical volume and still be able to do suspend to disk? (suspend to ram is also really handy)
OpenBSD was the first system to get encrypted swap and FreeBSD copied it quickly (5.3 was the first to support it, but 6.0 tweaked it to use GEOM). Not sure about suspend to encrypted swap, but it's a placebo if you're expecting true suspend to disk; it's not even theoretically possible to do it securely without something like a TPM, although that doesn't stop a few operating systems claiming it. Without encrypted swap, suspend to RAM and disk work fine on my ThinkPad R31.
Encrypted volumes were supported with Vinim years ago, and GEOM when it was introduced. I'm not sure if they are natively supported with ZFS, but you can always use a ZVOL as a GEOM provider and encrypt that.
- NetworkManager? Or something equivalent. I don't want to go to commandline unless a task that I'm performing demands by its very nature a command-oriented user interface.
No idea. Unlike Linux, the ifconfig tool on the command line doesn't suck, so I've never bothered looking at graphical alternatives. If you want a pointy-clicky system then I'd suggest that you look at PC-BSD, which is a more user-oriented FreeBSD distribution.
- 3D support on Intel graphics?
Given that the Intel drivers are developed by the FreeBSD DRI maintained, I'd be very surprised if they didn't.
- read&write support for ext3, ntfs, etc for Linux and Windows inter-op?
Ext3 uses the same layout as ext2, which is supported in-kernel. NTFS uses the same userspace driver as Linux.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.
Works for me.
Live UFS dump is broken.
Works for me.
USB mass storage support is broken.
Wine is not supported;
And this is FreeBSD's fault why?
http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64
ZFS in double parity mode is broken
Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.
MTRR for older ATI cards is broken
If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
If you want to use it on a laptop ... better look elsewhere. It will run, though.
Runs great on my Inspiron M600.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
The real time, low latencey kernel available to user accounts is pretty much the only reason I do. It's a must for multitrack sound recording.
The last time I was using FreeBSD regularly (late 4.x through 6.0), the real-time kernel access required for low-latency recording (a must for multitrack recording) was only available if you were running as root. At this time it was available via Igno Molnar's kernel patch and a rebuild.
My understanding was that the structure blocking users from real time kernel access is an intentional security design and very unlikely to change in FreeBSD. Do you happen to know if it has?
Have to disagree with you. I find Linux (well, Debian anyway) to be more consistent than FreeBSD. I manage a few FreeBSD boxes at my work, and I've found that configuration files and service startup scripts are better managed in Debian.
Linux has iptables instead of pf. From what I've used of pf, it doesn't have anything that cannot be done by iptables.
I do like Jails. While you can achieve the same thing with virtual machines, Jails is better with resources. Still, if we're talking about a desktop user here, it's a useless feature.
Speaking of desktop users, they will certainly like the better hardware support of Linux. For a regular user, they'll also prefer a distribution like Ubuntu. So the original commenter still has a good point.
None of this is available on Linux. Yes there are half-assed work arounds to do the same thing, but they don't work as well.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
As above. However, i've run freebsd quite happily on a laptop before (back in the 6.0 days, even). You just need to make sure the hardware support is there. AS you do with any OS - even on Windows i'm particular with the hardware I buy as the shiniest/cheapest/best value hardware in the world is no good without stable driver support...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
wifi works with freebsd, you just need to RTFM.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Flash problem will hopefully go away with HTML 5. 3d acceleration works fine once set up. What probs have you had with library management? Being able to build from ports to suit the version of library X you have on your sytem, rather than what the package depends on is a great strength, imho...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
I'd install it and give it a shot. You're right about the "feel". I think its because the kernel and userland are put out by the same core team, with the same quality standards and policies. It feels much more like an integrated system, rather than slapped together components.
I can't wait until CLANG is the default compiler, keen to see the speed-up...
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
Sounds like FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x!
Plain and simple... Unix is over 30 yrs old. A rugged, mature, operating system in comparison to the still teenaged Linux. Just the ports system makes BSD eclipse the nightmare of program installation on a Linux box. Yes, you do have lots of nice sand-boxed apps that can install nicely.. but BSD allows you an easy install everything in the Ports dir. I'll take a battle-scarred Unix any day over Linux.
I call computer-illiteracy job security
parent is not a troll, the bullet points are accurate. gotta love the moderation system - any time anyone brings up anything in any way anti linux.... as someone who has used both (in a 2500 employee company) for a decade+ ... he speaks the truth.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
That's a pretty poor definition of 'works'. To me, it means that I just install the OS and it goes. Windows frequently fails this test, mind you, as do many Linux distributions (and Ubuntu often fails on older hardware, where some other distribution would succeed, so it's not like there's a one size fits all fix from the Penguin either.)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
> Not sure about suspend to encrypted swap, but it's a placebo
> if you're expecting true suspend to disk;
My current setup is an encrypted volume, containing an LVM volume, containing root, swap and home. When I resume from s2d, it asks me for the passphrase just like during a normal boot, and only when the swap shows up it tries to resume from it. I guess that this is just as safe as a normal shutdown.
Big thanks to you (and everyone else) for all the replies.
Linux is Unix, it's just not UNIX. If you want to be a pedant, at least be correct.
I don't think there's ever been a point at which any of the *BSDs hasn't had a ton of broken stuff in ports.
You're a fanboy, and should stop, because you're not helping BSD.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.
Works for me.
It doesn't work with l4d2 dedicated server (segfaults), it doesn't work with rosetta (signal 4). Reproducible failure > "works for me."
Live UFS dump is broken.
Works for me.
Bullshit. UFS snapshots have been broken for a long time; read the thread. Core developers acknowledge it. Dump -L relies on UFS snapshots, and is therefore broken.
USB mass storage support is broken.
Still broken.
Wine is not supported on AMD64
And this is FreeBSD's fault why?
It works on Gentoo AMD64. Why can't FreeBSD support it?
ZFS in double parity mode is broken
Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.
That's right, you are guessing. You clearly haven't tried any of the things I described. So far, you're 0/6.
MTRR for older ATI cards is broken
If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.
Feel free to actually reference a bug report. You're full of it. "works for me!" How informative... it doesn't, and if you'd tried it, you'd know. Come back when you've actually tried any of the things I mentioned, dipshit.
>> ZFS in double parity mode is broken
> Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.
How retarded can you be? Please stop embarrassing us who dig and use FreeBSD but don't need to see it through rose-tinted glasses (or the whole scene as a pissing contest).
> > Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.
> Works for me.
Try to run the Neko VM, then.
Segfault, segfault, segfault. While it of course works like a charm on a real Linux system.
"ahah, you stupid, Neko is in the ports tree, just install it and enjoy the native version"
Yeah, but while it's in the ports tree, it obviously was never tested because it can't even start a thread without immediately crashing. Oh and a bug report is open for years, but apparently nobody knows how to make it work and nobody wants to remove broken ports from the ports tree either.
{{.sig}}
> -> faster routing code (all juniper routers run a modified version of fbsd, for good reason)
Yes, the good reason is the BSD license. They can use it for free and make money out of it without needing to opensource nor contribute back anything.
> -> actual coherent system
Uh? Oh come I can't compile that software against OpenSSL? Ah, it's using OpenSSL from /usr/local/lib, not the one in /usr/lib . But how come OpenSSH is linked against the one in /usr/local/ ? Ah, because it's the one from ports that overwrote the one in /usr/bin thanks to the awesome OVERRIDE_BASE feature.
Seriously, it's a real mess.
{{.sig}}
Ooops, that should have been 'jail filesystem'. I think I press the j and f keys with the same finger, but on opposite hands, so there's probably some dodgy wiring in my spine. Or I'm just so used to typing fail on the Internet that my brain autocorrected jail...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
FreeBSD has jails, which let you run virtual FreeBSD instances with a lot less overhead than KVM, and VirtualBox if you need to run other operating systems in virtual machines. Oh, and KQEMU also works on FreeBSD if you prefer something closer to KVM.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Yeah, that was my bad. I blame a lack of coffee.
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
There's less of a gap with FreeBSD 8. As I recall, FreeBSD now ships the same (or a slightly newer) version of ZFS than Solaris, however OpenSolaris has a newer version with a couple of interesting features (deduplication, for example). Both FreeBSD 8 and Solaris have very nice sound subsystems and I think FreeBSD jails are now up to feature parity with Solaris Zones (possibly slightly ahead; I'm not sure if you can nest Zones in Solaris). DTrace on Solaris is newer than in FreeBSD, although I've not looked at what the differences are. FreeBSD generally has better hardware support, although Solaris scales a lot better on systems with more than 8 cores (I wouldn't want to run FreeBSD on a 64-processor SMP box, while Solaris would consider that a mid-range system). FreeBSD 8 includes fine grained locking in the network stack, but Solaris has now moved to a lockless message passing model for the network stack, so should scale a lot better if you have lots of cores and lots of 10GigE connections.
In terms of userland, FreeBSD is a lot simpler. Solaris is backwards-compatible with every previous version of Solaris or SunOS ever made and contains SysV, BSD, and GNU userlands that you can switch between. FreeBSD just has a BSD userland. Solaris 10 (I think, maybe 9) replaced the SysV init system with SMF, which is conceptually quite similar to Apple's Launchd, but quite different in terms of implementation. FreeBSD uses RCng, which is a lot simpler and a bit less powerful. Solaris default installs include a lot of third-party software, providing a complete workstation or server environment, while FreeBSD installs a very lean system and expects you to add other things yourself. Which you prefer is a case of personal preference (I find Solaris too cluttered, other people find FreeBSD too sparse).
Oh, and I wouldn't say wanting ZFS on a desktop is unlikely. Snapshots and clones are both useful on a desktop and zfs send / zfs receive is incredibly useful for incremental backups (take a snapshot and then just stream the changes between two snapshots to a remote machine over the network or to DVD).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Installing Flash is a pain at the moment (you need to install the Linux version then run it via the plugin wrapper), but once it's installed it provides a better experience than the default Linux install because it runs in a separate process. Any time flash crashes, it just crashes the plugin without taking the browser down. Note that this is entirely possible on Linux too (and is used on some systems to run 32-bit flash in a 64-bit browser), and it's a shame that it isn't the default everywhere. Ideally, the flash plugin should also chroot itself somewhere so that the inevitable security hole in flash doesn't compromise anything important.
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I use slackware for my home web server / ssh-ing and torrenting from work. I have always been interested in BSDs but never really bothered to try it out. From what I understand Slackware is pretty similar to BSDs (do it yourself/rc.* scripts). What would be the main advantages of switching to a BSD? The ports system?
It doesn't work with l4d2 dedicated server (segfaults), it doesn't work with rosetta (signal 4). Reproducible failure > "works for me."
Too bad. File a bug report.
Bullshit. [freebsd.org] UFS snapshots have been broken for a long time; read the thread. Core developers acknowledge it. Dump -L relies on UFS snapshots, and is therefore broken.
No dump is not broken, sorry you have crappy hardware. No "core developer" agreed with you.
Still broken.
Works good here. Works good according to mailing list feedback. I'm so sorry it doesn't work for you. Maybe file a bug report.
It works on Gentoo AMD64. Why can't FreeBSD support it?
Gentoo AMD64 has 64 bit wine? Really? Maybe you should switch to Gentoo then.
That's right, you are guessing. You clearly haven't tried any of the things I described. So far, you're 0/6.
I see you have Internet Tough Guy Syndrome, but I assure you I've done these things.
Feel free to actually reference a bug report. You're full of it.
Well works for me is actually pretty informative. You say it doesn't, I say it does which mean one of us is wrong. I'm betting it's not me since the public archive agrees with me.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
Encrypted swap is easy: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/swap-encrypting.html sim
It's UNIX-like and licensed under the GNU's Not UNIX General Public License. It is not UNIX.
And in that moment, the student was enlightened. Or at least, was given the opportunity. You can lead a whore to Vasser, but you can't make him think.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well said.
Linux people talk about freedom and following standards and keeping things open, and yet they come up with awful linux-only hacks and conventions.
Like, why come out with ALSA, when they should have fixed their version of OSS instead..
I was amazed logging into a linux box recently how un-unix it's becoming.
That old comment "FreeBSD is for people that like Unix - Linux is for people that hate windows" is truer now more than ever.
Sig out of date
I have been backing up my servers using ufs snapshots since FreeBSD 7.2 and have no problems.
I also use snapshots for immediate access to historic versions of files, again no problems.
It works and works well.
Sig out of date
>> faster routing code (all juniper routers run a modified version of fbsd, for good reason)
> Yes, the good reason is the BSD license. They can use it for free and make money out of it without needing to opensource nor contribute back anything.
Way to go shooting yourself in the foot. Whilst what you say is actually correct, Juniper DO contribute back to Freebsd.
If you'd read the bloomin' article (yes, I know, this is slashdot) it even mentions some of the stuff they've contributed to the 8 release!
Your GPL-warped brain seems to think that the GPL is the only way to get stuff contributed.
Take your blinkers off
Sig out of date
"No, because Linux does add features not available on Windows."
No, because Freebsd does add features not available on Linux.
Fixed that for you.
One interesting and yet unexplored scenario with FreeBSD is using it for the ZFS in small "appliance" devices, like ARM-based NAS servers. Give it enough RAM and there appears a very interesting opportunity.
-- Sig down
I'll concur with Galactic Dominator - I used Linux emulation for almost a year as part of my backup strategy, before switching to duplicity. I still use dump (and yes, I'm doing dumps of live, mounted, read/write filesystems - all of them - nightly.
I also use ZFS on my system, and have never had corruption or a failure of any kind. As for double parity mode - I'm not sure what the status is, but as of version 8.0, ZFS is no longer considered experimental.
Why, no, I haven't meta-moderated lately. Thanks for asking!
Some of the highlights:...a new USB stack
Does that include support for USB 3.0?