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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
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
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
Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer.
Wow - your impeccable logic has convinced me! Where do I sign up?
Right here!
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
But to each her own.
Well, aren't you hip and and with it.
Are you running into the "need to create wlan0 instead of using the wifi device directly in 8.0" change? This has tripped up a lot of people.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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!
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
Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)
FreeBSD has ported pf from OpenBSD.
Pf is nice.
What utter drivel.
I'm sure FreeBSD some times performs better or with greater stability than Linux, and I'm just as sure that some times it's the other way around. Some times Windows beats them both. And who knows, perhaps even Solaris. It depends on a lot of things, though, and to say that FreeBSD is simly 'better' for 'serious' tasks just makes me convinced that you've never used a computer for serious tasks.
As for your other claims, that "FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or the flashiest X desktops and themes": that's also wrong. FreeBSD can use all the X desktops and all the themes that Linux can use. Nvidia makes drivers for FreeBSD, too.
You know you're on Slashdot when a jar full of fanboy wank is called 'insightful'.
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...
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.
FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or the flashiest X desktops and themes, ...
Hey, Neither does Windows 7!
Possibly that is the point. Reminding people that the 'Linux desktop' actually has very little to do with Linux.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The maintainer of the freebsd port of pf is the same person as the openbsd author. FreeBSD current usually lags a few weeks in patchset from openbsd in regards to pf, and in either release you're generally running the same version.
brandelf -t FreeBSD
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 run FreeBSD, having PF ported gives you a more sane choice of firewall there, but if you're setting out specifically to run PF, OpenBSD gives some major benefits. The code is several years ahead of FreeBSD's port. Watch some of the recent presentations to see what's changed - see links to a couple of related videos at http://spacehopper.org/pfvids/
Sorry if this comes across as a flame, but as the guy who wrote FreeBSD Update, perhaps you can answer a couple of questions:
Firstly, why is it so slow? I can cvsup and recompile the tree and install in less time that it takes freebsd-update upgrade to run; the two install steps then take even longer. If I run systat -iostat, I see it hitting the disk incredibly hard. Couldn't it just compare the last modification date of most of the files with the time of the last upgrade? Possibly this has been fixed, as updating from 8-RC3 to 8-RELEASE seems to be going a lot faster than going from RC-2 to RC-3 (and has actually finished while typing this post. Previous updates took a good 3-4 hours; longer than compiling all of LLVM + Clang on that machine).
Secondly, is it possible to make the merge marginally less stupid? Every time I run freebsd-update it prompts me to okay changes to files that I've never edited (and have no idea what it is even for), where the only change is the comment at the top telling me the FreeBSD version the file came from. I then have to say 'yes' a few dozen times, and at twice while doing that I've managed to type yes to okay one change which actually was important and left my system unbootable. One was a change to one of the init scripts in the bit that mounted the default filesystems; it tried to merge the two versions (even though the file was not one that I had modified, or that users ever should touch) and ended up with complete nonsense so the shell aborted the script while trying to mount filesystems. I only fixed that one by booting to single user mode, deleting the script and grabbing a copy from cvs.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News