Slashdot Mirror
FreeNAS Switching From FreeBSD To Debian Linux
dnaumov writes "FreeNAS, a popular, free NAS solution, is moving away from using FreeBSD as its underlying core OS and switching to Debian Linux. Version 0.8 of FreeNAS as well as all further releases are going to be based on Linux, while the FreeBSD-based 0.7 branch of FreeNAS is going into maintenance-only mode, according to main developer Volker Theile. A discussion about the switch, including comments from the developers, can be found on the FreeNAS SourceForge discussion forum. Some users applaud the change, which promises improved hardware compatibility, while others voice concerns regarding the future of their existing setups and lack of ZFS support in Linux."
Release 0.6x:
- User authentication I must add at minimum LDAP authentication... For NIS and RADIUS I must check if it's possible (don't know if it's possible to use PAM for samba).
Release 0.7x:
- Migrate to FreeBSD 7.0 (with ZFS support)
- Testing a new way for configuring/using share:
'Adding a new disk' will automatically initialize it (format under UFS) and mount it (transparent process for the user).
. 'Creating a share'(create a folder on a selected disk), with user/group/quota property on this share
Release 0.8x:
- Adding monitoring features (SNMP, email alerting, etc..) - Adding other features (I18n Web GUI, LCD, disk encryption, etc...)
Release 0.9x:
- Only Bug fixes, no more new features - This step will depend a lot's about the development of the "geom vinum tools". If this tools is not stable at this moment, I will replace it by 'geom mirror' for RAID 1 and by 'geom stripe' for RAID 0.
Release 1.0:
- The D day! - Lot's of documentation: User guide and developers guide.
and...
Date: 2009-09-17 17:23
Sender: votdev
--- cut ---
Anyway, 0.7 seems to be the last version of FreeNAS as it is right at the moment. For the next version the whole system will be recoded (what i'm doing at the moment). There will be no more embedded installs anymore, also the OS will be Debian.
Regards
Volker
By any other definition, this would be a fork. It's not even FreeNAS any more, it will be CoreNAS?
Anyone have more insight into what's REALLY going on with this project?
Isn't the real solution to start a new project for a Linux-based NAS solution and leave FreeNAS development to those who want to use FreeBSD?
Not only that, but FreeBSD is a far more reliable and higher-quality core than even Debian could ever hope to be.
The FreeBSD development process and team is far more integrated and centralized. This has resulted in a codebase that is much cleaner than what we see in the more distributed development model non-BSD open source software (including Linux).
Changes and new features go through a strenuous review process before they're admitted to the FreeBSD codebase. If code makes it into a public release of FreeBSD, you can be damn sure that it is of an extremely high quality, and has been reviewed by some of the best minds in the field.
This isn't as much the case with Linux and much of the userland software that Debian uses. The quality of the code is generally lower than that of FreeBSD's code, and bugs can creep in much easier.
For something as critical as storage, FreeBSD is clearly the way to go.
You are not inflammatory, you just give more meaning to the position of the first decimal point in the version number than it deserves.
Would the software magically be better if the version was 8.0? 2009.12? 3.141592? 666.123.789? There are many post-1.0 applications that are hopeless, buggy crap, quite a bit of them even commercial, and just as much sub-1.0 software of high stability and overall quality.
In this case, as with many FOSS projects, the sub-1.0 numbers probably mean "there are still features to be added before we consider our work complete". The keywords are "we", "consider" and "complete". "We" != "any other user with a different set of requirements", "consider" != "claim as absolute truth", "complete" != "stable". In other words, a 0.8 version might be perfectly stable, just not feature-complete from the author's point of view, and perfetly sufficient for a subset of potential users with less sophisticated needs.
And why 0.8 and not 2.3.075? My best guess is "because they could and they liked it better."
Case closed, have a good day.
This is Slashdot. Common sense is futile. You will be modded down.
i feel like the only think freenas had over openfiler was ZFS. i've been running openfiler for 2 years now and it has been rock solid.
without zfs why not go for the more mature linux based NAS?
If a vendor isn't willing to go to 1.0 then why should a customer have confidence? 1.0 is a milestone. Certainly it has absolutely no technical meaning, but that does not mean it has no meaning at all.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
[citation needed] is not a substitute for meaningful discussion and rebuttal.
"Linux is definitely faster and more feature-rich than FreeBSD." Keeping in the spirit of your post, would you care to post some benchmarks concerning the speed of linux vs. BSD in data storage, or for ZFS vs. btrfs?
at any rate, isn't stability more important in terms of this type of storage? if you're using a NAS-type device, i can't see how speed would be your primary concern, since you're limited by the NAS-style architecture right out the gate.
> Not only that, but FreeBSD is a far more reliable and
/usr/local. I'm sorry, but that's cheating.
> higher-quality core than even Debian could ever hope to be.
If that's true, it's only because FreeBSD refuses to include anything in the core. Even extremely basic things like Perl and bash are ports-tree stuff and go in
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.