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FreeBSD 8.2 Released

Posted by timothy on from the free-software-keeps-on-chugging dept.

meta coder writes with word of the release of FreeBSD 8.2: "This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights includes improvements in Xen support and various bugfixes."

2 of 183 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why use FreeBSD when you can use Linux? by greg1104 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'll bite. The main reasons I consider using FreeBSD nowadays are:

    1) Reasonable filesystem support. ext3 and ext4 are just terrible filesystem for 24x7 production systems. The potential for long fsck times alone is enough to remove them from a lot of serious applications. XFS does better, but with its lack of popularity the user base is a little scary. Meanwhile, FreeBSD has ZFS, which is just a better filesystem that almost any other choice. And it also has UFS2, which avoids the whole "let's keep the server down while we do a long filesystem check sometimes" problem Linux suffers with by doing background fsck.

    2) The new FreeBSD 8.2 includes userland DTrace support, which has been the missing piece that has kept earlier verisons from replacing Solaris for me on a lot of systems. systemtap on Linux just completely misses the point from a complexity and "scary" perspective. It just doesn't have that feel that you're not going to hurt the running process by using it that DTrace has always managed.

  2. KDE 4.5.5? by tyrione · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Now how sad is it that FreeBSD 8.2 has KDE 4.5.5 before Debian Sid? Great news for FreeBSD but truly pathetic for Debian, who keeps punting on any exact dates for KDE 4.6 builds, let alone 4.5.5.