Feature-Rich FreeBSD 10 Alpha Released

An anonymous reader writes "The first alpha release of FreeBSD 10.0 is now available for download. FreeBSD 10 features include replacing GCC with LLVM/Clang, VPS support, an AMD Radeon KMS support, Raspberry Pi support, Bhyve for HVN virtualization, and ARM EABI support."

Comments

Hurrah?

[DavidClarkeHR]

Year of the BSD desktop.... FINALLY!

Re:Hurrah?

[geek]

OSX = BSD, so yeah, its been year of BSD on the desktop for about a decade.

Re:Hurrah?

[__aaltlg1547]

Not really. OSX contains much of BSD, but it also contains lots and lots of proprietary code.

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the proprietary code is interface. There is plenty proprietry code that isn't interface, but not even much of that is OS material. OS X is layered. Interface layer, application layers... and system layers. Contrary to what most believe, an interface is not an operatng system... its window dressing. As far as the guts of the OS X is concerned, i.e. the operating system itself... it is sooooo BSD that it's what makes OS X UNIX. (I know, "BSD's not UNIX!" , and then, one day it was).

Re:Hurrah?

[kthreadd]

OSX = BSD, so yeah, its been year of BSD on the desktop for about a decade.

It includes part of the FreeBSD userland. I don't know if I agree that it makes it BSD. The FSF would probably agree though since they insist that Linux + the GNU userland should be called GNU/Linux, so they would probably argue that it should be called BSD/OS X if they were interested.

Re:Hurrah?

[Osgeld]

aka all the proprietary stuff is the stuff people give a shit about

Re: Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

bsd/xnu for consistency

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not just userland. Much of the OS X kernel is derived from FreeBSD and NetBSD, too.

The problem, though, is that Apple has slowly stopped developing the Unix parts. They've literally deprecated fork, because they can't be bothered to make it work reliably with Core Framework. Neither are they tracking POSIX or BSD developments anymore, having stopped several years ago. OS X's POSIX support is a full release behind. They're compliant to the 2001 specification, but the latest is 2008, plus fixes. In a few years, their POSIX support will be about as useful as Windows', in terms of interoperability with modern FOSS.

Instead, their system engineers have been busy reinventing the wheel by replacing core C code with C++ and Objective-C, for no apparent reason.

Re:Hurrah?

[tlambert]

Not just userland. Much of the OS X kernel is derived from FreeBSD and NetBSD, too.

Almost all of the BSD in the kernel is based on BSD 4.4-Lite2 and NetBSD; there are a couple of small sections, which ironically I wrote, that were pulled in from FreeBSD, like the BSD parts of the init code, and parts that generally everyone wrote, like chunks of the networking stack. I really wanted to change some of the VM APIs to be more like FreeBSD, i.e. in band errors in value returns should have been converted to value returned into variables passed by address with out of band error returns, but this would have required work on the part of the Intel guys prior to the Intel code integration.

The problem, though, is that Apple has slowly stopped developing the Unix parts.

This is BS.

They've literally deprecated fork, because they can't be bothered to make it work reliably with Core Framework.

No, that's a combination of several factors, some of them being Apple having poor representation on the UNIX steering committee. Specifically regarding the committee, there's no such thing as a pthread_atexec() and several other APIs which would be necessary in order to make fork() deterministically useful in already multithreaded programs.

The CoreFoundation factor is a combination of GCD, which starts and stops threads behind the programs back (and can't register exec handlers), and directory services, which for non-root processes starts another thread as a means of security partitioning to support everything DNS and network address related. It doesn't actually need to do this, and neither does GCD, but between that and the missing process lifecycle management functions in POSIX for threads, it's not supportable.

Basically, CoreFoundation is a piece of shit. It's now showing its initial lack of threads support in the design, and binary backward compatibility prevents it being redesigned. Catch-22.

The positive side of this is that people effectively have to use posix_spawn[p]() instead, which means they don't have to copy a massive fricking address space from one process to the other, which is expensive as hell in Mach, since they haven't adopted the red/black tree acceleration for ptov[] translations, mostly because there's too much code that relies on address aliases. In CS terms, the p:v has a cardinality of 1:N instead of 1:!, which breaks code relying on ptov(). There wasn't a lot of it, but there was absolutely no hope of getting rid of the aliases without the VM API changes I mentioned previously.

So boo fricking hoo: use LaunchServices like you were supposed to be doing when using CoreFoundation, and quit using fork() directly, and your problems will go away.

Neither are they tracking POSIX or BSD developments anymore, having stopped several years ago.

The only "tracking" of BSD kernel code that happened since 2003 that I'm aware of (but I left Apple in 2011) was in the networking code, and there was precious little of that, since Apple and BSD selected different concurrency models. BSDs is arguably more scalable, if you have unlimited memory to burn, other wise you want XNUs. You probably want XNUs anyway, particularly if you want to take cores on and offline out from under the CPU for power management or thermal budgetary reasons, and the scalability issues can be addressed.

OS X's POSIX support is a full release behind. They're compliant to the 2001 specification, but the latest is 2008, plus fixes. In a few years, their POSIX support will be about as useful as Windows', in terms of interoperability with modern FOSS.

That just asinine.

First off, the next jump to standards conformance, if any, will be unlikely to be 2008, since it's not going to be widely adopted by industry until IBM and Oracle can get their shit together, which takes more than 5 years, since it includes a migration strategy for mai

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

The UNIX side of OS X has been just fine in the recent releases. The problems with OS X are:

1. It doesn't have a real package management system.
2. Long turnaround time for security patches. They should stop this insane "we have to wait until 10.x.y until we ship this patch even though it's ready." A proper package management system would certainly help there.

Re:Hurrah?

[marcello_dl]

> Most of the proprietary code is interface.

But that is what makes the desktop. You say that essentially in the rest of your post

Re:Hurrah?

[tlambert]

The UNIX side of OS X has been just fine in the recent releases. The problems with OS X are:

1. It doesn't have a real package management system.

It's called "drag and drop"; properly written applications are self-contained in directories represented by the application icon. If you follow the Mac model, and don't try to install your files all over from hell to breakfast, there's no issue. This is why a lot of demo machines in stores now have epoxy in their USB ports (e.g. the ones at Fry's), since people were stealing already activated copies of Microsoft Office by plugging in their iPod shuffle or other thumb-drive and just dragging it over.

If you want to install all over from hell to breakfast, there's always http://www.macports.org/ or you can make a 5 line change to the FreeBSD ports management system to use "${MAKE}" instead of "make", and deal with two "echo" compatibility issues which are fixed by using "printf" instead, and almost all of the FreeBSD ports system "just works". I gave those patches back to FreeBSD (via Jordan Hubbard); not sure if they made them in.

Note that another benefit of the Mac model is that you can have different applications requiring different versions of libraries, and nobody cares except people already short on disk space. Duplicate block coalescing can fix that, but only works for ZFS, which is an add-on.

2. Long turnaround time for security patches. They should stop this insane "we have to wait until 10.x.y until we ship this patch even though it's ready." A proper package management system would certainly help there.

This is an issue for security problems in the kernel; otherwise, Apple ships regular security patches for all user space components; leave Software Update turned on, and it's automatic, and will pop up and bug you to install updates, since they usually mean an application or system restart (depending on what layer the installs happen).

For the kernel, this is really a management/resources/security-guys-do-not-push-hard-enough problem; the current development model for the Mac OS X kernel is "Scrum", which is good if you want to keep an organ bank of coders around to throw at the next iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad problem, and less good if you actually want to make substantive changes or progress in kernel technology, so it's mostly on managements back. I agree this is a problem.

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

can you go to sourceforge, find some random application's binaries for bsd and install/run them without issue on mac osx?

Re:Hurrah?

[TheRaven64]

They've literally deprecated fork, because they can't be bothered to make it work reliably with Core Framework

fork() deserves to be deprecated. The API originates with old machines that could have a single process in-core at a time. When you wanted to switch processes, you wrote the current process out and read the new one in. In this context, fork was the cheapest possible way of creating a new process, because you just wrote out the current process, tweaked the process control block, and continued executing. On a modern machine, it requires lots of TLB churn as you mark the entire process as copy-on-write (including TLB shootdowns which require IPIs on a multithreaded program using multiple cores). And then, in most cases, it's followed by exec() and so the process that you've just created is replaced by another one and you need to go through the whole sequence again to stop its memory being CoW.

Not only is fork() a ludicrously inefficient way of creating a process on a modern machine, it's also incredibly difficult to use correctly. When you fork(), all of your threads and all of your process descriptors are copied. You need to make sure that every thread that you create uses pthread_atfork() to ensure that it doesn't do any I/O after the fork() and before the exec(). You also need to ensure that you close any file descriptors that you don't want to be propagated to the child, which is nontrivial if you have other threads opening and closing files in the background (O_CLOEXEC helps here, but do you remember to use it everywhere?).

Oh, and posix_spawn() isn't much better. It's designed to be possible to implement on top of existing APIs and so ends up being largely useless without non-standard additions. It doesn't, for example, provide a mechanism to say 'close all file descriptors in the child, except for these ones'.

Re:Hurrah?

[epine]

Dude! 1998 called. They want your guru stick back.

Someone mod that up to +15, just for old times' sake. Thanks for the voyage. You made my day.

Re:Hurrah?

[__aaltlg1547]

Are you honestly trying to argue that the application interface is not part of the operating system? Pfbbbt!

Re:Hurrah?

[allo]

get the sources. compile them. enjoy.

Re:Hurrah?

[Bengie]

By "people", you mean "Mac users", not Unix users. Who cares about the fluff. Apple contributes back most of the important stuff.

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's called "drag and drop"; properly written applications are self-contained in directories represented by the application icon.

That's all fine-and-dandy until you need to keep track of the different version of library packages and make sure they're all up-to-date and not conflicting. Do you want your system handling patches and updates or do you want to manually go through an infinite number of directories and waste your time?

Re:Hurrah?

[BitZtream]

Just for reference to those who aren't aware of who the post above is from

tlambert is:

http://people.freebsd.org/~terry/
http://www.linkedin.com/pub/terry-lambert/2/70a/770

I.E. He knows his shit and has the references to back it up. His resume is pretty much a list of industry leading companies for the last 25 years.

Re:Hurrah?

[Sponge Bath]

It is a refreshing change from people posting pop culture references just for a laugh. I doubt it will last. All those moments will be lost in time, tike tears in rain.

Re:Hurrah?

[evilviper]

Year of the BSD desktop.... FINALLY!

Meh. My preferred slogan is:

"FreeBSD. Still dying after all these years..."

Netcraft confirms it, in the library, with the lead pipe.

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless they completely redesigned the operating system since the last time I used it a couple months ago, the OS is Xnu. Which is Mach, with IO Kit and BSD running on top of it for various services. BSD is only a part of the OS in OS X.

Re:Hurrah?

[kthreadd]

I think the idea is that you don't do that. Each application is supposed to use the system software as far as possible, and if an application vendor ships a third party library as part of their application bundle then that vendor is supposed to maintain it when needed. Won't be perfect from a storage efficiency point-of-view but each application will be more or less independent.

Re:Hurrah?

[tlambert]

It's called "drag and drop"; properly written applications are self-contained in directories represented by the application icon.

That's all fine-and-dandy until you need to keep track of the different version of library packages and make sure they're all up-to-date and not conflicting.

You don't need to worry about different versions because there is only one version of the library associated with the app: the one in the app bundle.

The way to make sure your app is up to date is to ensure it's up to date by dragging a new version, or having the app insert itself into the Software Update process, or to have it maintain its own update checks and cycle. The method to do this is documented.

By definition, since all libraries are private to the app, they are non-conflicting. That's the reason they are private to the app.

Do you want your system handling patches and updates or do you want to manually go through an infinite number of directories and waste your time?

I would prefer updates happen in binary form, and that the application handle itself, either by having code to do it on startup, or by installing its own handler into the Software Update process so that it gets checked when the system automatically checks for Apple supplied updates.

Basically, this boils down to you having two non-existant problems, and one self-caused problem (or vendor caused, if they don't support internal updates.

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry about that. After thinking about it for five seconds I realized how totally inappropriate that was to say. I'm sure he is a great guy, much greater than what I just was. I should have directed my criticism of Apple to Apple, not to him or anyone else just because they have worked for the company.

Re:Hurrah?

[MysteriousPreacher]

Are binaries built for any given BSD going to work on any other BSD? e.g. binaries from OpenBSD working in FreeBSD? How about differing processor architectures?

You're generally looking at compiling for target platforms. Where there is binary compatibility (such as OpenBSD providing FreeBSD binary compatibility) you're probably looking to include the expected FreeBSD libraries. Where possible, it's cleaner to compile for the intended target.

Re:Hurrah?

[gl4ss]

nobody really gives a shit about if osx is running on bsd kernel, beos kernel or linux kernel though.

"but wankwankuuhuuh it's got unix shell! can do anything" well laadifuckingdaa that itself doesn't have much to do with the kernel either. you could have that pretty much on any even half sane operating system.

for everyone who is using osx for the right reasons that just "window dressing" is what osx is to them. so bsd+apple simultaneous fanboys can just go fuck off instead of trolling every article with the spam about how you can buy a commercially supported freebsd operating system in the form of a mac and how it's fucking military quality bsd under the hood and certified unix(tm)(which is what makes it unix, but who the fuck cares about that, unix certification, when you can nowadays effectively run the same server software in debian, certified unixes, commercially supported or unsupported various other nix like distributions and even on windows).

Re: Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

And you've just indirectly hit on the core problem with desktop linux: dependency hell. Apple solved it the right way, apps are self contained.

No, Package managers are NOT a solution to this, because they virtually never work right over time, and god help you if you install something that isn't from the distro's repo. Linux is designed for web servers, which are built up by pros who install all the software at the same time and then carefully plan updates, or just re-kickstart them. Desktops get random apps installed at random times over a period of years by naive users. Package management doesn't work for that, beacause the distro versions keep moving. You need application independence. I believe this is the primary reason windows still exists.

Re:Hurrah?

[larry bagina]

BeOS couldn't be bothered to get fork working with their multi threaded GUI interfaces, either.

Re: Hurrah?

[kthreadd]

Self-contained applications is a nice idea, but it makes sense primarily with non-free binary only applications which the user or the OS distribution can't build from source code. If you use a system like Debian stable then you will rarely have any problems with the package manager, and as long as you're using software which is distributed as part of Debian you can be assured that a maintainer has looked at it, that it is licensed under a DFSG compatible license and will most likely not harm you.

You don't have the same thing on OS X and especially if you're running non-free programs downloaded from the net. That's why Apple is pushing so hard for sandboxing applications, since the user is ultimately unable to trust many of the applications.

Re:Hurrah?

[unixisc]

FreeBSD is the server OS. Once PC-BSD is out, this sarcastic rant can be even remotely relevant

Re: Hurrah?

[scrod]

can you go to sourceforge, find some random application's binaries for bsd and install/run them without issue on mac osx?

Actually, yes. This has been the case for just about every version of OS X ever released, since before 2001. That's because it uses a BSD tool chain and APIs. Apple goes to great lengths to maintain such compatibility, and should be pretty common knowledge if you've been paying attention on Slashdot.

Re: Hurrah?

[kthreadd]

Maybe I'm missing out here but I'm pretty sure a PowerPC Mach-O or PEF binary for Mac OS X from 2001 won't run on a modern system.

Re:Hurrah?

[catmistake]

If you're compiling binaries, you're doing it wrong.

Re: Hurrah?

[catmistake]

You're missing out, and there is a lot of confusion in this thread. You don't compile binaries. It doesn't matter if some ancient binary from some dead archetecture no longer runs on a modern system if the source code is still available. Compile from source.

make install
not war

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you arguing otherwise with absolutely no argument? Interesting tactic. Most people do confuse the interface with the operating system, apparently you are among them. My proof: remove the interface, it doesn't change the identity of the OS; remove the OS and leave the interface isolated... and you get nothing... no boot up, no login, no application launches, no nothing whatsoever.

Re: Hurrah?

[smash]

Self-contained applications is a nice idea, but it makes sense primarily with non-free binary only applications which the user or the OS distribution can't build from source code

Uh... no. It makes sense for any OS if you want to get away from dependency hell.

I can take an OS X application and simply drag/drop to any other OS X install (so long as it is of a supported version of the OS). There is one dependency - the OS version.

I can also run apps from anywhere (hell, even the disk image I downloaded them from), no need to worry about where they are installed.

Apple is sandboxing applications because writing software that is secure is hard, whether it is open source or closed source. Sandboxing and least privilege access is a way of attempting to deal with this problem: simply attempting to write secure applications has been proven over the last 30 years or so to be a problem we're not going to solve any time soon. Containing the problem as best we can via sandboxing perhaps reduces the amount of code that is security critical (the sandbox enforcement).

Re: Hurrah?

[scrod]

Ah yes, I misread that as "source code". Very few distribute pre-built binaries for BSD, though; that's what the ports system is for.

Re:Hurrah?

[MysteriousPreacher]

Your mum

Re:Hurrah?

[Guy Harris]

Like their initial select() implementation, which decremented the remaining time in the timeval structure to account for elapsed time, having an API is not the same thing as having a conformant API.

The current SUS allows that ("Upon successful completion, the select() function may modify the object pointed to by the timeout argument."), and that dates back at least as far as SUSv2.

It's still a rude surprise to people used to the BSD-style behavior in most other UN*Xes, and writing code that only sets the timeout before entering a select loop, though (that one bit me ages ago).

Re:Hurrah?

[Guy Harris]

Instead, their system engineers have been busy reinventing the wheel by replacing core C code with C++ and Objective-C, for no apparent reason.

Like Terry (and speaking as an engineer who replaced Objective-C code with C code in Leopard :-)), I'd like to know to what you're referring here.

Re:Hurrah?

[ArhcAngel]

By "people" he means consumers. If OS X has no consumers then it doesn't exist so I'd say they are a tad bit more important (to Apple) than the *nix heads who dig around in the CL. Sure Carbon and Cocoa need Darwin to run but the people buying OS X by and large wouldn't if Carbon and Cocoa weren't there.

Re:Hurrah?

[Pigskin-Referee]

They are still running 5+ year old linux_base-f10. You would have thought by now they would have updated it. Check out their base system installations. Virtually all of them are old versions. You would have thought for a new release, they would have updated their application.

Re:Hurrah?

[bbsalem]

Better, get BSD for free, run on hardware that costs 1/3 what Mac costs and compile to your heart's content, or not, and you'd still have most of the functionality of OS X, which you pay Apple to run anyway.

Re:Hurrah?

[smash]

But Android is Linux, right?

Re:Hurrah?

[smash]

If by "most of the functionality" you mean missing out on almost all of the headline OS X features, sure.

Re:Hurrah?

[Anonymous Coward]

| 1. It doesn't have a real package management system.
Err, yes it does, it supports:
-Macports (Macversion of FreeBSD ports)
-Fink (Debian DPKG for Mac)
-Pkgsrc (NetBSD universal Package management)
-Homebrew (Maclike/Portslike easy install package management specifically targeted at macs)

I run Pkgsrc and Homebrew and never ran into trouble.

yea

[celle]

Woman screams and waves arms.

FreeBSD!!

Oh, geek screams and waves arms.

Re:yea

[celle]

"...Oh, geek screams and waves arms."

      Oops, sorry, didn't mean to be sexist.

Re:yea

[rrohbeck]

Why do we need to free BSD and why did (s)he get incarcerated?

Re:yea

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do we need to free BSD and why did (s)he get incarcerated?

1) We don't.

2) She was actually turning tricks.

Re:yea

[Anonymous Coward]

NetBSD advocates support the right to bar arms.

Re:yea

[philip.paradis]

This explains so much.

TCP congestion control research in FreeBSD

[bcreane]

FreeBSD hosts interesting work with respect to TCP congestion control. An earlier version (I think FreeBSD 8.0) introduced modular congestion control algorithms, and this version introduces CAIA Delay-Gradient (CDG) congestion control algorithm. The check in is here: http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=252504, and an interesting (if slightly esoteric) slide deck is here: http://www.ietf.org/proceedings/84/slides/slides-84-iccrg-2.pdf.

Competition is always good

[Anonymous Coward]

Entrenched market share leaders get comfortable and a bit arrogant, particularly in technology. Things are done a certain way because that's the way they've always been done, and anyone who thinks differently is a clueless moron.

I don't think Linux kernel and GCC are exceptions to this rule, which has been proved over and over and over again.

Re:Competition is always good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes we know that.

However BSD isn't really competition.

Re:Competition is always good

[dbIII]

It is with things like ZFS - the linux implementation (which I'm also using) is currently miles behind the freebsd version.

ASLR anyone ?

[Anonymous Coward]

You could just put a big red on/off switch if entropy matters so much to some users :-(

Re:The real problem with BSD

[ThorGod]

Was this FreeBSD or one of the others?

I tell you what grinds me...the installers. The best one for "just get it done" is PC-BSD - but even it can be flaky.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[vomitology]

I can (unfortunately) second this. When I tried to install on my netbook and asked for help, I got many variations of RTFM... which if I could find one that was written in some semblance of English I would. Most of the BSD documentation I've seen is... somewhat less than user friendly.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you missed http://www.freebsd.org/handbook

In well written english, with screenshots and everything.

So, the real question is...

[dbraden]

...does it run Docker? *ducks*

Re:So, the real question is...

[gmuslera]

Docker is based in LXC (linux containers), so not available in freebsd. But can be done a port or a similar project based on FreeBSD Jails. It also uses aufs and cgrups, but i think freebsd have similar tools too.

Re:So, the real question is...

[Anonymous Coward]

whoosh

Re:The real problem with BSD

[geek]

Was this FreeBSD or one of the others?

I tell you what grinds me...the installers. The best one for "just get it done" is PC-BSD - but even it can be flaky.

The FreeBSDinstaller is fine if you arent trying to do anything fancy, otherwise you're dropping to a terminal and doing a little manual work. The plus side is FreeBSD has what I consider to be the best documentation of any UNIX out there with the possible exception of Arch.

PCBSD is an unmitigated disaster though. I'd stay far away from that pile of shit. The installer is flakey, the distro is bloated as fuck and the community is fucking worthless. Being based on FreeBSD you would think the documentation would be decent but its total crap. The whole PBI concept is the workmanship of retards too.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Who needs an installer when you can partition your disk yourself then untar the entire os and reboot?

Re:The real problem with BSD

[ThorGod]

Exactly. It just seems like, by now, the installers shouldn't feel completely bare bones or completely "well, who knows what we'll get out of this".

security

[santax]

As much as I love freebsd I have stopped using it after their servers got 'served' with the use of 'legitimate' ssh keys. http://www.paritynews.com/2012/11/19/487/two-freebsd-project-servers-hacked/ Given that Freebsd never released a good audit report after that hack I can only be worried more. Add to that, we now that we know the NSA had access to the certs from diginotar and might had done or paid for the diginotar hack I think one might as well use windows. I hate to say it, but the complete codebase from freebsd needs to be checked. Again and again. Preferable with the help from openbsd.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, OpenBSD is exactly who you want.

Re:security

[santax]

You are cherry picking. Theo released that mail to the open on day 1. The guy who made the accusations got a bit scared after a reporter did a factcheck and asked him to remove it until he could answer. The reporter did, but we are still waiting for that answer. promised to respond to a question from a reporter never did. The backdoor would have been installed in 2001 and in SSH only. While it could be true... now, 12 years later that backdoor still isn't found. And it had been checked by everyone that matters and has the skills to do so.

Re:security

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as I love freebsd I have stopped using it after their servers got 'served' with the use of 'legitimate' ssh keys. http://www.paritynews.com/2012/11/19/487/two-freebsd-project-servers-hacked/

Given that Freebsd never released a good audit report after that hack I can only be worried more.

Add to that, we now that we know the NSA had access to the certs from diginotar and might had done or paid for the diginotar hack I think one might as well use windows. I hate to say it, but the complete codebase from freebsd needs to be checked. Again and again. Preferable with the help from openbsd.

Maybe you should read over the report from freebsd.org: http://www.freebsd.org/news/2012-compromise.html

1) It was a single ssh-key that was leaked.
2) The accompanying user rights allowed access to two build server nodes which they took offline and they compared the data to a known good offline copy.
3) They pulled the 9.1-RELEASE packages they couldnt verify.
4) The compromised user only had access to the build system for binary packages. The BUILD system (and third party at that). NO access to the source repositories (except checking out, like you and me).
5) If you didn't use the 3rd party binary packages you weren't affected at all. (and who uses binary packages with freebsd anyway?)

I don't know how the infrastructure is organized in your company, but usually there is a user management on a server if you hand out ssh-keys and only a few if any are allowed to sudo su. IF there is sudo at all. That isn't a desktop box where every user added gets an entry in sudoers to su.

Re:security

[TheRaven64]

Someone else has already pointed you at the report on the compromise. One of our developers has a VM that turned out not to be as secure as he though, and which had his ssh keys (with no passphrase) that gave access to the FreeBSD cluster machines. As soon as the attack was noticed (very quickly, owing to one particularly paranoid developer), the affected machines were taken offline. Bringing things back online took a long time, for several reasons:

• All of the code that we're running on FreeBSD.org machines was audited
• Some of it turned out to be a little bit scary (e.g. build machines having access to the FTP servers so they could push packages) and so the architecture needed redesigning in places.
• We rolled out auditdistd on all of the hosted machines, so now they have audit logs that are stored in multiple places, for all machines.
• We redesigned the network layout at all of our sites to reduce interconnectivity of unrelated services.

As to the codebase needing auditing, we had both svn and git mirrors that allowed the entire history to be checked. We also had copies of checksums of releases and so all of these things were verified. Bringing CVS back online took a bit longer, as CVS easily let us verify the top of the tree, but not the history. I think we ended up regenerating the entire CVS history from svn, and took the opportunity to officially remove support for CVS.

Are there still vulnerabilities? Almost certainly. Any codebase more than a few dozen lines long will contain bugs, and some of them are exploitable if you're sufficiently clever. That's why a lot of the focus in 10.0 has been on mitigation techniques. The auditdistd framework lets you easily deploy auditing for an entire site. Capsicum makes it relatively easy to compartmentalise applications and a system daemons use capsicum out of the box. So do some of the normal filter utilities, for example even if you run uniq as a root user, once it's finished parsing the command line arguments it won't be able to access to any files in your system except the ones you told it to read.

Re:security

[BitZtream]

Given that Freebsd never released a good audit report after that hack I can only be worried more.

http://www.freebsd.org/news/2012-compromise.html

Get a clue troll. Why are you referencing some random website written 2 days after the incident was noticed rather than the vendor, who did a full write up on what happened?

Add to that, we now that we know the NSA had access to the certs from diginotar and might had done or paid for the diginotar hack I think one might as well use windows

What the fuck does that have to do with FreeBSD or Windows? You want to use Windows because it has Diginotar/Comodo certs included by default? You know FreeBSD itself doesn't trust ANYONE's certs by default, right?

And if you read the page you're linking to ... it was clear, even on that shitty page, that it effected pre-built ports. Specifically stating the OS itself had absolutely no risk of intrusion, since the keys in question had no access to write anything other than 3rd party packages.

You're just a ignorant troll, a shitty one at that.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Dahamma]

Everything you say is true. But are the Linux developers really all that different? There have been some epic flamewars on LKML and plenty of RTFM...

The fact is OS developers are generally extremely smart, "self-confident" (I'll try not to say "egotistical" or "arrogant"), and possibly somewhat socially awkward/blunt. The only reason you don't get that from Windows and OSX is that MS and Apple hide their kernel developers away from public debate :)

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Falkentyne]

Yes, I ran into that problem in the past as well but then I realized I was emailing the FreeBDSM mailing list. Needless to say, I've since switched to Linux and I'm being fulfilled in ways you can't imagine.



... and it's actually a website wtf

Re:The real problem with BSD

[__aaltlg1547]

And this is not like Linux?

Re:The real problem with BSD

[icebike]

Apparently you missed http://www.freebsd.org/handbook

In well written english, with screenshots and everything.

Exactly. The handbook is awesome. (I didn't even need to use it to get up and running because bsdinstall (the installer) is pretty self explanitory to anyone
who has been around any nix systems for a while.) You will want a copy of the manual somewhere handy

I haven't touched FreeBSD in years, but recently wanted to play with it again. It was awesomely well documented, both with a manual and several guides, not to mention a zillion Google Hits. I didn't need to bug anyone about any thing, because all the answers were at my finger tips. It was actually a very easy install.
I added XFCE4 just to see how well that worked, and it was quite nice.

If someone gets turfed from the mailing list, its because they joined the WRONG mailing list. Start asking for beginner help on the Linux Kernel Mailing List list and see how warmly you are received.

But installing version 9 was very easy. There is no reason to avoid FreeBSD if you like messing around with different OSs. Learning is not detrimental to your health.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[icebike]

Everything you say is true.

These people should not be answering questions from rank newbies. They have day jobs, and spend a hell of a lot of
time maintaining the software. They just don't have enough hours in the day to handle questions from every passing neophyte.

There are other mailing lists for this.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[santax]

Hehe, you didn't try to install 9 with full disk encryption did you? ;) Just saying.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Dahamma]

These people should not be answering questions from rank newbies.

Yes, and there are ways of saying that to someone that are not condescending, rude, or just plain assholish.

Though you know, some people in fact DO like helping others, even newbies (sometimes we call those "teachers", and sometimes they are just good people). But even if someone doesn't want to help, "please use XXX list for this question" is really not any harder to type than than "stupid question, stop posting here and RTFM".

Re:The real problem with BSD

[sumdumass]

I think one of the problems might also be that they are seeing the same damn questions asked over and over but slightly different and the user isn't able to connect the slightly different question to the published answer already given somewhere.

I used to do some support on IRC with a Linux group catering to a specific distro and I saw this all the time. I eventually created macros to ask the questions just to get to the point of the problem because of the 10,000 different ways someone states it. Often the skill levels of the users were so different that you would either talk over someone's head or upset them for talking down to them. It got extremely aggravating when talking over someone's skill level and they don't tell you they don't understand something until you are 20 steps into it. It is even more aggravating when you talk down to someone and they get upset and cuss you out crying they aren't a newbie or something. Most of the problems were incompatible or unsupported devices that were already listed as incompatible and unsupported on the distro's website but people refused to believe it until they saw it first hand.

I eventually bailed on the entire thing after the distro merged with another and dropped all the things I like in order to promote all the things I didn't like about it. Some of the others who helped found it easier to just ssh into the user's box and fix it than to pull the real question out and explain the answer well enough to be used. I can see why some groups get short and say RTFM all the time (not that I agree it is proper to do so). I've about given up on linux- it seems as soon as there is something I like, they go and change it and make it extremely difficult to put it back in.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD developers or Linux developers? Sometimes it's hard to tell. Linus Torvolds is one mean guy.

Personally I don't care, nearly all developers, doesn't matter what operating system they favor are Not-invented-here's, and assume anyone who has a problem with their software suffers from PEBKAC. Interact with developers as little as possible.If you can't replicate the problem twice by yourself, then the problem isn't reproducible.

As far as why I'll pick FreeBSD over Linux. Out of the box, I can't cripple freebsd with default-settings, but I can with Linux, which says much about the terrible state of Linux if you can have something like apachebench pushed against it and have it segfault in seconds, or be so unresponsive you can't rescue the machine. That is out-of-the-box Linux... unreliable. FreeBSD and OSX don't do this. The only thing that does it worse is Windows.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you tried ArchBSD?

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Osgeld]

and instead of politely pointing it out, you had to make yourself sound like a snotty condescending ass about it

grats for proving the op's point

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

sounds typical of linux

its the users fault cause they didnt know some made up buzzword specific to some random distro, and when you talked to them like they were stupid they got mad

nevermind its the ass clown os and its unqualified support staff, its too much for you to deal with

fuck off

Re:The real problem with BSD

[epyT-R]

..or maybe you were just 'wrong' and you took offense rather than chock it up as a learning experience.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[epyT-R]

computers are complex tools. The more operating systems try to hide that, the more dumb the users get.. it's a race to the bottom.

This antipathy towards learning curves is a big part of today's society (the idiocracy). Not only do people abhor learning, their superiors refuse to give them the time necessary to do it... Thus we end up with desktop operating systems that work like tablets. Everyone now thinks all computers should work like smartphones, no matter what they need the machine for. Complex procedures do not work like they do in star trek. Deal with it.

There are users like this with every os, not just linux.

you fuck off.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[epyT-R]

Get a goddamned clue. You can fuck up any OS if you try hard enough.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

[...] chock it up [...]

"chalk it up" is the correct wording.

Re: The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Still, with PCBSD you can install a FreeBSD with ZFS in 5minutes and 10 clicks. In 1 minute you can make a pure FreeBSD jail or even an linux one and still can watch YouTube and play Games on that box.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a goddamned clue. You can fuck up any OS if you try hard enough.

Butthurt Linux Zealots! This is why I come to Slashdot.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[jones_supa]

Everything you say is true.

These people should not be answering questions from rank newbies. They have day jobs, and spend a hell of a lot of
time maintaining the software. They just don't have enough hours in the day to handle questions from every passing neophyte.

There are other mailing lists for this.

I understand that, but still... There are some cases in which I there is not a person that has the deep technological understanding of some component, when I post in the forums of some distro. And on the other hand, as you say, the professional developers don't have time to answer all the peasant questions. Ah well.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Get a goddamned clue. You can fuck up any OS if you try hard enough.

That's a clue to move to Windows or Mac.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, this version is OK but when FreeBSD 9.0 came out (the stable version, not the alpha or beta) it was unusable. FreeBSD 9.x have a totally different way of installing than earlier versions, and when it came out it was undocumented. How nice.

Advantages / disadvantages vis-a-vis Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Genuine question, though I know I run the risk of starting a flame war.

What advantages or disadvantages would I find if I installed FreeBSD when compared to my current Debian Linux system?

Re:Advantages / disadvantages vis-a-vis Linux?

[kthreadd]

Advantages:

* The OS and the applications are separate. This means that you can have up to date versions of your desktop and all applications on a stable core OS. On Debian you would either have to build things yourself or upgrade your entire system to testing or sid.
* A mature ZFS implementation. You can use ZFS-on-Linux or Btrfs for similar functionality on Debian, but it's often not considered to be as production ready as ZFS on FreeBSD. Also for license compatiblity issues ZFS-on-Linux will never ship as part of a GNU/Linux distribution and will have to be installed separately.

Disadvantages:

* Not as good hardware support. Usually works well on desktops and servers, but it can take some tweaking to get it to work well on modern laptops.
* Some software does not run on FreeBSD. Very uncommon for open source, but can be a problem if you're running non-free software. You can mitigate this by installing the Linux compatibility layer on FreeBSD.

Re:Advantages / disadvantages vis-a-vis Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

An informative and reasonably neutral comment.
Kill it with fire!

Re:Advantages / disadvantages vis-a-vis Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks.

So maybe worth playing with on a spare partition when I've got a few spare days, but no real killer advantage.

Re:Advantages / disadvantages vis-a-vis Linux?

[smash]

There's no single killer advantage, but the general trend i've seen with FreeBSD after having used it since 2001 (Linux since 1996) is that in general, whilst some things seem to take longer to be supported in FreeBSD, generally once implemented, the implementation is stable. As in, it isn't junked and replaced with something completely different 18 months later. Linux tends to be in much more of a state of flux - this can be good if you want to run the very latest, however if you want something a bit more battle tested, it is not.

FreeBSD has different trees which are "supported" for a much longer period of time than most Linux distributions. Due to the seperation of the base OS and ports, you can run a battle-tested, stable core OS and updated ports. This is a lot trickier to do and far less common in the Linux world.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[TheRaven64]

There are several things that make your post look like a troll:

• Which BSD are you referring to? There's some overlap between the BSD communities, but only about as much as there is between the communities of various Linux distributions.
• Where did you ask? Was it one of the places that FreeBSD recommends (mailing lists, IRC channels, or forums), or did you just pick a random place somewhere on the Internet?
• Did you actually read the FreeBSD Handbook, which contains fairly detailed instructions on installation, or is that one of the documents that wasn't 'written in some semblance of English'.

Still contains proprietary firmware?

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.gnu.org/distros/common-distros.html#BSD

Re:Still contains proprietary firmware?

[kthreadd]

The general stance is that it's not optimal bus also not a critical problem since it's not part of the OS and only used to enable certain hardware. There's no plan to remove them as far as I know, although there is work going on in tweaking the build system so that you can build a FreeBSD distribution where they are omitted.

VPS?

[allo]

What's the problem with jails?

Re:VPS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Jails can't have their resources (CPU, Memory, etc) without applying a patch (which, AFAIK, isn't maintained any longer) and recompiling. VPS instances seem like jails on steroids.

See http://7he.at/freebsd/vps/docs/man/vps.conf.5.html for a list of configurable resource limitations.

Re:VPS?

[laffer1]

I was wondering this too, but upon further research, VPS adds things Jails can't do like migrating from one physical machine to another without restarting programs and possibly even keeping sockets open. It has a mechanism to transfer an image of the disk state too.

Apparently, VPS also allows for sharing of several different types of resources to lower memory usage and they support distinct pids (init is pid 1 in each one for instance).

It looks like the new plan is if you want to virtualize freebsd instances, use VPS and if you need to run something else, use bhyve.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[allo]

and the userland libraries are PITA. try "rm foo -rf". ARGH.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[mcgrew]

This antipathy towards learning curves is a big part of today's society (the idiocracy).

I've always loved to learn, but one thing I hate is having to relearn. If a new tool has obvious advantages over an old tool I'm happy to learn the new tool: I'm lazy. I don't live to work, I work to live. I didn't mind learning Windows because it had obvious advantages over DOS. I didn't mind learning Linux because Windows was a PITA.

One reason it was such a pain was change for the sake of change, which Windows is even worse about now. Back in the '90s my employer was transitioning from Corel Office to Microsoft Office, so I took an Excel class. Two weeks after I took the class they upgraded to a newer version of Excel; that class was a complete waste of time because the New Excel was nothing like the old Excel (it was more like Quattro than the old Excel).

What's worse is when a change introduces complexity rather than simplicity, like that stupid Microsoft Ribbon. Rename editing functions from Edit to Home, WHY??? Changing the File menu to a colored button with no mouseover was just retarded. At least they fixed that little stupidity. Introducing the Microsoft car, with the throttle on the left and the brake on the right.

That's what I like about Linux; changes are almost always improvements (and when they aren't the community usually screams bloody murder). Microsoft's changes are usually just for the sake of introducing an unnecessary learning curve.

There's way too much useful, interesting stuff for any one person to learn, don't waste my time relearning an interface when I could be spending my time learning something useful.

Complex procedures do not work like they do in star trek.

I would have agreed with you before I got an Android phone. That thing is straight out of Star Trek. Microsoft's problem with W8 is they thought "people already know how to use a tablet so we'll make the desktop like a tablet." The trouble is, that's like designing your hammer to be more like a saw. They're different tools with different purposes. A car is not a bicycle, I don't want handlebars in my car.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[BitZtream]

Really, what way is that? Answering 30 ignorant questions a day by people asking for stuff that is so clearly WAY above their heads they shouldn't be asking, yet they do.

As a developer, this is why I avoid working on projects where random people can interact with the devs. You get mailing list questions like

I'm trying to make this plugin that can totally change the way the software works, but I get an error:

main must return a value

Can you help me fix?!!@?$!@?^#$^!@?!?

What is the response I'm supposed to give to all those morons who are so ignorant of what they are doing that they don't have any idea how ignorant they are. Thats not something I can fix, its not my problem, its theirs. Its one thing to not understand how something works, its entirely different to not know anything about the subject matter at all, and then ask someone how to do something that's never been done before.

Do you think race car drivers and mechanics should sit around and answer the 'I want fast car, how me go fast?!?!?!@?! What is drivers license?!?!@?@!?@$ What is engine?!?!?!?! tires?!?!?!?!' crap as well?

When you so clearly don't know what you're doing, and you so clearly haven't tried to figure out anything at all, and then you go ask high-end devs how to do something that shows you know ABSOLUTELY NOTHING ABOUT THE OS OR DEVELOPMENT FOR IT ... you deserve to get a kick in the teeth.

Its fucking rude to waste my time with your ignorance when your ignorance can be solved by spending the time you took to write to the kernel list on Google with far better results. Lazy fucks.

Werll said sir ! now...

[johnjones]

it drives me insane when I get linux zealots (the uninformed type...) banging on about Mach...

however I have 1 question...

why is the most deployed Mach version unable to implement IPv6 ?
(the most deployed linux versions being part of the android stack vs Mach being most deployed in Apple iOS)

having a TCP stack and then hobbling it seems weird and to me very annoying !

regards

John Jones

Re:Werll said sir ! now...

[smash]

Uh... iOS has supported ipv6 for some time now. I have native IPv6 at home and my iPhone/iPad pick up an ipv6 address and work dual-stack just fine?

Re:The real problem with BSD

[wjcofkc]

after getting completely embarrassed

Perhaps you deserved it because I for one have no idea what you are talking about. I am new to FreeBSD as of the last few weeks and personally have found their community to be quite helpful, especially the forums on FreeBSD.org. I recently asked a very stupid question over something obvious I had overlooked and no one flamed me at all - in fact they were helpful and didn't call me out on it. Granted when it comes to their official forums there are rather extensive rules of etiquette to follow, but they are there for a reason and they make sense.

Perhaps there has been a rift in the space-time continuum and you are posting from the evil universe.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[DNS-and-BIND]

So, the point you're making is that your hostility is completely justified, and these people deserve the abuse. Yay, I guess?

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Lawrence_Bird]

I hate to respond to trolls but in this case I think the record needs to be set straight. I have used FreeBSD for about 6 or 7 years now, having come off about 12 years of Slackware. In that time, I have had multiple need to ask for help or clarification both on the mailing list as well as the IRC channel. And I can honestly say I did not get one fliippant or rude remark and some people actually did try to help, unlike some other open source software (non-OS) where questions were met with crickets.

Lastly - FreeBSD is probably the single most/best documented open source operating system ever.

wireless?

[nimbius]

802.11n fully supported yet?

The problem with PC-BSD

[unixisc]

Why, what exactly is wrong w/ the PC-BSD installer, or for that matter, PBI? Does it not work as it's supposed to, as per theory?

What did I do wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

I installed FreeBSD v10 in a VMWare player window on a Win7 PC. The install went exactly as the directions said. But when I booted, it asked for my login, which I did, and then went to $ prompt. I'm not a BSD or Linux guy - I'm a Windows guy - I don't know what to do with a $ or # prompt. I was hoping to see something like Ubuntu, that loads up to a nice GUI right away. Does FreeBSD 10 have no GUI? Or did I miss something in the install process? BTW, I installed it twice - in case I missed a step. Checksum was correct.

Re:What did I do wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

startx?

Re:What did I do wrong?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know why I'm doing this, but check the FreeBSD handbook web page. I don't think X is even part of the core OS anymore so you just get a bog standard text only UNIX environment to work with until you either install a desktop from binary packages or ports.

Re:What did I do wrong?

[smash]

If you're new to unix, FreeBSD 10 alpha is definitely not what you want. By default, FreeBSD installs no GUI, and v10 is not production ready yet - it is a development snapshot. If you want something equivalent to Ubuntu, check out PC-BSD, which is the user-friendly desktop oriented variant of FreeBSD.

Get a day job for God's sake!

[Anonymous Coward]

'BSD wins because Apple uses BSD and Apple has tiger blood'. This stupid chestnut has been around for years. Is the slashdot crowd incapable of moving on? Too lazy to try out some new material? Have you become the Jay Leno of nerd posters?

Re:Get a day job for God's sake!

[TangoMargarine]

BSD was around long before Mac OS X. Give BSD instead the credit it deserves.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Dahamma]

Here's a response: "delete message". Or for those really advanced users: "delete and filter". The only reason to reply with an insulting comment that even doesn't even answer a possibly ignorant question is a misplaced need to abuse or bully someone. It doesn't really solve anything, and frankly I don't even know why you'd want to make the effort if replying is such a burden.

Despite what you think, reputation counts. A lot of good open source projects have been derailed, unnecessarily forked, or abandoned by the community because of ego and arrogance over cooperation and communication.

And finally, you might want to look up what "ignorance" actually means. It simply means lacking knowledge, which means anyone asking a question about anything is by definition ignorant about the answer. Like many words, it's only really an insult if you make it one. The way to fix that ignorance is information, not insults.

Hyper-V integration

[ci4]

In case anyone here cares, Hyper-V support has been imported in HEAD - see http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=255524 . I managed earlier today to build a kernel with it and do a number of performance tests - it looks good.
This is not present in the 10-Alpha CD yet by default, you have to get the latest source with svn, add ''driver hyperv" to the GENERIC and build it; I'd switch to labelled fstab entries before installing and rebooting it, though. Swap the 'de' with 'hn' network adapter etc.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[smash]

Just because you are doing it wrong, it doesn't mean rm is poo. Try: "rm -Rf foo" instead.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[smash]

I'm not quite sure how one can point out the exceedingly obvious documentation without sounding condescending?

Re:The real problem with BSD

[smash]

In short: yes. The handbook is front and center on the main website menu under documentation. If someone is unable to find that even before they find the link to the ISO, there's no helping them.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Osgeld]

easily

Re:The real problem with BSD

[vomitology]

Sorry, didn't know I needed to source my opinion. I've tried several versions of both Free- and PC-, I've tried to get help on official forums, a few Google Groups, and some of the larger IRCs. I did read the Handbook. It did help with installation, but it wasn't much help getting my Broadcom wireless working.

Where shall I submit my sworn affidavit and list of personal references?

Raspberry PI and ZFS

[jcea]

I wonder about ZFS running on a Raspberry PI. I know that CPU is really slow and that memory is tight, but I wonder if it could do as a small and slow, but stable NAS.

Re:Raspberry PI and ZFS

[smash]

ZFS was originally developed on hardware with similar/less horsepower than a raspberry pi (back in the early 2000s... 2001 or so IIRC).

Re:Raspberry PI and ZFS

[jcea]

Minimum RAM size for ZFS is usually 2GB, with 4GB as the "you rather have".

I am using ZFS on Solaris gear since 2006, and those machines were "small" and had 4GB of RAM.

I am wondering if ZFS can be run at all in a Raspberry PI with 512MB, even if slow. My demands are low: stream a single file and backup storage, for a single client.

Re:Raspberry PI and ZFS

[smash]

Minimum recommended size for adequate performance. There is nothing inherent in ZFS to prevent it from working in less memory.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have agreed with you before I got an Android phone. That thing is straight out of Star Trek.

You should have a look at iOS then.

Re:The real problem with BSD

[smash]

What's your forums.freebsd.org username?

Re:The real problem with BSD

[allo]

the problem is not, that you're not able to do it. The problem is, its fucked up. You need to do it the one and only way, while GNU tools are much more flexible. Of course, you can install GNU stuff. I only talk about the default installed stuff, which are really old unix tools.

VPS Support

[nbritton]

1. No mention of VPS (virtualization containers) is made in the features list, furthermore vpsctl doesn't appear to be present on my test install. Are you sure it's part of FreeBSD 10? I really hope it is, the documentation implies that you can have nested containers with no performance penalty. How is networking handled inside these containers?

2. I'm assuming jails still exist in FreeBSD, how do they relate, or fit in, with VPS and Bhyve?

3. Can Bhyve be used with processors that don't support Extended Page Tables? For example, Xeon 5400 series processors?

4. No mention of ZFS LZ4 compression, is this default now? How stable is FreeBSD's ZFS implementation, relative to Solaris?

5. Is Clang setup to automatically target cpu instruction set? i.e. cc -target-cpu corei7-avx? Any performance improvements of the binaries?

6. Has ports management gotten any better, specifically upgrading ports? Can applications be self contained, like on the Mac, yet?

Re:VPS Support

[nbritton]

2.1: For Jails, VPS, and Bhyve, what is the footprint (i.e. memory overhead) for each implementation?