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FreeBSD 9.3 Released
First time accepted submitter k4w0ru writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/9 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features.
Some of the highlights: ZFS bookmarks, OpenSSL 0.9.8za, OpenSSH 6.6p1, SNI, BIND 9.9.5. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list.
It is a "Tier 2" — so there are no official builds for it, for example.
It is a "Tier 1" for NetBSD, so you may have better luck there. They even distinguish between "ARM evaluation boards" (evbarm) and "StrongARM based Windows CE PDA machines" (hpcarm). I'm sure, OpenBSD is similar in this regard, but I'm tired of copy-pasting links...
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
9.2 EOL has been moved to the end of the year allowing a longer migration period for those still running the stable 9 branch. .. as expected ..thanks BSD.
I'm running 10 with zfs-on-boot in production. working excellently
For the usual knockers, give it go ! - though i do admit that non-tier-1 such as ARM, could pose challenging.
like all choices, fit for purpose.
LibreSSL is not even a mature project. FreeBSD doesn't change things on a whim... well sometimes they do but they warn users like 2 years in advance:
Dropping GCC for Clang
putting LZMA into the base system (thereby screwing up everyone upgrading from 8.x to 8.3 and beyond)
Changing all the version numbers in the source code for no damn reason.
So I am honestly asking, what is BSD good for. I presently use CentOS and I am perfectly happy with it but for some reason BSD has a magical "hard core" allure. So what I should ask is: what excuse do I need to use it?
Three reasons I personally can think of. First, NetBSD specifically is a fork intended to run on basically anything with a microprocessor. CentOS will run on x86 hardware, and in the form of Pidora and similar, runs on ARM. Try it on an Itanium or SPARC or PowerPC Mac, and things get a smidge more interesting.
Second, ZFS. Now cue those who believe that file system nirvana is found in btrfs or ReiserFS or HFS+, but I'm a huge fan of ZFS as a file system. If you're like me, you'll be using BSD in the form of one of its descendants, like FreeNAS or NAS4Free, where ZFS makes lots of other things much easier.
Finally, the license. I'm neither a programmer nor a recompiler so my use of BSD licensed software is essentially identical to my use of GPL software ('free as in beer', with the occasional bug report). For purists and programmers, there is a difference in what is and isn't allowed under the respective licenses.
If you are happy with CentOS, use it. We are not like Linux people, we are not out to convert you. We are not hoping you see the one, true way. I have never understood the concept where people are happy with a solution or product, and they actively seek out something else.
For me, I was a Linux user goign back to 1992; I dumped it in favor of FreeBSD in 1999 and never looked back.
Second, ZFS
From what I've read about ZFS, it sounds like it comes from science fiction. Built-in snapshots and copy-on-write, are you kidding me? Too bad there's nothing comparable in Linux. Well, there is btrfs, but it is not stable last I heard. Why can't they just port ZFS to Linux?