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FreeBSD 11.0 Released (freebsdfoundation.org)

Posted by EditorDavid on from the going-up-to-11 dept.

Long-time Slashdot reader basscomm writes, "After a couple of delays, FreeBSD 11 has been released. Check out the release notes here." The FreeBSD Foundation writes: The latest release continues to pioneer the field of copyfree-licensed, open source operating systems by including new architecture support, performance improvements, toolchain enhancements and support for contemporary wireless chipsets. The new features and improvements bring about an even more robust operating system that both companies and end users alike benefit greatly from using.
FreeBSD 11 supports both the ARMv8 and RISC-V architectures, and also supports the 802.11n wireless networking standard. In addition, OpenSSH has been updated to 7.2p2, and OpenSSH DSA key generation has been disabled by default, so "It is important to update OpenSSH keys prior to upgrading."

18 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Focus by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The new features and improvements bring about an even more robust operating system that both companies and end users alike benefit greatly from using.

    I like these guys. They know what's important to focus their attentions.

    Others, well let's say they are more concerned with bells and whistles and eye candy.

    1. Re:Focus by arth1 · · Score: 2

      With that-which-should-not-be-mentioned killing linux, jumping ship to BSD becomes more and more attractive.

      Unfortunately, there are still some pieces missing, like lack of high performance file systems (zfs is high functionality, not high performance) and lack of software for many RAID controllers, or kernel-hooked utilities we take for granted these days like inotify, selinux and cgroups (when used by the admin to control resources, not as a crutch for that-which-should-not-be-mentioned).

    2. Re: Focus by swb · · Score: 2

      I generally agree that software RAID is fine, but will counter that even on generic Dell boxes with PERC RAID-6 controllers and SATA disks in RAID6, it's pretty easy to see writes do 250 MB/sec.

      The reality is your disks are off the PCIe bus no matter what.

      I don't think that it's controller performance per se that's the limitation anymore, it's that software defined RAID usually has a much richer feature set, whether its SSD caching, tiering or block level striping or the ability to serve storage off the network. The limitation of RAID cards simply seems to be software size.

      High end cards can do SSD caching, but AFAIK that's about the end of it past RAID sets.

      On the plus side for RAID cards is battery-backed write caches and freeing the OS from a certain level of overhead -- you can just unload your write on the card in very few cycles and let it deal with sorting out the parity and actually managing disk writes.

      You also get the advantage of a redundant OS boot LUN. I also find that software RAID tends to require more disks in the end -- you can have double parity with 4x disks that includes your OS and data.

      The sweet spot is probably RAID cards that support a subset of disks for redundancy and the rest in JBOD for OS-defined storage environments. We've done a couple of MS Storage Spaces installs -- 2x SATA hardware mirrored for boot, 2x SSD and 6X SATA in a tiered space.

  2. They just now added 802.11n support? by drinkypoo · · Score: 2

    Tell me that there's actually been a way to do it all along, but now there's just a better way.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    1. Re: They just now added 802.11n support? by QuietLagoon · · Score: 4, Informative

      ...You're surprised that a dead OS... At peak times, Netflix generates over 35% of all the traffic on the US portion of the Internet. Guess what "dead" OS powers the servers that create all that traffic?

    2. Re: They just now added 802.11n support? by ls671 · · Score: 2

      How is *BSD dead when it runs the PS3 and PS4 ???

      Pretty amazing! I don't have PS3 on linux...

      ~/tmp$ set | grep PS
      GROUPS=()
      PS1='\[\e]0;\u@\h: \w\a\]${debian_chroot:+($debian_chroot)}\u@\h:\w\$ '
      PS2='> '
      PS4='+ '
      ~/tmp$

      --
      Everything I write is lies, read between the lines.
    3. Re:They just now added 802.11n support? by drinkypoo · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I too was susprised when I realized that servers tend to use cables for networking. Hilarious, no?

      What's hilarious is all of these childish excuses.

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    4. Re: They just now added 802.11n support? by _merlin · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Trouble is, whatever I get with pkg never has the options I need enabled, so I have to go back to using ports, then I get messy dependency issues "X needs Y to be newer than version B, but Z needs Y to be older than version A". With RHEL and similar, the binary packages tend to have kitchen sink enabled by default, which is better suited for my use cases.

  3. Slashdot Sponsored Whitepaper by FunkSoulBrother · · Score: 2

    Anyone seeing these? Any adblock/noscript rules that defeat them?

  4. KMS support? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

    I know Hyper-V support has been improved from 10.3 as Azure has that custom port that MS contributed back.

    But KMS/Quemu interests me as any 2016 IT professional uses virtualization and VMare Workstation is discontinued and in life support mode and sucks greatly.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
    1. Re:KMS support? by Shane_Optima · · Score: 2

      If you don't have specific requirements necessitating another solution (a longer support window, perhaps), I really can't recommend Qubes highly enough. You can run conventional Xen HVMs alongside Qubes AppVMs which 1. are damned fast, 2. can utilize shared templates for disk space efficiency and easier updates, 3. have tools for quickly and securely sharing files or clipboard contents and 4. allow you to intelligently mix and manage color-coded windows in a single task bar. These features are available with Windows 7 as well (Windows 10 is still in development.) Yes, they're stuck using Fedora for the base for now (they'll move to something minimal and more secure down the road) but you can have BSD or arbitrary Linux distro guests and Dom0 doesn't have any network access so there's no reason to be paranoid about it.

      The fact that it's probably the most secure full-featured desktop distro ever made (particularly on machines that properly support vt-d) is largely a result of it being a powerful hypervisor. Some people seem to think that it being an ultra-secure OS must mean its crippled or cumbersome but nothing could be further from the truth; it's been a usability win across the board and has been my daily driver for over a year now. I do wish the GUI had better built-in snapshot functionality, but backup functionality works fine and there's nothing preventing you from using btrfs and/or LVM.

    2. Re: KMS support? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 2

      I am talking about KMS and Freebsd as a host :-)

      Yes part of KVM was ported to the FreeBSD kernel. For now stuck on Windows 10 with Hyper-V for games. KMS provided GPU and hardware pass thru

      --
      http://saveie6.com/
    3. Re: KMS support? by Shane_Optima · · Score: 2

      Ok, yeah GPU passthrough is still a no-go for Qubes right now. It sounded like you might've been in the market for a general workhorse hypervisor, but 3d gaming is the one area in which it's definitely lacking.

      On the other hand, I should protest that Qubes does make for a superior casual gaming and retro/oldschool gaming experience. There's something to be said for running 2d Steam games (ones that don't have Linux compatibility), Fallout 2 and other oldschool Windows games in their own window sitting in the task bar right next to your Linux apps, with no WINE involvement and no Windows desktop or secondary taskbar in sight.

      (If you can't get 'em running in Windows 7 you will need to go through a secondary XP/98/95 desktop, through.)

  5. Re: New and Improved!!! by Hognoxious · · Score: 4, Interesting

    The systemd developers have better things to do than support a dead OS.

    Like killing a live one?

    --
    Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  6. Re:FreeBSD is for losers by rubycodez · · Score: 4, Interesting

    You know GNU/Linux is jumping the shark when THE major distro didn't take the time to research how to properly go from one LTS to the current one that has systemd and it clobbers the systemd related things. And Debian, that used to the the best engineered distro, just puts in needless circle-jerking complexity, even the /etc/motd is dynamically generated and the twats made the wrong choice of having a static /etc/motd.tail instead of the obvious solution of motd being static as per normal Unix convention and a motd.head to be generated. GNU/LInux is circling the drain

  7. gimme a pitch on FreeBSD by AnAlchemist · · Score: 2

    I've been a long-time Linux user, but I'm not religious about it, and I've always been curious about the BSDs.

    Can someone give me an elevator pitch, especially about FreeBSD, seemingly the most popular of the BSDs? All the (server) software I use on a regular basis runs on FreeBSD.

    Before someone says "just try it," there's sooo much cool stuff to try (currently learning Clojure and Raspberry Pi stuff), so I need a reason to try it.

    Gimme some.

    1. Re:gimme a pitch on FreeBSD by Neo-Rio-101 · · Score: 2

      FreeBSD has been traditionally used in ISPs, primarily for it's networking.
      It also supports native ZFS for storage

      It's usually been the base OS for other projects like pfsense, and FreeNAS

      Also given it's licence, any changes made to the source don't have to be shared... so code gets creatively "borrowed" from it a lot.
      Just ask Apple.

      --
      READY.
      PRINT ""+-0
    2. Re:gimme a pitch on FreeBSD by dbIII · · Score: 2

      Can someone give me an elevator pitch

      If you want something like ZFS it's a couple of years ahead of linux.
      Otherwise it's fairly similar and slightly better ft on older hardware than current versions of linux.
      Not much point in trying it without one of those two reasons since it's really very similar to what you are used to.

      As a final note, the ports collection on FreeBSD appears to be the Gentoo linux dream achieved. Just tick boxes instead of choosing compile flags.