http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2008, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Fri, 16 May 2008 17:16:34 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/19473/Review:_FreeBSD_7.0/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19473/Review:_FreeBSD_7.0/ "Here we are at the moment of truth for the FreeBSD operating system - the 7.0 release. This is what FreeBSD users and developers have been waiting for ever since the dark days of the 5.X series when the promises of superior performance, threading, and stability fell flat. Though each release in the FreeBSD 6.X series improved markedly in quality and performance, 7.0 has been widely anticipated as the release that FreeBSD fans can have confidence in. I wish I could say that FreeBSD 7.0 lived up to the hype." Fri, 14 Mar 2008 20:48:12 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 58 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News Valour http://www.osnews.com/story/19455/Beyond_FreeBSD_7_Performance/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19455/Beyond_FreeBSD_7_Performance/ "Since the conclusion of the SMPng project, the focus of SMP development in FreeBSD has shifted from deploying locking infrastructure to careful profiling and optimization of kernel SMP strategies for increased performance on common workloads. FreeBSD 7.0 was the first release to benefit from this optimization work." The status of this work includes MySQL workload benchmarks and memory allocator performance in the new FreeBSD 8 branch. Also, here is a recent presentation showing FreeBSD compared to several other operating systems like NetBSD, DrangonFly, Solaris, and Linux. Tue, 11 Mar 2008 10:05:09 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 38 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News Chezz http://www.osnews.com/story/19434/Preview:_FreeBSD_7.0/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19434/Preview:_FreeBSD_7.0/ "The next major update of FreeBSD 7, due this December, is in the running to be one of the most impressive FreeBSD releases to date. The ULE scheduler has now reached maturity, leading to significant gains across the board (particularly in server workloads). This new scheduler brings notably impressive performance improvements to both MySQL and PostgreSQL. In the first section of this article, I'm going to take a look at what's new. In the second section, I will discuss what the future holds for FreeBSD beyond the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release, including screen shots of the revamped FreeBSD installer 'finstall'." Thu, 06 Mar 2008 16:38:45 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 21 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News irbis http://www.osnews.com/story/19401/FreeBSD_7.0_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19401/FreeBSD_7.0_Released/ FreeBSD 7.0 has been released. "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches." Wed, 27 Feb 2008 22:32:13 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 58 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19390/Whats_New_in_FreeBSD_7.0/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19390/Whats_New_in_FreeBSD_7.0/ "FreeBSD is back to its incredible performance and now can take advantage of multi-core/CPUs systems very well... So well that some benchmarks on both Intel and AMD systems showed release 7.0 being faster than Linux 2.6 when running PostreSQL or MySQL. Federico Biancuzzi interviewed two dozen developers to discuss all the cool details of FreeBSD 7.0: networking and SMP performance, SCTP support, the new IPSEC stack, virtualization, monitoring frameworks, ports, storage limits and a new journaling facility, what changed in the accounting file format, jemalloc(), ULE, and more." Tue, 26 Feb 2008 20:59:25 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 46 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News Oliver http://www.osnews.com/story/19358/FreeBSD_Q4_Status_Report/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19358/FreeBSD_Q4_Status_Report/ "This report covers FreeBSD related projects between October and December 2007. AsiaBSDCon 2008 is approaching and will be held at the Tokyo University of Science in Tokyo, Japan on the 27th - 30th of March 2008. The FreeBSD Foundation has released a Newsletter detailing their activities over the past few months. FreeBSD 7.0 is nearing release and the 2nd Release Canidate is ready for testing and is available for download now." Tue, 19 Feb 2008 13:29:56 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 14 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News Joel Dahl http://www.osnews.com/story/19333/FreeBSD_7.0-RC2_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19333/FreeBSD_7.0-RC2_Released/ The FreeBSD project has released the second release candidate for FreeBSD 7.0. "We sincerely hope this will be the last of the public tests for 7.0 and that the -RELEASE builds will start in about a week and a half. If bug(s) considered big enough to be show-stoppers are found we will of course reconsider but hopefully we're in good enough shape now to proceed with the release." Wed, 13 Feb 2008 14:25:16 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 17 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News bsd_user http://www.osnews.com/story/19238/The_Depenguinator_Version_2.0/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19238/The_Depenguinator_Version_2.0/ "In December 2003, I wrote a script for remotely upgrading a linux system to FreeBSD. I gave it a catchy name ('Depenguinator', inspired by the 'Antichickenator' in Baldur's Gate), announced it on a FreeBSD mailing list and on Slashdot, and before long it was famous. Unfortunately, it didn't take long for changes in the layout of FreeBSD releases to make the Depenguination script stop working; so for the past three years I have been receiving emails asking me to update it to work with newer FreeBSD releases." And now it's back. Tue, 29 Jan 2008 23:10:12 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 26 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News friendly.daemon@googlemail.com http://www.osnews.com/story/19181/FreeBSD_6.3_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19181/FreeBSD_6.3_Released/ You guessed it from the headline (bravo!): FreeBSD 6.3 has been released to the public (that's us). From the release notes: "Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 6.2-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements." Fri, 18 Jan 2008 15:04:16 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 18 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News anonymous http://www.osnews.com/story/19134/DesktopBSD_1.6_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19134/DesktopBSD_1.6_Released/ DesktopBSD 1.6 has been released. These are the most notable features introduced: "FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system. X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware. Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive. Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates. Improved package manager usability and performance. Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools. Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs. Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering. DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages" Download. Wed, 09 Jan 2008 10:19:21 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 8 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News Oliver http://www.osnews.com/story/19103/FreeBSD_6.3-RC2_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19103/FreeBSD_6.3-RC2_Released/ FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 has been released. "Sorry for the delay with this phase of the 6.3 release. A few glitches were found during testing of the 6.3-RC2 ISOs that included pre-built packages. The 6.3-RC2 builds for amd64 and i386 should now be available on the majority of the FreeBSD mirror sites. I just finished loading the sparc64 build so that will take a little while to propagate to the mirrors. This is the last planned RC for 6.3. Unless a major show-stopper problem is found the release of 6.3 should happen in about two weeks." Tue, 01 Jan 2008 23:47:46 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 55 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News vermaden http://www.osnews.com/story/19097/FreeBSD_7.0-RC1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19097/FreeBSD_7.0-RC1_Released/ FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 has been released. "The ports team has gotten the release package sets built for most of the architectures (sparc64 is still a long way off) so we have begun including the pre-built packages on the ISOs. Even a very basic post-build test turned up one latent bug in sysinstall, and once that was fixed a more extensive test (load both KDE and GNOME) turned up two more latent bugs. The 7.0-RC1 builds have one of the three bugs fixed in them. The other two bugs aren't fatal to installs on 7.0-RC1 (they were fatal to installs on 6.3-RC2) and we have more 7.0-RCs coming so I went ahead with making 7.0-RC1 available as-is." Sun, 30 Dec 2007 19:22:07 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 30 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News yourabi http://www.osnews.com/story/19061/New_FreeBSD_Foundation_Newsletter_Published/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19061/New_FreeBSD_Foundation_Newsletter_Published/ There is a new edition of the FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. "The innovation of the past lives on in FreeBSD. From SMP and network scalability to innovations in security APIs and wireless networking, the technology of FreeBSD is making an impact on our world. What future piece of BSD technology will help foster a new public commodity like the Internet? I can't say, but the past shows us that investing in open source OS development and its commercial use pays large dividends. The two testimonials in this newsletter from Isilon and Network Appliance show this process at work." Tue, 18 Dec 2007 18:36:04 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 22 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News Joel Dahl http://www.osnews.com/story/19013/FreeBSD_7.0-BETA4_Available/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19013/FreeBSD_7.0-BETA4_Available/ "The 7.0-BETA4 builds are now available. If you would like to use cvsup to update an older machine the branch tag to use is still RELENG_7. For users of FreeBSD Update due to some last-minute bumps in system libraries, installed third-party applications must be recompiled as per normal for a 'major' upgrade, even if upgrading from an earlier 7.0 BETA." Thu, 06 Dec 2007 16:21:27 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 12 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News vermaden http://www.osnews.com/story/18954/FreeBSD_7.0_Beta_3_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18954/FreeBSD_7.0_Beta_3_Released/ The third beta of FreeBSD 7.0 has been released. I cannot seem to find any information on changes between the second beta and this one. Additionally, the release schedule doesn't even list a third beta. Tue, 20 Nov 2007 16:56:14 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) FreeBSD 22 http://www.osnews.com/topics/10 News vermaden