Submitted by “It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.5-RELEASE. Work done between the 5.4-RELEASE and this release has mostly been bugfixes. Some ‘vendor supplied’ software has also been updated, mostly due to security concerns (specifically BIND and sendmail). This is the last planned release on the 5-STABLE branch.”
I must say that since switching to 6.x for both my laptop and my Ultra 60 nearly 6 months ago, I have not even thought about the 5.x branch. Somthing tells me that I am not the only who isn’t paying attention to this branch anymore.
For sure…how does your Ultra 60 run? What do you use it for?
I use it as a webserver and just to play with. Here are some unixbench results:
/bin/sh: ELF 64-bit MSB executable, SPARC V9, version 1 (FreeBSD), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), stripped
/dev/da0f 5824868 2781576 2577304 52% /usr
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 605967.7 lps (10.0 secs, 10 samples)
Double-Precision Whetstone 147.7 MWIPS (10.0 secs, 10 samples)
System Call Overhead 63687.2 lps (10.0 secs, 10 samples)
Pipe Throughput 76408.1 lps (10.0 secs, 10 samples)
Pipe-based Context Switching 14181.4 lps (10.0 secs, 10 samples)
Process Creation 427.9 lps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
Execl Throughput 99.5 lps (29.6 secs, 3 samples)
File Read 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 50279.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Write 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 16755.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 16690.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Read 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 15214.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Write 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 8668.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 5313.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Read 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 103174.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Write 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 17866.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 17722.0 KBps (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
Shell Scripts (1 concurrent) 308.6 lpm (60.0 secs, 3 samples)
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 53.0 lpm (60.0 secs, 3 samples)
Shell Scripts (16 concurrent) 26.0 lpm (60.0 secs, 3 samples)
Arithmetic Test (type = short) 54479.0 lps (10.0 secs, 3 samples)
Arithmetic Test (type = int) 56793.6 lps (10.0 secs, 3 samples)
Arithmetic Test (type = long) 37105.7 lps (10.0 secs, 3 samples)
Arithmetic Test (type = float) 82886.5 lps (10.0 secs, 3 samples)
Arithmetic Test (type = double) 65983.9 lps (10.0 secs, 3 samples)
Arithoh 2480292.9 lps (10.0 secs, 3 samples)
C Compiler Throughput 201.6 lpm (60.0 secs, 3 samples)
Dc: sqrt(2) to 99 decimal places 11755.4 lpm (30.0 secs, 3 samples)
Recursion Test–Tower of Hanoi 10576.6 lps (20.0 secs, 3 samples)
INDEX VALUES
TEST BASELINE RESULT INDEX
Dhrystone 2 using register variables 116700.0 605967.7 51.9
Double-Precision Whetstone 55.0 147.7 26.9
Execl Throughput 43.0 99.5 23.1
File Copy 1024 bufsize 2000 maxblocks 3960.0 16690.0 42.1
File Copy 256 bufsize 500 maxblocks 1655.0 5313.0 32.1
File Copy 4096 bufsize 8000 maxblocks 5800.0 17722.0 30.6
Pipe Throughput 12440.0 76408.1 61.4
Pipe-based Context Switching 4000.0 14181.4 35.5
Process Creation 126.0 427.9 34.0
Shell Scripts (8 concurrent) 6.0 53.0 88.3
System Call Overhead 15000.0 63687.2 42.5
=========
FINAL SCORE 39.5
I know that there are a few people still using the 5.x branch due to various issues and lack of time to do the upgrade to the 6.x series.
This is something I have always admired about the FreeBSD team, is that they never seem to leave you with an abandoned OS. Truly great work.
This is something I have always admired about the FreeBSD team, is that they never seem to leave you with an abandoned OS. Truly great work.
I agree. they are still supporting FreeBSD 4.11.
Yeah, those of us who just milked 4.x until 6.1 was out are mighty lucky. 5.x reminds me of 3.x… That’s not a dig, it’s just one of those “transitional” releases that’s nice to skip if you can.
Yeah, those of us who just milked 4.x until 6.1 was out are mighty lucky. 5.x reminds me of 3.x… That’s not a dig, it’s just one of those “transitional” releases that’s nice to skip if you can.
Wow! I’m in total agreement there with what you said about the 3.x branch. The 5.x branch reminds me of the 3.x branch as well.
At the time, I gave it a try but I stuck with 2.2.8 until 4.0-BETA was released. For some reason 3.x never appealed to me and neither did the 5.x branch even though I forced myself to use it.
The 6.x series is great, but I think I won’t be 100% satisfied until I no longer see those [GIANT LOCKED] messages when I boot up. I mean, once everything is MP safe and multi-threading is kicking ass, and it’s running efficiently/speedily on an 8-way server then I can sit back and say, “Wow, they made it!”
On my most recent 6.1 server, only ohci0 and atkbd0 seem to be giant-locked… so the USB controller and the keyboard controller.
Typically these two things are nearly completely unused on a server, so it doesn’t make much sense to rework them, unless it’s a fun side project for someone.
I’m still using 5.x daily. Has never been a problem. Nothing wrong with it as far as I have experienced. Nice to see the FreeBSD Team cater for bone-lazy people like me.
or OSNews becomes less and less relevant these days?