Submitted by “The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 8.1 release cycle is now available for amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. Files suitable for creating installation media or doing FTP based installs through the network should be on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites by now.”
I’ve been running the 8- branch since a year before the it went from -CURRENT to -STABLE on my desktop, with excellent results, but I’ve been holding off upgrading servers from the 7- branch for the 8.1-RELEASE. Glad to see it’ll be out soon.
The High Availability Storage project was imported into 8-STABLE a month or so ago, and will be part of this release.
HAST is similar to DRBD, in that it allows you to create master/slave storage servers. Combines with CARP, you get a nice fail-over setup that is completely transparent to the clients.
And it works with ZFS to boot.
Gotta love GEOM. Sometimes, working on Linux systems without the benefit of GEOM is a royal pain.
Is there any status on the work that was done in the SOC 2009 regarding tickless kernel work and FreeBSD? I’ve had a look at:
http://freebsd.mercurysquad.com/
And it gives an overview but it hasn’t been updated since August 2009 so I am wondering what the situation is today? Also the issue of HAL also fits into that perview of ticklessness because HAL uses poll() which continuously cycles through looking for new devices rather than being a situation where the devices tell the operating system when they are plugged in – Linux has udev/upower/udisk, but I haven’t seen any information as so far as the clarification of whether these are going to be used or whether FreeBSD/GNOME/KDE programmers will simply create a special FreeBSD implementation that hooks natively into the operating system.
The problem with HAL is that it was never designed to be portable, and is not needed on a FreeBSD system.
We have devd, an nice event-driven hardware notification framework. Along with devfs, a nice virtual filesystem for creating/managing device nodes. Between those, we have everything that udev/udisk/upower/hal/devicekit/etc are supposed to support, and more.
Unfortunately, all Linux/X/KDE/GNOME/etc devs believe “there is only Linux”, and write all their software for Linux systems, with all the limitations of Linux systems. These (X/KDE/GNOME/etc) are supposed to be portable apps … but are written with all kinds of Linux-isms and “features” that only work on Linux systems. And so all kinds of hacks like udev, HAL, DeviceKit, are created … and only work on Linux. And everything higher up the stack are written for these “portable abstraction layers” … that only work on Linux.
I had real high hopes for KDE’s Solid framework, as it was a nice front-end/back-end setup where multiple back-ends were to be developed … and yet only a HAL backend was ever written.
Even HAL was supposed to support multiple back-ends, but never made it that far.
If only devs would take the time to learn what tools are available to them, and use them, instead of doing things “the Linux way”, and only “the Linux way”.
I’ve always done a comparison of FreeBSD with Subaru cars – relatively small number of fans, but die hard ones, extremely reliable when you know how to drive and maintain it, very capable, like a swiss-army knife, and rugged in some fashion. Love them both
Amen
I subscribe
Subaru was the best selling car in Israel throughout the 80s. Something like 1 in 5 family cars sold were white Subaru Leone’s. They were the only Japanese car manufacturer to stand up to the Arab boycott.
At one point, my mother (wrongly) received a ticket in the mail for illegally parking somewhere. When she went to court she claimed the policeman must have gotten the license plate number wrong. The judge said “but he got the model and color correct” when she pointed out that it was “A white Subaru” the judge canceled the ticket.
I always thought FreeBSD would make a great Virtualization host. I have used FreeBSD for most things but I always found there was something missing (like Flash) that needed me to boot into windows or Run Linux emulation, etc.
Instead, if we have a rock solid virtualization foundation then we can run the missing features on a virtual machine while at the same time increasing the user based of FreeBSD and hence getting more developers to release for the platfrom natively.
-D
Virtualbox is in ports and works very well and in some areas even better then VMware Workstation. The only problem it’s the OSE addition, so no USB pass-through, which kind of sucks and it’s a PITA to do headless, but if you don’t mind just keeping a server logged in it works great as a VM platform. I have my home server running BSD with virtualbox and then an instance of debian, win2008 and freebsd running. Works like a charm.
Yeah, I looked into it but with no PCI/USB pass through, some of my TV tuner stuff will not work. I looked into Xen as well, but FreeBSD is not supported for Dom0 yet. NetBSD supports Xen but brings a whole other set of issues.
I wish there was a solution like KVM on FreeBSD. It would be far more useful than Linuxulator or Wine (IMHO).
-D