One of my popular articles shortly after I joined OSNews in 2001 proved to be “the big *BSD interview” and so it is only appropriate to end my serving at OSNews with a similar theme. Today we are very happy to host a Q&A with well-known FreeBSD developers John Baldwin, Robert Watson and Scott Long. We discuss about FreeBSD 6 and its new features, the competition, TrustedBSD, Darwin etc.
1. Tell us more about SMPVFS and its significance.
John Baldwin: The SMPVFS work is a task to add fine-grained locking to the VFS layer of the
kernel as well as the UFS and nullfs filesystems. The VFS layer provides the
abstractions in the kernel that describe file objects. Each filesystem
provides a VFS “driver” to manage the files on a disk device according to the
design of that filesystem. Adding fine-grained locking to VFS and the UFS
filesystem allows more concurrency in the kernel, especially with workloads
that include disk I/O.
Robert N M Watson: One of the other nice benefits to the SMPVFS work is that with our fully
preemptive 6.x kernel, not holding the Giant lock over the file system
code lets the file system code not only preempt lower precedence kernel
threads, such as background crypto operations or file system operations,
but be preempted by more timing critical code, such as sound card
interrupts, network I/O, and so on. So this isn’t just a win for SMP, but
a win for UP also. The SMP wins are impressive though — Kris Kennaway
has recently been benchmarking package builds, a very VFS-intensive
workload, on 12-CPU sparc systems, and all the scalability we’d hoped for
is there.
Scott Long: SMPVFS also reduces contention for storage drivers that are still under the Giant lock and increases the possible parallelism between these drivers and the filesystems above them. Kris’ tests are a very good example of this; even though the SCSI subsystem and most of the ESP driver are still under the Giant lock, performance still scaled well.
2. We recently read that the fix for the Hyper-Threading vulnerability is considered non-trivial. Why is that?
John Baldwin: The issue found with HT is that the two logical CPUs on a single core share
the same caches and as a result there are ways for one logical CPU to spy on
the activities of the other CPU in the same core. The proposed fixes involve
ways of guaranteeing that all of threads on a single core are all allowed to
spy on each other. For example, one policy is that only threads with the
same user ID should be allowed to run together no the same core. The problem
is that right now FreeBSD treats logical CPUs as separate CPUs and schedules
available threads on the first CPU that becomes available. It would be a bit
of work to make the scheduler more aware of logical CPUs and to schedule
threads with respect to UIDs, etc.
Robert N M Watson: It’s worth observing that this is a serious vulnerability across a range
of operating systems, not just FreeBSD. If you allow untrusted users on
the same system as an SSH daemon, you’re at risk, which affects everyone
from desktop users, to ISPs, to military end-users. It’s also a very hard
problem to solve — we’re looking at it from the perspective of improving
the scheduler, bringing in OpenSSL updates to limit timing attacks, and
obviously we’re hoping that CPU vendors take this opportunity to explore
how to harden CPU architectures against this sort of attack. Because this
vulnerability isn’t just about scheduling, crypto, or hyper-threading, a
lot of hard work will have to into a long term solutions.
3. Why is TrustedBSD an important piece of the upcoming FreeBSD 6? How does it compare to SE-Linux or OpenBSD?
John Baldwin: Robert is probably the best to answer this. From my understanding, TrustedBSD
is a superset of SE-Linux as it includes things like ACLs for files as well
as the MAC framework that allows for arbitrary MAC policies to be hooked into
the kernel. One such policy being developed is a port of SE-Linux called
SE-BSD. There are also other policies available for the MAC framework
besides SE-BSD.
Robert N M Watson: TrustedBSD elements have now appeared in 4.x, 5.x, and 6.x. 5.x brought
in many of our most significant features — some were infrastructure to
support our goals, and others were security features we’ve been targetting
as primary goals. Supporting TrustedBSD features included OpenPAM, GEOM,
UFS2 with extended attributes, and a lot of kernel and user space cleanup
for access control. It turns out that our extensive SMP work in 5.x was
also very important, as the mature kernel synchronization architecture of
5.x allows us to generate access control decisions in many code paths that
would not easily have supported it in 4.x, such as in software interrupt
paths in the network stack.
The direct feature set in 5.x included the TrustedBSD MAC Framework, which
allows compile-time and run-time extension of the FreeBSD security model,
a set of sample system policy modules, such as Multi-Level Security, Biba
Integrity, and a variey of hardening policies, and also support for Access
Control Lists (ACLs). So the TrustedBSD work was really key to the 5.x
release line, especially if you include the supporting features I listed
above.
In 6.x, many of the experimental features from 5.x are considered
production quality, and extended in a variety of ways. Two of the biggest
“new” projects are SEBSD, a port of NSA’s FLASK/TE implementation from
SELinux and its predecessors (DTOS, FLUX), and support for CAPP security
event audit, which is derived from OpenBSM, which is in turn derived from
Apple’s CAPP Audit implementation. SEBSD will be an add-on distribution
on top of FreeBSD 6.x, and allow the authoring of fine-grained Type
Enforcement (TE) policies similar to those in SELinux. OpenBSM provides
us with a implementation of both kernel event auditing, as well as a
BSD-licensed user space audit library implementing Sun’s BSM audit file
format and service API. Adding support for Audit really fleshes out our
trusted operating system feature set, and NSA’s FLASK/TE provides a
powerful policy language to for tuning system security for specific
applications and configurations.
These are security features that our network appliance, security,
financial, and military consumers will appreciate greatly. They’re also
features that end users will be able to use to customize and monitor
security operation of their systems in a manner currently unsupported by
any other open or closed source operating system.
4. What other new features are we going to see on FreeBSD 6.0?
John Baldwin: Support for WPA security for 802.11. The tty subsystem has been reworked in
preparation for adding fine-graind locking in the future. FreeBSD/i386 and
FreeBSD/amd64 now use the timer in the local APIC to drive the various kernel
clocks. Support for several different CPU frequency drivers such as
SpeedStep and PowerNow. Support for hardware performance monitoring counters
on i386, amd64 and ia64. The if_bridge(4) driver from NetBSD has been merged
in as well. There are lots of other things that I’m sure I’m missing, but
more details can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes.html in the
release notes documents for FreeBSD-Current.
Robert N M Watson: You’ll also find features like read-only support for reiserfs, and
substantial performance optimization and SMP cleanup from our first design
for fine-grained SMP in 5.x, compiler suite upgrades, significant upgrades
to our 802.11 code to support features like WPA and authentication/crypto
plug-in frameworks, and complete integration of IPv6 into the ipfw2
firewall (previously IPv6 was supported separately). There’s also a
substantial re-write of the libthr threading library by David Xu, which
offers significant performance enhancements for 1:1 threading users.
Scott Long: The APIC change for i386 and amd64 that John mentioned is actualy a very
important feature. Many motherboards, especially newer Athlon64 desktop
boards, cannot even boot FreeBSD 4.x or 5.x, but work very well under
6.0 with these changes.
PowerPC support is something that I consider FreeBSD 6.0’s best kept
secret. Installing FreeBSD/ppc on a Mac is a little cumbersome (though
not much different from NetBSD or Linux), but once installed it works
very well and runs X Windows and most apps. I run it on my MacMini,
and there is effort underway to provideWe are looking at possible
providing install ISOs for it for 6.0.
We are also looking at integrating DomU support for Xen. Xen is a very
exciting piece of technology for both developers and for large
datacenters, so supporting it is a high priority. We are actively
looking for help with porting full Dom0 support so that FreeBSD can be
fully self-hosted in the Xen environment.
5. Are there plans to move FreeBSD’s public version control system to another system, away from CVS?
John Baldwin: Probably not anytime soon. The current CVS + CVSup infrastructure that the
FreeBSD Project has is a great benefit and would require a large deal of work
to replace.
Robert N M Watson: Revision control is always topic of active discussion in any open source
project, and especially projects in which revision control is so essential
to its operation as in the FreeBSD Project. FreeBSD has some pretty
intensive requirements for revision control — with several hundred active
developers working throughout our CVS tree, not to mention all the
external contributors, the FreeBSD CVS repository sees over 50,000 comits
a year. We have our eyes on where to go in the future, but whatever we
select when the time comes, it will have to support today’s workload, and
tomorrow’s as it continues to grow.
As John alludes to, one of the ways we make CVS go as far as it does is
through the use of extension tools for replicating our CVS repository to
thousands of end-systems, avoiding read-only operations having to go into
a single central repository. In this manner, FreeBSD developers can avoid
hitting the central repository with anything other than commit operations.
Many sub-projects within FreeBSD use other revision control systems to
augment CVS, tracking the central repository, and then merging changes
back to CVS at mature snapshot points for the sub-project. For example,
developers frequently make use of CVS, Subversion, and Perforce — for
TrustedBSD, we use Perforce with cvsup export of our repository, for
example.
6. We hear that some cool bits from Darwin will be backported to FreeBSD (and the other way around). Please tell us more about these… bits and what they do. 😉
John Baldwin: I personally do not have any plans of porting anything from one OS to the
other. It might be interesting to port launchd from OS X Tiger to FreeBSD as
a replacement for init and inetd though.
Robert N M Watson: The TrustedBSD Audit support originated in large part from Mac OS X, and
we really appreciate Apple’s work with us to develop audit support, and
their support in getting it out into open source. One of the outcomes of
this will be our (TrustedBSD’s) continuing maintainership of OpenBSM, a
bundling of the libraries, documentation, and command line tools, which
will be portable across a host of operating systems including FreeBSD,
Darwin, and Linux. This sort of arrangement can be a strong motivator for
companies like Apple to release software under open source — we’re
already preparing bundles of documentation and feature enhancements that
we hope they will be able to adopt back into Mac OS X.
7. Apple announced recently that they are swiching to x86. What does this mean for FreeBSD and other open source OSes?
John Baldwin: I do not currently foresee it causing any changes in the free software world.
Robert N M Watson: Apple’s work on Mac OS X is very impressive — they’ve successfully drawn
from both their extensive experience in UI and application design, and a
host of open source origins, including Mach, BSD, FreeBSD, KDE, FSF’s tool
chain, and Python, not to mention their closed source components, such as
windowing system and application suites. others to create a convincing
and powerful desktop product. Part of the root of their success is in
interacting with and building on open source products — be it FreeBSD
network stack code, or the KDE web browser components. I don’t see this
going away with the move to i386, and hopefully we’ll see even more
contributions back to the open source community.
8. Looking back to the last 3 years, how do you evaluate FreeBSD’s popularity? Do you see FreeBSD’s status declined or getting more popular among users and developers?
John Baldwin: I think it is growing. It seems that every time I sit down to talk to other
FreeBSD folks at conferences I hear about another company that is using
FreeBSD as part of a product or service that they sell. The volume of e-mail
going through the lists also seems to be steadily growing, which can be a bit
of a headache when one is trying to keep up. 🙂
Robert N M Watson: Likewise — more and more companies are adopting FreeBSD as the foundation
for their products, and FreeBSD continues to see wide-spread success in
the web services, ISP business, etc. The FreeBSD Project has never really
done a very good job at advocacy or monitoring its user population in a
formal way — we’re software engineers, and until recently, we didn’t even
have a marketing team. However, the scope and influence of FreeBSD users
in the computer world is easily visible from their contributions to the
project. You don’t have to look far to find out that FreeBSD systems
process over a trillion dollars in banking transactions in the US every
year, at the root name servers, or many of the most significant internet
service providers and web service providers.
One of the things I like to point out about FreeBSD is the longevity we
see in our contributors — we are one of the few open source projects that
can demonstrate a code history going back almost 30 years, and who have
active developers who have worked on that code base for much of that time!
I began using FreeBSD in about 1995, and joined the developer team in 1999
— despite being on the project six years, I consider myself a relative
newcommer. Many commercial software companies would count themselves lucky
if their senior engineers had half that time working on a project. Daily
contributors range from high school students to tenured university
professors, and our developer base continues to grow.
Scott Long: The stats that I always look at are: CVS commit volume, mailing list traffic volume, bug database activity, and new committer activity. 9 new source tree committers have been added in the last six months, which brings the total number up to an impressive 219. This doesn’t count the numerous others who contribute to just the ports and/or the docs tree.
9. Many have commented on the inability of open source desktop environments to provide a coherant, integrated solution that would satisfy modern users used to Mac OS X or even Windows. Where do you pinpoint the problem?
John Baldwin: I think that free software developers are usually driven by churning out code
to solve the problems that they face and building tools for their own use
whether it be for personal use or work related. End users want a product
that solves their needs and those needs are not a subset of a developers
needs. Some developers may try to solve needs that they don’t have, but they
still are not able to solve needs that they don’t know exist. 🙂 Companies
such as Apple and Microsoft employ more than just software engineers. They
also employ folks who understand user interfaces and people who try to
determine what problems consumers want solved.
Robert N M Watson: The open source world is an interesting place — some very important
pieces of innovation in the UI arena have been developed as open source,
from X11 to NCSA Mosaic, and more recently Firefox. Parts of the academic
world performing research into the user experience and human interactions
have long benefited from and contributed open source. However, I do feel
that the current top-to-bottom open source desktop stack is playing catch
up with work by companies like Apple and Microsoft. Part of the
difficulty here has been in developing a complete object model stack, not
to mention a mature application suite. The contribution of the
OpenOffice.org source code by Sun was an important step in fleshing out
the open source desktop, but I think it’s telling that OpenOffice.org
still needs to ship with many basic components that are considered
standard on the commercial desktop systems. Until the open source world
can make it easy to develop integrated desktop applications, we’ll
continue to see a lack of mature ones. All this aside, we’ve come a long
way in the past six years — software products such as X11, X.org, KDE,
and GNOME provide usable user interfaces that are miles ahead of X11 and
fvwm in 1999.
10. How are you getting on with the journalling extension to UFS?
John Baldwin: Ask Scott about this one. 🙂
Scott Long: The UFS Journalling project was listed as a candidate project for the Google Summer of Code. The response from applicants has been overwhelming, and I’m looking forward to working with some very good
people on it. While it might take more time than the Summer of Code timeframe to complete, I expect it to be working and stable in time for FreeBSD 7.0, and possible available for later 6.x releases via patches.
11. Are you paid to work on FreeBSD fulltime or is it a side project/hobby for you?
John Baldwin: I am very fortunate to be paid nearly full time to do FreeBSD work. I
probably spend about 80+% of my paid work time working on FreeBSD.
Robert N M Watson: It varies — I’m a Senior Principal Scientist at SPARTA (previously
TIS/NAI/McAfee Research), and what I work on depends on the customers I
find and the work I find. Over the past few years, much of my work has
been on the FreeBSD or Mac OS X platforms, particularly as relates to work
on operating system security. Other work, such as SMP network stack
support for FreeBSD, I do in my copious (?) spare time. The open source
business world took some bumps with the dotcom crash, but it’s easy to see
that it is experiencing the same recovery that’s visible in the closed
source high tech world. Whereas three years ago it was hard to throw a
stone at an open source event without hitting a recently laid off open
source developer, today recruiters are easily seen on and off the mailing
lists again.
12. What is your opinion on PC-BSD and OpenSolaris? How’s your cooperation –if any– with OpenBSD & NetBSD these days?
John Baldwin: PC-BSD: It’s great to see someone taking FreeBSD and extending it to be even
more friendly to desktop end-users. OpenSolaris: No opinion as of yet; haven’t had time to look at it.
*BSD: FreeBSD recently imported if_bridge(4) from NetBSD and dhclient(8) from OpenBSD so we certainly have no problem taking code from our sibling projects. I’m not as familiar with any code going in the other direction as I really only have the time and brain capacity to focus on one open source operating system.
Robert N M Watson: Sun has a long history of innovative operating system work, and it’s
really great to see them starting to get parts of Solaris out under an
open source license. Sun has obviously long depended on and interacted
with the open source community, and their ability to work this through Sun
Legal is impressive :-). An interesting question for Sun will be whether
they can build a community around OpenSolaris that extends beyond
Sun-employed developers in the same way that Apple has started to see
success in building a community around Darwin.
A point I was reminded of recently by Mike Smith at Apple is that there
are really two things we mean by open source: we mean the
licensing/distribution of software, but also the community that is built
around it. Key to the success of an open source project is both of these
elements, and creating and maintaining that community requires easily as
much investment as the software development itself. However, once
achieved, the pay-offs for everyone involved can be huge.
With respect to other open source projects — FreeBSD remains both a large
producer and consumer of open source, generating open source foundations
for many other open source projects, as well as consuming the output of
many other open source projects. In the closed source world, competition
is a powerful force for change, as it is in the open source world.
However, in open source world, the opportunities for collaboration and
cooperation are far greater than in the closed source world, so we have
the opportunity to share ideas and code much more easily, and as a result
benefit from that exchange. A point that is sometimes lost when the “Open
Source Community” and “Open Source Software Stacks” are discussed is the
importance of both competition and cooperation in its success. Open
source makes possible a market place of ideas and the incarnation of those
ideas in source code. We’re all better off for the existence of many
competing (and cooperating) software projects, and let’s hope we never
move away from a world where that is the case.
End your serving?
Really Good stuff, it’s just a pity you’re leaving…
But let’s get back IT: any chance to have some other big bsd interview in the future? If so are you accepting requests for the favorite bsd hackers to interview? (my votes goes to jkh and phk of Darwin and FreeBSD)
>End your serving?
Yes. I will be sending some articles for publication every once in a while, but I won’t be ‘a regular’ anymore. I will only be contributing occassionally.
“OpenBSM provides us with a implementation of both kernel event auditing, as well as a BSD-licensed user space audit library implementing Sun’s BSM audit file format and service API. ”
looking fwd to it – but the trusted bsd sebsd ISO is very out of date, and the freebsd60c from june 2005 won’t install!
linux also needs OpenBSM.
Good to see that the interview also emphasises the code sharing going on between FreeBSD and the other BSDs and OSX.
I think the BSD flavours actually feed of eachother more than the different Linux distros do (concerning new technologies).
The journaling question would have been a good time to ask their opinion on some of the new ideas in Dragonfly, but still a nice interview.
Eugenia : thanks and good luck with your future project(s).
I just read the 2001 article : it’s Matt Dillon commenting on all the ‘goodies’ in FreeBSD 5.0. How’s that for irony.
Osnews wont be the same…w/o Eugenia.
Eugenia’s insightful articles, and comments and moderations[ok ok we hated some of the moderations but most of them were rational!!] will be missed.
After the spate of content-less interviews, it’s good to see something with some meat. Looking forward to 6.0-RELEASE!
I wonder if 6.0 will fix the issue that prevents me from using my iPod with FreeBSD while atapicam is compiled into the kernel? It’s really the only issue I have with the OS at the moment, and while it’s not a deal breaker, it would certainly be nice to have.
Other than that, I’m glad to hear there’s a bright future for FreeBSD.
*cue “BSD is dying” comments*
I really look forward to see 6.0 out in the field. One thing though that I like to point out. Notice how humble these guys are and how enthusiastic they are about the actual technology. they also seem so not care about the hype of media… I mean, they’re honest about Sun and their role in the software industry…
It feels really good to know that these guys are out there working on one of the most technologically evolved operating systems out there.
May you be sucessful wherever you go.
This interview raises my expectations for FreeBSD 6.x considerably.
Let’s hope FreeBSD 6.x won’t be such a big disappointment like 5.x.
Does anybody know what’s the benefit of these countless new security “features”? Will they render buffer overflows ineffective or do they just add more complexity? How do they compare to OpenBSD’s exploit mitigation techniques?
… and by the way, this was a great ending. All things start and end with FreeBSD!
Great article, this is the type of stuff that makes OSNews awsome!
> Does anybody know what’s the benefit of these countless new security “features”?
As an end user, or even as an advanced user you really do not use them a lot, the basic unix security is usually Good Enough(tm).
However, for bastion hosts, and the paranoid sysadmins (no, wait, *every* sysadmin is paranoid
they provide good entertainment. I guess they have much more sense in really big setups (e.g.: hosting providers) or really small black boxes.
I’m a bit disappointed there’s no plan to port over launchd from macosx, it seems a really nice thingie… one of these days I’m stealing a coworker’s ibook to check it out
ps: to osnews staff: please open up an empty newsline or somesuch so we can all tell eugenia how much we love her without going ot
Thanks Eugenia for this post I was really waiting for a FreeBSD 6 article to be posted.
FreeBSD is so promising in many ways. I cannot wait for the release.
eugenia leaving…. why, what aww come on…. throw us a frickin bone…..
cant just drop a line like that and not tell us more….
Good diplomatic and professional response by the interviewed.
> Does anybody know what’s the benefit of these countless new security “features”?
“As an end user, or even as an advanced user you really do not use them a lot, the basic unix security is usually Good Enough(tm).
However, for bastion hosts, and the paranoid sysadmins (no, wait, *every* sysadmin is paranoid
they provide good entertainment. I guess they have much more sense in really big setups (e.g.: hosting providers) or really small black boxes.”
Then it probably won’t provide more security in the end. Few of last year’s OpenBSD security “problems” were really exploitable in practice. The same isn’t true for vulnerabilities found in FreeBSD. On the other side, even in OpenBSD’s heavily audited code a vulnerability in the “sudo” tool was found – so I suspect that all these new security “features” in FreeBSD will introduce more vulnerabilities than they fix. In my opinion, good security “features” should be as simple as possible and they should be enabled in the default configuration, without requiring any user interaction. This prevents the user from introducing new holes by misconfiguration.
FreeBSD now has jails, chroot, ACLs, MACs, CAPP, OpenBSM, FLASK/TE, blablabla – this sounds way too confusing for average users in my opinion.
Did you get tired of the ‘same old, same old’, nothing new, the lack of imagination of the developers and their implementations based on their narrow mindness?
I, for one, will miss your courage to face these nincompoops, and your good faith in trying to improve the open source movement. Gracias, my friend.
I was just happy to see Xen mentioned. 😉
I really like FreeBSD, just installed 5.4 on a P200/64MB (X Terminal), it’s come a long way since I started using it back at 2.1.5.
As a side note, 5.4 now defines “5” for me, I was an earlier adopter of 5.x, and was disappointed (some laptop problems not seen in 4.x). Hope 6.x is a smoother transistion.
Great work guys!
Great interview. I wish you would have asked about Dragonflybsd. I know it’s not directly relevent to the topic, but I would’ve liked to know their opinion on how the project is progressing. A lot of interesting work seems to be taking place in Dragonfly, and yet I haven’t seen any news on any porting of novel solutions from DFBSD to other BSDs.
I thought the interview was mostly worthless. There are countless real questions people want real answers to that were not asked. These are questions I would like the FreeBSD team to answer:
1) When will they replace the installer?
2) How come SMP is taking so long? Is the light at the end of the tunnel near? How much longer until Big Giant Lock is removed?
3) Do they find anything interesting from Linux, Solaris, or DragonFlyBSD’s SMP approach? Where do they expect FreeBSD to excel when compared to these other projects?
4) What possible short comming do they see in their approach to SMP? How scalable will their OS become?
5) Why has 5 proven so troublesome? Where is 6 in terms of SMP and stability?
6) How is the code quality? Are there plans to revisit things later on and simplify/fix things? Are junior developers involved in cleaning up code?
I love the FreeBSD project so I don’t mean to put them down with these questions. I just am so confused as to where the entire project is.
I’ve been coming to OSNews for so long I know you tried to leave before… is it for real this time? 😉
Cheers
It is one of the things that I have been watching closly for the last 2 years. In some ways I have been surprised by the fact that performance seems to be an afterthought to many BSD people. I agree that I would rather have security and stability first, but sometimes in talking to BSD people they almost seem to use that as an excuse to say that the performance is “good enough”. I’m happy to hear, Matt at least, more bluntly address the kernel performance issues.
1) When will they replace the installer?
A) When someone does it. There are proposals right now for basing a new installer on the DragonFly one. But that is just one of many possibilities, and we encourage anyone to start some real coding.
2) How come SMP is taking so long? Is the light at the end of the tunnel near? How much longer until Big Giant Lock is removed?
A) This was talked about in the interview.
3) Do they find anything interesting from Linux, Solaris, or DragonFlyBSD’s SMP approach? Where do they expect FreeBSD to excel when compared to these other projects?
A) A lot of the SMP concepts in FreeBSD have been borrowed from Solaris, others have been borrowed from BSD/OS. One of the goals of DragonFly is to do SMP with a totally different approach, and we are eagerly awaiting their results.
4) What possible short comming do they see in their approach to SMP? How scalable will their OS become?
A) This was answered in the interview.
5) Why has 5 proven so troublesome? Where is 6 in terms of SMP and stability?
A) (1) We tried to do too much with 5.x. If you look at the feature list, it’s quite impressive. M:N threading, SMPng, UFS2, NSS, MAC, GEOM, sparc64, amd64, etc, etc. Those are all complicated projects, and fitting them together was an incredibly difficult task. While there were some bumpy releases, the fact that we’ve held together and improved says quite a bit about the skill and committment of our developers and users.
A) (2) Answered in the interview.
6) How is the code quality? Are there plans to revisit things later on and simplify/fix things? Are junior developers involved in cleaning up code?
A) We’ve been working closely with Coverity and their static analysis tools for the last few months to clean up common hidden mistakes in the tree. Every fix that comes from these analysis tools is attributed to Coverity in the CVS tree, so it’s quite easy to see how successfull it has been.
Really, really promising. I’m FreeBSD user since 2.1.5, I’m pretty deep in FreeBSD internals, but this interview makes me fell much more better
Just nothing more to add. They’ve said it all.
@slash
1)When will they replace the installer?
Why do you need replacing installer? Is it harder for you than Debian/WindowsNT/2000/XP/anyother installer? If yes – please, use OS that you have preinstalled on your PC.
Truely – I do not see the reason for replacing installer. Could you give me a one, please? If people cannot read English – I suspect that they cannot read any language…
even though I’m a Linux user, I totally enjoy seeing the *BSDs move up. I want to see a party of Open OSes.
Hm, as I can see, at least Scott reads and answers comments.
I have a question:
We had some talk with a friend of mine, who is http://www.altlinux.ru/“>ALT (Debian-Mandrake-like Linux distro) user. We’ve talked about something like RELENG_X_Y (security branch)-tied ports/packages trees. Is there any plans on making such thing in FreeBSD?
As was mentioned in the article, HT vulnerability is a real issue with all OSs, and not just FreeBSD. I’m just wondering how, as a user, I might be able to defend against it. Is it the case that if I’m just run a single cpu (no SMP), then I’m safe? Or can I recompile the kernel to turn it off? Or is it turned off by default? (but what about other OSs – is it turned off by default?).
Seems like this would be a major issue.
Sorry to see you go. ;_;
I guess I also have to say I like where FBSD is heading, keep up the good work.
I’m inclined to agree with Alexandr. The FreeBSD installer is not pretty, but it works. The only problem I’ve ever come across with it is the infamous geometry bug. Aside from that it does exactly what I expect it to. I don’t need Anaconda to install FreeBSD on my machine.
@Scott
So, like I asked, will the iPod/atapicam problem be fixed in 6.0? (Re: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=80420) Like I said, not a deal breaker, just curious.
Eugenia, too bad you’re leaving – just hope that the people left in charge of OSNews will still keep it OSNews and not make it LinuxNews.
I can’t blame you for wanting out – infact I’ve been wanting out of the software world as well. I need to figure out what else I’m good at.
It’s too bad that you now need to prove that you’re a worthy software developer by bending over and having the zealots ram GPL up you bu**
We had some talk with a friend of mine, who is http://www.altlinux.ru/ ALT Linux(Debian-Mandrake-like Linux distro) user. We’ve talked about something like RELENG_X_Y (security branch)-tied ports/packages trees. Is there any plans on making such thing in FreeBSD?
I can’t speak for the ports or the security teams, but I will say that maintaining the ports across such a wide range of releases is a very hard task, and I think that the only way that they manage it is by not branching. Also, with 12,000 ports to deal with, tying them to security releases every time a port gets fixs would likely become very cumbersome very quickly. With more resources it might be possible to batch ports updates together into more coherent security releases. If you’re interested in working on something like this, you should definitely contact the ports team.
@Scott
So, like I asked, will the iPod/atapicam problem be fixed in 6.0? (Re: http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=80420) Like I said, not a deal breaker, just curious.
I honestly cannot say. I only have a firewire iPod, not a USB one, so there isn’t much I can do to help you debug this and get a resolution (not that I don’t want to try, but my free time is getting shorter every day). Maybe you can contact the ATAPICAM maintainer (Thomas Quinot) and work with him?
But I wish Eugenia the best. She has done a wonderful job for osnews!
I’m afraid I don’t know enough about the underlying system to really be much help, I was just curious. Maybe it’s time I stopped being so cheap an picked up a firewire card.
> “OpenBSM provides us with a implementation of both kernel event auditing,
> as well as a BSD-licensed user space audit library implementing Sun’s BSM
> audit file format and service API. ”
We’re very excited about this, and hope that we’ll see transfer of this source to other open source systems as well.
> looking fwd to it – but the trusted bsd sebsd ISO is very out of date, and the
> freebsd60c from june 2005 won’t install!
There’s a new SEBSD snapshot that’s almost ready to go out the door — it should be there in another week or so. It’s based on a much more recent 6.x snapshot, and we hope to start release packages instead of ISOs soon.
> linux also needs OpenBSM.
OpenBSM is intended to build and run on FreeBSD, Darwin, Solaris, and Linux. It should easily also build and run on NetBSD, OpenBSD, etc. Obviously, you need the kernel side in order to generate many of the audit records of interest, but our BSM code is a good place to start.
Thanks for the comments!
Sheeze, I saw a whole bunch of writing but noone answered my questions. Reminds me about the President and the War in Iraq. All I want to know is where exactly does SMP stand at the moment? It’s not a difficult question. Go to http://www.freebsd.org/smp. Look at what’s in progress:
Newbus In progress, VM In progress, Buffer cache In progress, VFS In progress, Processes and thread operations In progress, Scheduler In progress, TTY subsystem In progress, IPv4, IPv6 In progress, IPX/SPX In progress, netatalk In progress, Network stack infrastructure In progress, NFS Client Not Started, NFS Server In Progress.
That’s a big list of “In progress.” A lot of the stuff are extremely important for scalability too. The list barely gets updated so we have no idea when to expect something to be checkmarked. It would be nice to know.
I can’t see how FreeBSD 6 will scale much better when NewBus, VM, Buffer Cache, VFS, Processes and Thread Operations, Scheduler, IPv4, IPv6 and the Network stack are all under Giant Lock. At the moment, it seems that the project is getting the worst of both worlds, all the negatives of being under giant-lock and being multithreaded.
About the installer, I don’t really care when or if it gets replaced. I am used to it, and it works. But if there are no plans to replace it, they should not bring it up in so many discussions. They should just say there are no plans to replace it and leave it at that.
so long, and thanks for all the fish
please do continue to write your comments and editorials , especially like the one about gnome devs not being open enough;
thanks
cheers
ram
Sorry to see you leave. I got hooked on OSNews when I was a BeOS fanboy (as it was dying) and OSNews always carried the latest and greatest BeOS news (and the attempt of OpenBeOS et al to revive it). At first I wondered who this Eugneia person was and why she was causing so much havoc on the forums. 🙂
Now I’m a MS/Linux/OSX/Solaris fan boy and my love for OS stuff has increased because this site is *not* a linux-only or OSS-only site. Keep it this way.
I wish you the best of luck…
It’s very nice to see the FreeBSD people are excited about Xen. The guy who ported FreeBSD to run on Xen has, I understand, recently got commit access on the FreeBSD CVS tree, so hopefully we’ll see an official merge soon. NetBSD has always had excellent Xen support also.
Interestingly, I noticed there was a Google Summer of Code project to make the FreeBSD installer work nicely in a Xen guest.
Where did she said she’s leaving? Jesus
http://slashdot.org/~Eugenia%20Loli/journal
Things have changed a lot in the past 3 years or so – and not for the better. Looks like there is going to a new moderation system in place too.
> I can’t see how FreeBSD 6 will scale much better when NewBus, VM,
> Buffer Cache, VFS, Processes and Thread Operations, Scheduler, IPv4, IPv6
> and the Network stack are all under Giant Lock. At the moment, it seems
> that the project is getting the worst of both worlds, all the negatives of
> being under giant-lock and being multithreaded.
I think your comments may come from a mis-understanding about the process of removing Giant from the kernel, or at least, how this is illustrated in our SMPng development web page. Removing Giant is an incremental process, in which progressively fewer sections of the kernel run with Giant. With each release of FreeBSD as of 5.0, fewer and fewer sections are covered–in 5.3, for example, the “big deal” was that the vast majority of the network stack ran without Giant. The exceptions were largely in the form of “edge cases” in the stack, or less commonly used components in IPX/SPX. In FreeBSD 5.4, IPX/SPX ships without Giant over it. The developer-centric SMPng web page tracks “done” in the sense of 100% completeness, as it has centered on whether tasks remain to be done by developers so that developers can identify new work that must be done. So if something runs 95% of the time without Giant, the 5% being unusual configurations or rare cases (such as loading a network device driver), it will still be listed as “in progress”.
Of the above subsystems, all run without Giant in the performance-centric paths and common cases. For example, the complete top-to-bottom I/O and name space paths for the UFS file system, but not, for example, the MSDOS file system.
Another interesting property of the Giant removal process is that as Giant falls over less and less of the system, contention on Giant is improved, improving performance for components of the kernel that remain under Giant. For example, if a device driver runs with Giant still, it will see lower contention in 6.x as it will no longer contend with Giant over the buffer cache, VFS name space, file system, etc, since it is no longer held there, resulting in lower latency in processing the disk interrupts.
In practice, all of the components you identified in your post, from the scheduler and threading code, to VFS/VM/buffer cache, to IPv4 and IPv6 network stacks, run without Giant. This means entirely Giant-free operation for our important network and file system loads, such as multi-threaded web server operation.
Thanks
I’m gonna miss ya, Eugenia. Don’t go!
Thanks Robert, that’s all I really wanted to hear. It just seems like it’s much harder to find information about the status of SMP and FreeBSD these days. Looking forward to test driving FreeBSD 6.
I only have a limited experience with FreeBSD and the little I have played with it I was very pleased overall.
However, I do have one complaint… overall the installer is fine, but… fix that damn geometry bug and maybe go with a more straight forward less confusing partitioning program (I like cfdisk).
Otherwise.. quite pleased with FreeBSD, and I may be replacing my Slackware box with FreeBSD
will be hard to pry me away from Gentoo on my other systems though….. ya never know.
First, thank you Eugenia for all the time dedicated to this site, I wish you the best. Thanks to the FreeBSD developers for taking the time from their precious schedule to give this interview and posting coments here. All of you have a good luck.
Eugenia has done a lot for OSNews, seems appropriate that she gets a break from it all
Maybe she’ll find it more fun to do only editorials.
Have fun, Eugenia.
Thanks John Baldwin, Robert Watson and Scott Long! For taking the time to answer all the questions and even reply to our comments here. I monitor the freebsd stable,ppc,current closely and I can tell you I cannot wait to see version 6. It should show how hard you worked on 5.
It is really amazing to see all these features coming together
Good luck and thanks again.
This is very nice interview. Well done and good job from Eugenia Loli-Queru.
cheers
“Did you get tired of the ‘same old, same old’, nothing new, the lack of imagination of the developers and their implementations based on their narrow mindness?”
It’s very eays to criticize when you are the one reading the news instead of one of the people that makes the news; what you said was not constructive criticism, it was a very non-specific rude remark followed by an insult.
When you are ready to write complicated programs and innovate software as we know it then you can say something, until then keep your ignorant and rude remarks to yourself. One of the most discourating things about any job or hobby is that it can not only be thankless, but also a constant excuse for ignorant people to insult you and your work; if that is how you want to be, you don’t deserve to use software someone actually worked hard to write.
That article is above my understanding.
But I can say that the installer is fine with me.
i have been running the freebsd6.0-current-snap004 and all is much as when i started with freebsd back in 5.0, Except mplayer and realplayer now work.
i watch freshports.org and do my cvsup and portupgrade as needed.
keep growing and going FreeBSD!!
Hope this osnews is the same without Eugenia.
Robert Wilson looks like one really nice guy – and is that a Grolsch he’s drinking? Excellent!
whoops.
While I disagreed with Eugenia´s opinions and some of her moderation criterias more than often, and even engaged on one heated discussion with her once, she donated so much time to maintain this website that I wonder how she makes up time to treat JBQ and her other personal matters… 🙂
I truly wish you the best and also am looking forward to see more content of yours on this site in the future.
Best regards,
DeadFish Man
Waow.
I thought 6.x was to be a mere evolution from 5.x but not that different, and reading the interview I had the impression of a huge amount of work though. Of course, it is just an impression, and thus fairly subjective.
Will that justify writing a new “Design and implementation of the freebsd system” ? 🙂
Anyway thank you for all the work (and time to tell us all 😉
++
Thanks for creating OSNews.
I guess it won’t be the same without you but I understand that
things sometime need to change.
Once again thanks for your articles and the creation of the site.
Good luck for your next projects
My two cents:
1. Keep the installer the way it is.Clean,fast and reliable.
2. I think Scott Long has stressed multiple times now how 6.X will reap the benefits of the 5.X branch,I’ve beta-tested 6.0-snapshots for a while now, ranging from platforms as varied as PIV Prescotts to v20z SunFires,running processor-intensive software such as Mathematica and let me just tell you it’s been quite impressive, especially compared with 5.X and any other OS I’ve tested so far, performance wise I can tell that 6.X picks up where 4.X stayed, sacrificing performance for stability is always the way to go, keep it up guys and thanks for all your wonderful work.
I’ll join the others in saying a big thank you to the FreeBSD developers, for their work and for informing us about it in this interview and comments.
Also, a big thanks to Eugenia for posting great stuff like this. I really hope the leaving thing isn’t definitive!
John, Robert, Scott and other FreeBSD developers: thank you. Eugenia thank you.
> By slash (IP: —.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net) –
> Posted on 2005-06-24 01:40:40
> Thanks Robert, that’s all I really wanted to hear.
> It just seems like it’s much harder to find
> information about the status of SMP and FreeBSD
> these days. Looking forward to test driving FreeBSD 6.
Yeah — I have to say that we’ve put a lot of effort into the code, and a lot less into the documentation so far, as 6.x is still a new thing. One of the concerns here is actually figuring out how to target status documents — most of the status information is targetted at people actively involved in or following development, with less frequent information as part of the bi-monthly developer status reports. I’ll try to take a pass through the SMPng web page and update it in the next few weeks, so that people sitting somewhere between “tracking CVS” and “tracking releases” can follow things better.
Thanks for your comments!
Thanks Eugenia for all of your hard work. I check this
website daily and have really enjoyed your articles. I use FreeBSD and Linux daily and am very excited to see that
FreeBSD 6 is going to rock. I tried it a couple of months ago or so, but switched to 5.4 recently again until all of the “kinks” are
worked out. Great work guys- can’t wait to see it!
Yup freebsd is gr8 os. With all these new stuff I’m sure it will be move to desktop too … Right now i’m using on servers. Thanks for info and feature of upcomming OS version!
> I have to say that we’ve put a lot of effort into the code, and a lot less into the documentation so far, as 6.x is still a new thing. One of the concerns here is actually figuring out how to target status documents
The weekly freebsd cvs-src summaries (http://excel.xl0.org/FreeBSD/) were great, imo that was a really good way to keep people abreast with current development.
If someone else could take up the whole thing you’ll probably solve the problem. (I’ll volunteer myself but most of the time I’m not understanding a single thing discussed in cvs-src or hackers
ps: leave sysinstall alone, this year we had sun opensourcing solaris, and apple switching to intel, we are seriously risking to deep-freeze hell here
I’m a late comer to FreeBSD as I started on 5.0.
Having always used Linux, I had this thing to try out FreeBSD and for that 5.0 was choosen (Actually it was an article here on OSNews announcing 5.0 Release that got me started
)
But what kept me using it?
– Documentation: Having never used FreeBSD I found the Documentation awesome, which is by itself a VERY IMPORTANT plus over many other OSs.
I read current, stable and sparc on a daily basis and find those mailing lists another good source of information (some deserved to be documented).
– Ports: I have to put up with RPM hell @work. Give me ports/packages any day of the week!
– It just works: most new technologies are supported or will be (WPA on 6.x for example) and will continue to be supported. I recall having to patch every linux kernel with a patch for pptp support(multiple connections) with nat on netfilter that took ages to get incorporated.
– User experience: FreeBSD is an OS. Complete. Everything tied together (kernel + userland), applications (ports/packages), Documentation. It’s this one stop shopping that makes it very appealing and friendly to the user. At least for me
(1)
I’m a Linux user because of the machines I admin @work but if given the chance I would use FreeBSD, definitily.
Most of my machines now run FreeBSD: I dual boot XP/FreeBSD 5.4 on my laptop (P4m) and my home PC(AMD XP), my firewall/router/proxy is an old Sun Ultra 5 running 5.4
I have some other servers (Web, ftp, fileserver, network monitoring, postgres) running FreeBSD as well.
I’ve seen the differences from 5.0 all the way to 5.4 and they are noticeable, and from what I’ve been reading the last few months I’m most eager to upgrade to 6.0!
My congratulations to the Dev Team for they’re work, support on the mailing lists and even responding on OSNews
Note: I didn’t try to bash Linux. I use Linux and it’s great, but from an user experience point of view, mine, FreeBSD comes out in 1st place. Of course, your mileage may vary
Robert, Scott, John and all other FreeBSD developers; a very big thank you.
I bought the 2.2.8 set a long time ago and have been using FreeBSD ever since.
I’m using -CURRENT on a couple of systems and the progress does show IMHO compared to the previous and current 5.x releases.
IMO the OS is more logical and thought through than many other unix-like OS’es I’ve worked with.
My loyalty towards FreeBSD is well founded.
The FreeBSD installer feels quite natural and useful to me at this point (it had better, I’ve been installing various versions since around 4.0!). That doesn’t mean it can’t be improved.
The BSD Installer folks have put out a new tech preview; I haven’t tried it yet, but previous versions have seemed to me to do a good job at selecting which decisions can be automated and which should be left to the user. If the FBSD project is looking at this as something it may want to adopt or model its own new installer upon, I’d be pleased about that.
Thank you Eugenia,
I’ll be missed for sure.
Thanks for all your contribution and your views.
Thank you very much for very interesting articles, Eugenia! Good luck! I hope your future will be bright and shiny!
BTW, this is my first comment on OsNews. 🙂
I read a couple of negative comments about Eugenia, I am infuriated. The reason osnews has been my favourite website since 2001 when it started was because it shared the news that mattered to me. I applaud Eugenia effort thus far, my only concern is when she used to take a vacation the news items were kind of “soso”, how would it fare when she leaves for good.
I at least expect a parting article sharing her experience at OSnews.
FreeBSD 5.x == GCC 3.0.x == GCC 4.0.x: a lot of long needed infrastructure changes and integration of new ideas, to be improved upon once the new stuff has been proven and the old stuff removed. But it won’t be t3h r0xx0r until the next version.
FreeBSD 6.x == GCC 3.3.x == GCC 4.1.x and up: wherein the new stuff is proven and tested to work, remaining old stuff is removed and consigned to history, and the deeper improvements begin to shine as they are optimized and perfected.
FreeBSD 5.x was a necessary step to get to 6.x, which promises to be t3h sn4ppy, and now with 5.4, it’s really nice in it’s own right. Just like we needed to get through the initial release series of GCC 3 and GCC 4 before we really reaped the benefits of what the teams have done.
Now, I shan’t get into whether either project required a whole new version number or not, but the point is moot because the respective development models determine that.
Thanks for the interview, Mrs. Loli-Queru! Way to go off on a high note! Personally, *I* think you made this place one of the most respected geeky news sites on this here new fangled inter-web and you will be missed.
–JM
NONE of what was in the artical matters one bit until the FreeBSD installer is fixed. It fails to reslove DNS 50% of the time, if you have to go back and correct a mistake the install fails. The package untility is a total failure and useless. You use the FreeBSD installer to create a minmum install and even THEN you are crossing your fingers it works! It is inconcivable to me that “improvments” like hyperthreading support are more important than the basics.
“Use simple, effective and reliable methods and tools in order to achive complex solutions” -Theo De Rault at the Calgary Linux Users Group Meeting during Hack-a-thon 2005.
> FreeBSD 5.x was a necessary step to get to 6.x,
> which promises to be t3h sn4ppy, and now with 5.4,
> it’s really nice in it’s own right. Just like we
> needed to get through the initial release series of
> GCC 3 and GCC 4 before we really reaped the benefits
> of what the teams have done.
Part of the problem with the development and maintenance of multi-million line source code bases is that some changes take half a decade or longer to complete. You can’t do them outside the tree or you get left behind, and you can’t stop doing releases for the duration, because then no one gets other necessary features and updates. The result is that they’re rolled in in a staggered manner, with overlapping branches and releases. Similarly, old and new Apache versions overlap, old and new Linux kernel versions overlap, and even Windows versions overlap. This exact same pattern turns up in hardware — the chip that’s the bleeding edge computation cluster today will be in your toaster oven in a few years, but there’s no reason to put it in the toaster oven today (if nothing else, it’s a very expensive heating coil).
When you look at the FreeBSD front page and the release information, you’ll see we are careful to mark which releases are “production”, and which are “technology preview” or “developer snapshot” releases, so as to try and give a bit more information to the user about where it’s appropriate to use various versions. Third party product developers will who are building embedded or derived products, such as firewalls or storage appliances, will often want to remain towards the head of the curve, because their product life cycles will often match our product life cycle. Large web hosts might track further back, as they’ll have a less immediate need for the bleeding edge features.
One of the nice things about open source is that there’s a lot of visibility into the intermediate steps in the development process — you can see inside the product, how things are going, the bug report databases, etc. You don’t get this openness with closed source products. Interestingly, this actually has a cost for open source in the enterprise: because people can see under the hood while it’s being built, they assume that it’s always in a state of being built. FreeBSD “-STABLE” production branches have quite long life spans during which they are *not* being built, and sometimes there are misunderstandings about when it’s appropriate or not appropriate to grab a version. If you grab a developer snapshot, it will crash!
I think the world is becoming a lot more aware of the positive and negative sides to an entirely open development process, and so is able to take better advantage of it than they were a few years ago.
So long, Eugenia. We hardly knew ye.
Eugenia can’t leave!!!
I’ve been coming here every day for a couple of years, I’ve enjoyed many of your editorials, and like how you’ve spoken out on issues in the past when you’ve felt stuff isn’t right. Its a shame the vocal minority here are screwing it over for the rest of us and have caused you trouble and pain, I don’t think the site will be the same without you. And GnomeFiles will surely take a hit
Good luck in whatever you choose to do, I hope you find something enjoyable and productive to do in the hours OSNews used to fill. So long, and thanks for the ride
I really wish that Apple and the TrustedBSD people had talked to Sun about BSM before cloning the existing Solaris stuff. Why ? because it would have been much more useful for us to develop an open standard and open implementaion of this rather than them just cloning the existing interfaces.
In Solaris we have developed a new set of higher level and much more useful interfaces, we have also added support for XML output. Until very recently we didn’t even know that Apple had BSM support and had cloned our interfaces and file formats.
So if any of the people working on OpenBSM are reading please contact me, darren dot moffat at sun dot com, so we can work together – it will be faster and better for all of us and all of our users if we do so.
Even if you choose not to contact Sun about this, then I wish you good luck it will be really nice to have a compeditor for Trusted Solaris again.
I’d also like to point out that all the code for Solaris BSM is already open in OpenSolaris.
Userland: http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/lib/libbsm/
Kernel:
http://cvs.opensolaris.org/source/xref/usr/src/uts/common/c2/
Lets see Eugenia got offended but a minority of people. More here in her blog @ http://slashdot.org/~Eugenia%20Loli/journal
Now let us bring her back to OSNEWS. I want every one supporting Eugenia to say “EUGENIA PLEASE COME BACK TO OSNEWS” either here or on all the comments that you leave.
Admitedly there’s a lack of communication among different OpenSource projects, and it’s been a many years since I last heard about SUN wanting to contribute with the BSDs. It would be nice to see SUN adopting some FreeBSD stuff like netgraph, kqueue and eventually maybe even GEOM and KGI. <BR>There are issues though … taking code from Solaris into the BSDs (or Linux) is not really an option because of the license. Apple has been very flexible with the BSD guys on that.
Scott, you’re a little behind on the ports count, it currently stands at 13135. (For what it’s worth, all but a few of these are source-based.)
As per the initial question: although people occasionally ask about branching the ports tree, in practice we don’t feel we have enough manpower to do it The effort of keeping the ports tree up-to-date on the various combinations of major releases and architectures is as much as we care to handle, even with the automated ports building cluster (IMHO FreeBSD’s “secret weapon”).
So for the moment there is no plan to do anything to the ports trees for releases, other than CVS tags, which we already do.
Howdy,
First off, how cool of these guys to take this time out and then to come in here and answer questions. Very much appreciated (as is all the work you do for FreeBSD). And 6.x looks very interesting. I remember getting into this back at 2.1.5 and even then the “philosophy” got me.
Through the years, Mike Smith had helped me tremendously with various scsi/raid issues on the mailing lists. Really great guy who took time to explain how he was using the data I supplied him in my bug reports/troubleshooting. I learned so much just from short interactions with him. He was also incredibly kind and patient.
I saw in the article that he’s at Apple. What type of work is he doing there?
Lastly, of those that work at Apple now (JKH, Mike), I’d love to see either of these folks write an article along the lines of “A tour of my OS-X workstation” – love to see what they do for virtual desktops, and what they find are “must haves” as far as little utilities and hacks.
I’ve been using FreeBSD for 3 years now and I _LOVE_ it and I’m impresive how developers track the comments and even respond, however I have a quick shot, since FreeBSD 5.2 I’ve been testing OpenOffice.org and well it CRASH the whole system that wont even reply the pings, same in 5.3 and now in 5.4 and since 1.1.2 to 1.1.4 on 3 diferents machines diferent hardware, someone should look at it.
I recently installed Ubuntu in one the computers of my office, I is amazing how simple, easy and nice it is designed/arranged … with Synaptic, easy to update ….
I would like to know if there is an equivalent in the BSD world. I found PC-BSD difficult to install … much more than Ubuntu.
Any suggestion?
Thx
* clicks heels together *
theres no person like eugenia, theres no person like eugenia, theres no person like eugenia,
she just needs to step back and tkae things in stride and realize this is a VERY public place and people are going to express themselves, dear dont let it get to you…… water off a ducks back…..nothing more….. people being the assholes they are, myself included….. In real life I am the most “to each his own” kind of person…. But I love to argue like I am a devout christian on a soul saving quest…
all in good fun….
i am looking for a job if anyone is interested
souneedalink (at) yahoo
Your edits and stories have been main source for OSNEWS and certainly I could see the efforts you put in for it. Your views about GNOME Developers were right on. Instead of listening to users, if they keep on being adamant, they will lose in the end. I love Open source software but people like them make me stay away from it at times. I hope u will continue to contribute to OSNEWS otherwise I might not be that interested in this news site
FreeBSD 5.x Performance does well considering all the other features implemented into the 5.x releases. I did a benchmark on a Compaq Proliant 8500R with Quad 550MHz Intel Pentium III Xeons (2MB L2), 1GB Ram, 64MB Compaq SmartArray (IDA), Hotswap SCSI, Hotplug PCI, etc. The conditions were not timed via a watch, but by eye. Compiling a fully fledged server setup using MySQL 4.1.12, PHP 4.3.11, Apache 2.0.54 w/ OpenSSL, all from source on 2.6.9 enabled Slackware and Gentoo 2005.0, verus FreeBSD 5.3. FreeBSD on MySQL for instance, took a substantially less period of time to complete, I’m guessing 15 minutes to do MySQL 4. Linux took twice that on both distributions, Gentoo being faster then Slackware for obvious performance perks. Although it is on top with speed, I still think they are right about the locking mechninism. I look forward to 6-RELEASE. The reason I stick with FreeBSD as my server platform lies within its maturity. http://www.levenez.com/unix/ have some fun looking at BSD going all the way back to the 1970’s. Good review, thank you for your work.