The FreeBSD 6.0 release cycle has begun. According to the FreeBSD team, “FreeBSD 6.0 will be a much less dramatic step from the FreeBSD 5 branch than the FreeBSD 5 branch was from FreeBSD 4. Much of the work that has gone into 6.0 development has focused on polishing and improving the
work from 5.x These changes include streamlining direct device access in the kernel, providing a multi-threaded SMP-safe UFS/VFS filesystem layer, implementing WPA and Host-AP 802.11 features, as well as countless bugfixes and device driver improvements.”
It looks like Apple OS X86 for 2006 will be a contender. When I read what is happening for FreeBSD it is much more interesting (and intelligent) compared to the mud hut chaos that is Linux.
From all indications, Linux desktop will be over in 2-3 years.
Ignore the troll, OSNews has a new system to deal with trolls and that is rate them negatively!
From all indications, Linux desktop will be over in 2-3 years.
I’d love to see you back that one up.
For those of us Linuxy Folks interested in exploring the dark side, FreeBSD is a fairly easy to install and manage BSD. If you want a REALLY easy to use version of BSD to play with, try PCBSD:
http://www.pcbsd.org
>PCBSD
Agreed, once that hits 6.0 I’m throwing it on an old laptop. Previous PCBSD felt nice for desktop, and it’s for my wife who only need to surf and do word processing. She used to run Slackware on it, but I want her to try this next.
P
From all indications, Linux desktop will be over in 2-3 years.
How can it be over, when it was never there?
Maybe by end of Septemeber we would have PC-BSD also based on FreeBSD 6.0. From what I read FreeBSD is soing to be more optimized for Pentium 4 systems and the support for slower systems is going to be dropped, slower systems would be on FreeBSD 4.x series. Hope we get GCC 4.0 in FreeBSD 6.0. Kudos to the efforts of developers at FreeSBD, any word on BSD 5.0 has that got anything with the FreeBSD 6.x project.
That sounds like good news!!!
Does that meen it will be i686 optimized. It’s fast enough as it is.
“Hope we get GCC 4.0 in FreeBSD 6.0. Kudos to the efforts of developers at FreeSBD,” FreeBSD 6.0 will not have GCC 4.0 in the base system. Install it from the ports collection. Note, I’m actively contributing to the GCC development of gfortran, and I will vocally discourage the inclusion of GCC 4.0 into the base system because 4.0 isn’t as good as 3.3.4 in some area.
From what I read FreeBSD is soing to be more optimized for Pentium 4 systems and the support for slower systems is going to be dropped
You hear wrong. FreeBSD binaries are compiled for the i386. If you want to optimise the binaries, you need to edit /etc/make.conf and set CPUTYPE and CFLAGS as you desire.
The only change in 6.0 compared to previous versions is that CFLAGS now defaults to -O2 instead of -O.
Do I have to recompile the Kernel then. Any place I can find more info on this topic.
Hi. Like lots of other things when working with Unix, I think that most people learn this from a mentor. Or as K&R put it “a local expert”. The handbook does cover it, but I reckon, makes it a little harder than it is. It really isn’t difficult at all. My master took me through it many years ago. I can help you out … my son! This works for me:
i) # cp /usr/share/examples/stable-supfile /root
ii) Edit the release tag to RELENG_6. Edit the cvsup server to a server geographically nearby.
iii) # cvsup -g -L 2 /root/stable-supfile
iv) # cp -Rp /etc /etc.bak
v) # mergemaster -p -v
vi) # cd /usr/obj ; chflags -R noschg * ; rm -rf *
vii) # cd /usr/src ; make buildworld && make kernel KERNCONF=YOURKERNEL
viii) Drop into single user mode:
# shutdown now
ix) # cd /usr/src
# make installworld
x) # mergemaster -v
You’ll be prompted for a while about which of your /etc files and scripts to update. I keep my rc.conf, hosts and a couple of others that I want to keep. For MOST files and scripts, you’d want to install the new one. I just think to myself “If I had to customise it, I’ll have to keep it”. This is the only tricky part. But, if you use my simple rule, it isn’t tricky at all. It’s either ‘keep’ or ‘install’ – I don’t bother with ‘merge’ (usually).
xi) Reboot your system into full, multi-user mode:
# reboot
EASY! If all goes well, you’ll feel a somewhat undeserved sense of pride
Hope this helps.
Does mass storage work properly this time?
over usb2
So USB 2.0 mass storage devices don’t work in the current release? In other words, I couldn’t even hook in a USB keychain device?
Does mass storage work properly this time?
over usb2
Depends on the USB2 chipset, and the USB2 device. Most work fine, some will lock up the system. It’s pretty much trial-and-error. The ehci device is not part of the GENERIC kernel for this reason.
is getting USB2 to work properly going to be a priority.
Actually device ehci is enabled in the GENERIC kernel on FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1
USB mass storage works fine on my FreeBSD 5.4. I believe there was one issue that related to iPods in the previous release, but USB keychain drives work fine for me.
It’s probably luck then…but I’ve never had any problems with USB and Firewire storage devices on FreeBSD since 5.2, actually… more “plug and play” then in Win XP
like someone said ehci isnt that great.
and a thumbdrive i have works wonderfully. (extremely fast etc)
but more to the point. i dont think plugging in a problematic device should CRASH the system.
there should be graceful exits.
I never had any problem with it under 4.10.
FreeBSD Handbook regarding kernel compilation: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/kernelcon…
Fairly definitive.
I’ve been running 6.0 since SNAP004 – and am sure I’m up to Beta1 since my portupgrade today turned up 12 things that need to be done. I’ve had no issues with web/email on my server, it’s a homebox, but still does a decent amount of work. I had 5.3 installed but went with 6.0 knowing that it was to go soon, plus I needed to update my 5.3, and thought it’d be fun. Well hell, it is allot of fun, and I’m loving FreeBSD. After 4 years with a Linux server doing web/mail/etc at home, this is a nice change, and there’s a freshness about it. Could be that coming from Slackware, then Gentoo, to BSD helps. OpenBSD is coming up on an old box for firewall via pf, and I’m having fun again!
P
Is is possible to view a partition that is formated with ReiserFS? I have a file server that runs linux right now. I wouldn’t mind trying FreeBSD on it, but I don’t want to back everything up and format all the partitions.
Yes, FreeBSD 6.0 can read ReiserFS partitions
My Toshiba laptop wont boot from their CD, and I didn’t see any install floppy images. I ended up putting regular FreeBSD on it.
If ehci is in better condition, then well its getting installed this weekend.
umass0: Apple iPod, rev 2.00/10.01, addr 2
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Apple iPod 2.70> Removable Direct Access SCSI-4 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 992MB (2032640 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 992C)
# mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /ipod
# ls /ipod
.DS_Store .VolumeIcon.icns iPod_Control
.Spotlight-V100 ._.Trashes
.Trashes ._iPod_Control
avg. read speed when copying from the shuffle seems to be between 2.1-2.2 MB/s
I could be wrong as I haven’t tried to use the new ReiserFS options, but I believe the current support is only reliable for Read operations, I recommend reading through a few of the relevant mailing lists before trusting your data in a read/write mode. And of course backup critical files.
Well, as I said earlier, FreeBSD 6.0 can _READ_ ReiserFS partitions…
from the mount_reiserfs man page:
CAVEATS
This utility is primarily used for read access to a ReiserFS volume.
Writing to a volume is currently unsupported.
I did notice you only said read, I would just hate for a new bsd user to go convert their fileserver only to loose a bunch of data. Not that I think such a result is likely or common, rather that its hard to be too careful.
Here are someother interesting projects that are coming out of *bsd.
Kernel Graphics Interface
http://people.freebsd.org/~nsouch/kgi4BSD/
http://people.freebsd.org/~nsouch/kgi4BSD/content-about.html
http://www.trustedbsd.org/components.html
Access Control Lists
Extended Attributes
Fine-Grained Capabilities
Security-Enhanced BSD (SEBSD)
Security-Enhanced Darwin (SEDarwin)
Lots of cooling things coming down the pipe.
well chech their news page. The latest post says January 2005 Happy New year! I don’t know about their project but their web page is not very actively supported!
Does anyone know if they improved their msdosfs implementation to cleanly mount fat partitions larger than 128Gb?
Actually device ehci is enabled in the GENERIC kernel on FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1
Hmmm…could this ehci issue be the reason why I’ve never been able to get my USB keyboard to work on FreeBSD (or OpenBSD or NetBSD)? If so, maybe this new feature in 6.0 will fix it. I look forward to trying it out.
Did you try the “Boot FreeBSD with USB keyboard” boot menu option when booting FreeBSD 5.x?
4 – 5 – 6 OK I am waiting for FreeBSD Support.
So get on it and start coding
http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0201702452
I think it can’t be named 6.0.only 5.5or 5.x
If you break binary compatibility, you need to use a new major version number. That’s the way it works in BSD-land. In fact, even after 6.0-RELEASE, you’ll still see a number of 5.x releases, most likely. It’s an excellent versioning scheme.
like the previous 6.0-cuurent releaeses, this version aalso fails to install on vmware 4.2 gsx server.
KGI works on FreeBSD. The development goes as fast as the rest of KGI though
.
I recently had trouble mounting a Fat32 volume 400gb in size. External drive, Firewire and or USB2.
: (
Why use FAT when there’s UFS2
I`m wondering, did anyone tried to get ISO images for PowerPC? I can`t find them.
http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/
Better wait for BETA2 though…
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2005-July/001270.htm…
I did end up reformatting to UFS2, but ultimately I want to have the option of mounting the drive on windows. There are a few implementations of ufs for windows, but the ones I have found are not very plug n play.
If you really need to mount it on windows, you could partition the drive into, say, 4 x 100 GB FAT32 partitions.
Since FAT32 partitions has a 4 GB maximum file size limit, you could also try using the limited NTFS write support in FreeBSD.
What about the low latency on the desktop compared 4x to 5x and 6x to 4x ?
Is UFS2 a journaling file sistem ? I think freebsd laks a good journaling FS like ext3 for linux sistems.
UFS2 is a file system with soft updates, which solves the problem in a different way than a journalling fs
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix2000/g…
does(will?) FreeBSD support lvm2/evms volumes?
I think softupdate have much overhead than journaling fs when the os have lots of writing back,so it only suit small machine
cpu does’nt suit filesystem operation
viii) Drop into single user mode:
# shutdown now
ix) # cd /usr/src
# make installworld
x) # mergemaster -v
Don’t need to drop into single user mode. I never did.
There is also work towards a journalling ufs:
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-jan-2005-mar-2005.html#Fi…
well chech their news page. The latest post says January 2005 Happy New year! I don’t know about their project but their web page is not very actively supported!
———————————————————
Join a mailing list.