“This report covers the last quarter of a exciting year 2006 for FreeBSD development. FreeBSD 6.2 is finally out of the door and work towards FreeBSD 7.0 is gearing up.” This report includes detailed information about (among others) ZFS, iSCSI, ARM, a new USB stack, Network Stack Virtualization, Wireless networking, and Sound Subsystem improvements.
In order to try out FreeBSD on laptop as well, these are most useful resources:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/laptop/index.ht…
http://laptop.bsdgroup.de/freebsd/
P.S. whoever’s not yet acquainted with FreeBSD might prefer to start with a desktop or server installation though, just to break the ice
I would like there is a patch for me to support the new broadcom driver for the new Dell Machines.
You know, this status report gave just enough I needed to make the decision to help this project. I already donated but will help with translation and (gnome) beta testing.
Nice overview and keep em coming:-)
Too bad FreeBSD still has trouble with Xen dom0 support. I’d switch from Ubuntu to FreeBSD any day, if only I could use Xen.
Try NetBSD then.
3945abg driver coming to FreeBSD – looks like I’ve found my own little piece of Graceland
The other improvements look awesome, but one still has to wonder what is the situation with KSE, and are they going to biff it out given the lack of updating to their kse website – http://www.freebsd.org/kse ; there were rumours that they were going to replace it because it didn’t perform as well as expected – any update on that?
SMP progress is coming along nicely, which should make things progress; hopefully Nvidia will pull finger and update their driver for FreeBSD rather than being still suck in the 5.x stone age – lets also hope that Xorg modular will be ready by the time 6.3 is released so that we can experience some 7.2 goodness 🙂
Edited 2007-01-18 01:25
/*hopefully Nvidia will pull finger and update their driver for FreeBSD rather than being still suck in the 5.x stone age – lets also hope that Xorg modular will be ready by the time 6.3 is released so that we can experience some 7.2 goodness 🙂 */
I don’t think freebsd 6.3 will be using Xorg 7.2, because freebsd 7 current is still using Xorg 6.9. Xorg 7.2 might appear in late freebsd 7 releses or maybe until freebsd 8. but since freebsd 5.5 eoL is not until next year and it also uses Xorg 6.9 and the nvidia driver works great and also uses UFS2 ,etc. I still won’t upgrade to a freebsd 6 release.
Edited 2007-01-18 05:30
I don’t think freebsd 6.3 will be using Xorg 7.2, because freebsd 7 current is still using Xorg 6.9. Xorg 7.2 might appear in late freebsd 7 releses or maybe until freebsd 8. but since freebsd 5.5 eoL is not until next year and it also uses Xorg 6.9 and the nvidia driver works great and also uses UFS2 ,etc. I still won’t upgrade to a freebsd 6 release.
Work is very far underway with Xorg 7.2. There is a separate ports tree that contains Xorg 7.2.0 RC3, and upgrading from 6.9 is nearly flawless. It will only be a short while till this is made available in the regular ports tree, I’m sure.
As for the nVidia driver. You are correct. The driver works great, even on -CURRENT (which I’m currently using).
Adam
I’m using xorg 7.2 on freenbsd 6.2 right now, with all the beryl goodies you’d want
Screenies:
ftp://hatvani.unideb.hu/personal/screenshots/beryl/watereffect1.pn…
ftp://hatvani.unideb.hu/personal/screenshots/beryl/cube1.png
I’m using xorg 7.2 on freenbsd 6.2 right now
Where did you find Xorg 7.2 port at. I searched in the ports and only found 6.9, and i don’t want to compile upto 300 files to run 7.2
You know, if you put xorg 7.2 modular freebsd into google, the first link is to their website:
http://wikitest.freebsd.org/ModularXorg
Which provides you information on how you can download the necessary ports files using git.
Also, if you use nvidia-drivers, you have to copy relevant libs to:
ModulePath “/usr/local/lib/xorg/modules/”
(you also have to include this line in xorg.conf under Section “Files”)
You also have to be aware of a problem described here:
http://forum.beryl-project.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=31
One solution offered is to modprobe the nvidia kernel module with this option:
NVreg_RegistryDwords=”PerfLevelSrc=0x2222″
This is for linux, for freebsd, you can put this in sysctl.conf instead:
hw.nvidia.registry.dwords=PerfLevelSrc=0x2222
Still, this didn’t solve the problem of freezing – nor did any of the advices given in that thread. Nevertheless, I left that knob in sysctl.conf, while disabling beryl-manager – and now I have xorg+beryl running for more than a day without problems (beryl manager provides a systray icon for settings). So, what I suggest is to use beryl-manager once to set all the options you want, and than put only beryl in .kde/Autostart (if you use kde). Whenewer you need to change a setting, than you can use beryl-settings or emerald-theme-manager to set them, but don’t use beryl-manager).
I did all this on a clean install of freebsd 6.2, never bothering to install official ports, using the git repository mentioned in other posts from the beginning.
You do realise that Xorg is a port, part of the ports tree, and is not part of any FreeBSD release? Right?
You do realise that you can run any version of Xorg on (just about) any version of FreeBSD? For instance, you can run Xorg 6.9 on FreeBSD 4.11, 5.3-5.5, 6.0-6.2, and 7-CURRENT?
And you do realise that once Xorg 7.x hits the ports tree, you’ll be able to run it on (just about) any version of FreeBSD (so long as there aren’t version checks in the port Makefile, of course), simply by updating the ports tree and installing from there?
This is not Linux. The FreeBSD OS is released separately from the apps that run on that OS. And there is only 1 ports tree; every version of FreeBSD out there uses the same ports tree.
If you want new apps, you don’t need to update the OS. Just update the ports tree and install the new apps. Such a nicer setup than a Linux distro where you have to wait for the next release to get the new versions of apps.
Edited 2007-01-18 23:28
It’s obvious pepole can upgrade, installed apps to their os What i was refering was that the next release of freebsd, might still come with Xorg 6.9 installed by default,because they have been releasing freebsd with xorg 6.9 for some time. I use OpenBSD not linux
and openbsd does not show an Xorg port under the ports tree unless I’m not looking in the right area, and I’m not going to try to compile xorg 7.2, it will take days or even weeks in my system.
FreeBSD does not “come with Xorg 6.9 installed”.
FreeBSD does not include Xorg. There are packages for whatever the default version of Xorg in the ports tree is, available on the install CD. But that is not part of FreeBSD.
And if someone wants to install XFree86 3.3.6, or XFree86 4.4, they can. They can even install binary packages for it using “pkg_add -r”.
And when Xorg 7.2 hits the ports tree and becomes the default X install, you’ll still probably be able to install Xorg 6.9.
That’s the beauty of FreeBSD. The apps are separated from the OS. You can upgrade them asynchronously.
When X.org 7.2 hits the tree, it will replace 6.9, so you won’t be able to install it anymore. We will also (or that’s very likely) remove XFree86-3 support at the same time. XFree86-4 support will be removed at a later date.
Sure you can make backup packages and install them later, but it’s probably going to cause a lot of problems.
For all those talking about Xorg 7.2 you might have read the status report.
X.org 7.2 release has been delayed more than a month, which gave us more time to fix build failures, to work on a few runtime issues and to determine the easiest way to upgrade from 6.9 to 7.2 (mostly with the help of people on the freebsd-x11@ mailing list ). Everything is in a rather good shape but there’s still a little amount of work to do. The merge of new ports is most likely to happen before the end of January.
Open tasks:
Do a global review of the diff between the original tree and the experimental one (git-diff origin xorg for git users)
Fix the remaining (9 I think, 3 being lang/jdk’s) build errors
Continue testing
Do another experimental build on pointyhat