Submitted by “The 7.0-BETA4 builds are now available. If you would like to use cvsup to update an older machine the branch tag to use is still RELENG_7. For users of FreeBSD Update due to some last-minute bumps in system libraries, installed third-party applications must be recompiled as per normal for a ‘major’ upgrade, even if upgrading from an earlier 7.0 BETA.”
Great, FreeBSD 7 is coming…..
Couple of buzzwords: ZFS, gjournal, SCHED_ULE 2, Linuxulator 2.6, unionfs, RSTP, etc.
http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd7.html
I am pleased that FreeBSD is strong and coming along so well. Just out of curiosity, do they usually have 4 BETA builds or is it a sign that there have been some troublesome issues they wanted to resolve?
Not sure, but I’m sure they said they wanted 7 out by the end of the year, so maybe they are having one or two problems.
On a side note, I have been running an early FreeBSD 7 (Current) since August with the ULE scheduler and it’s excellent, runs extremely well. Have only needed to shut it down once, and that was because I need to rebuild the kernel to support USB drives. I keep meaning to update my source tree and rebuild it, but haven’t got round to it yet.
There is a showstopper (TCP timer) and therefore the new release date is January 2008. Quality first.
Just put this beta on a new storage-server at home and it JustWorks(tm). The combination of ZFS and FreeBSD is awesome. Gonna rebuild my other systems to use 7 later this weekend.
Remember, when you’re setting up a Linux or BSD box, make sure you use COMMON hardware. Not some obscure budget crap. If you do that you can expect a very nice experience. 7 works nicely with AMDs and nVidias current chipsets. Graphics is a whole other department and there is no known cure for that disease yet, only promising prospects
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What Linux needs right now is a big dose of ZFS. There is not a day at work where ZFS would not have helped me fix a problem more easily on our debian systems. I’m not talking some userland mounted crap, I’m talking ZFS mounted as root.
7 release is gonna be a good one
What Linux needs right now is a big dose of ZFS. There is not a day at work where ZFS would not have helped me fix a problem more easily on our debian systems. I’m not talking some userland mounted crap, I’m talking ZFS mounted as root.
Why is that? I don’t quite see why Linux needs zfs so badly? I fail to understand why LVM/xfs are not as powerful as zfs. Please explain.
And what “problems” do you fix on Debian systems with zfs???
I fail to understand why LVM/xfs are not as powerful as zfs. Please explain.
Snapshots, online. Upgrading a production system (root partition) is virtually risk free. With LVM you need a separate boot partition, this is also true for zfs at the moment but that is under heavy development.
Protection against silent write errors. Yes this i rapidly becoming a serious problem. Not a big issue in the sub-terabyte data landscape but for others it is.
Did I mention snapshots? Yes I did but once you start using it online you’d never wanna go back. It changes how you see your fs.
Really pooled storage, dynamic and not needed to be preallocated and having to use xfs_growfs. You really don’t wanna use that on a live fs with concurrent writes going on at the same time.
There are other very useful features as well, compression, nfs-support and also it is ONE system not 3-4.
Just a question, in case anyone knows:
Are there any plans to implement VMWare’s VMI paravirtualization hooks (similar to Xen) on FreeBSD? I couldn’t find any references by Googling. I tried these on Linux distributions and they make a big, user noticable difference.
Not to my knowledge. As a matter of fact, I am not aware of any virtualization software that makes use of the new Virtualization capable processors for FreeBSD. Kqemu (from the QEMU) project was to get changes from the Linux-KVM but does not seem it has. If you are looking for virtualization, stick to Linux (with VMware, KVM, VirtualBox, etc.). I keep FreeBSD on the Server, but Linux for the desktop.
Note: VirtualBox is supposed to have something for FreeBSD but have not heard of anyhting yet. There seem to be alpha code but seems broken.
FreeBSD 7 sounds like it will be an outstanding release.
I’m looking forward to running it in the near future.
Hey FreeBSD dev team!
Thanks for the hard work, I just upgraded few servers from 6.x to 7.x using src upgrade with mergemaster.
Then I did portupgrade -f “*” then all my ports are happy now
Go FreeBSD!