Submitted by KenSmith announced the immediate availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RC1 in the FreeBSD-stable mailing list. “The first of two planned Release Candidates for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of some of the recent work would be
particularly appreciated.” The release schedule states that the final release is to be expected early May, at which point we’ll cover FreeBSD 7.2 in much more detail.
A link to what’s new and cool in this release would be nice. With Linux, we always get these indepth news articles about “awesome” new features, but with BSDs, no one covers them. It makes you wonder about how the BSDs are keeping up with the “awesome” features of Linux, like sophisticated schedulers, drivers, etc. The BSD developers aren’t sitting on their asses, and they’re not ignoring what the Linux people are doing… so it would be cool if someone actually talked about their developments too.
i think you just volunteered yourself, so on behalf of the rest of use lazy people, thanks
personally, i also would like to see more competition between the *nixs, and much of this has little to do with that they actually do (cause they do alot) and a great amount to do with how the media (thats you OSN) reports on it.
someone has to stir the pot right?
just a thought.
Alas, if I had half a clue on the topic, I wouldn’t have felt the need to ask the question. I don’t even know where to begin. Join their mailing lists and start asking questions? I’ll add that to my long list of other things to do.
Release Notes will be available once the version is released. In there you will find what you are looking for.
7.2 will be an incremental release of the 7.X series. Most of the new and exciting features in FreeBSD happen on the major versions, like 7.0.
7.1 and the upcoming 7.2 fix bugs, add some drivers and may enhance some subsystems. It is worth having a look at few of the features introduced in 7.0:
– ZFS filesystem
– New ULE scheduler (default in the GENERIC kernel from 7.1 onwards)
– Much better SMP support (fine-grained locking)
– UFS journaling via the GEOM framework
– DTrace
– More drivers etc.
Read more about it here: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.0R/announce.html
8.0-RELEASE is also scheduled for later this year, and you can expect another nice list of new features there too.
I put my bet more on 8.0 which has revolutionary changes like USB4BSd and possibly KGI. Combined with support from Debian this is a step in the right direction.
What support from Debian? Cutting out a kernel is pure nonsense! The huge advantage of *BSD is the high quality development of kernel and userland altogether. Furthermore nobody cares about most parts of GNU userland, it’s a single lack of quality. Even many Linux distros are glad to use some tools of the BSD userland (the most obvious OpenSSH, libarchive and bsdtar …) and Google Android e.g. uses many parts of the BSD userland plus a libc derived from OpenBSD/NetBSD. Linux uses superpages, a technology developed for FreeBSD, Firefox 3.x uses jemalloc from FreeBSD etc. pp.
Well I don’t want to start a flameware, BUT Debian itself is barely able anymore to just put together some operating system developed by other people. And I don’t want to mention any of the high quality flops, like Iceweasel, cdrtools …
Developing a kernel plus userland and distributing this as ready-to-use operating system is a real achievement.
This is all nice, but I think that APT is much more powerfull than FreeBSD ports. I for one would welcome BSD with APT for package management
Debian/kFreeBSD
http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/
I would say APT is the best for binary package management, but FreeBSD ports is unbeatable for source based installs.
But APT is for Debian, not FreeBSD. Just because one can replace the kernel with a bunch of hacking does not mean you can use Debian packages on FreeBSD. There is the complete userland to consider. Debian developers develop for Debian, and not FreeBSD.
Binary packages != ports. And if it comes to sources-based management Debian is a single failure. However if we’re talking about management of binary packages, then pacman from ArchLinux is the way to go. Why should an OS like FreeBSD that follows the KISS principle use something like apt? Prone to failure, overloaded with scripts etc.? No you’re talking about the past. But then, most people chosing FreeBSD are quiet happy about the ports and the control they get while building the software. And I don’t speak about performance, but control of features, patches, quality compared to inconsistencies among binary packages etc.
ports are better if you want to compile. For binary releases I would prefer pacman to apt-get, and I’m an old apt-get lover.
Now FreeBSD with pacman would really rock.
Respectfully disagree, Love debian gnu/linux. Will love debian gnu/FreeBSD. I prefer the Gnu userland. Silly little differences between the two, but sort of a pain switching between my Linux work and anything on BSD.
OpenSSH comes from OpenBSD, not FreeBSD, and where are talking about Debian GNU/FreeBSD in this case.
So, what’s the boombastic part of the freebsd userland which GNU should envy?