Terminus wrote in to tell us that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 is now available on the FreeBSD FTP servers. He also reminds us “The final release is scheduled for January 17th 2003.”
FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 Available
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Adam Scheinberg
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I’m not a developer, and as such I don’t have any experience in OS-building. But it would seem to me that RC3’s short lifespan of about a week, with 5.0-RELEASE due the 17th, would make it pretty useless to iron out any significant bugs. Especially seeing as how the build process starts even some time before the 17th to get the distribution mechanism churning in time.
I think I’ll pass on RC3 and wait another week for -RELEASE.
Heh, your handle is so similar to mine…
But at any rate, agreed, I’ve been running RC2 since December 22nd, and don’t see any real point in upgrading to RC3 for a week before the final release. I’ll just stick with RC2 for now.
“But at any rate, agreed, I’ve been running RC2 since December 22nd, and don’t see any real point in upgrading to RC3 for a week before the final release. I’ll just stick with RC2 for now.”
Because certain problems are supposed to be fixed. Inlcuding the occasional buffer sync failure on shutdown, and maybe the broken ACPI support. I also think maybe setting Gnome as the default desktop works now.
Anyway, I’m going to grab it and play with it.
Hmm
It appears to support a range of CPU’s but now PowerPC.
Damn and I was wanting to run it on my new Amiga Too
Regards
Darren
I am not having a good day.
I meant to say “No PPC Version” but did a typo instead (Twice, so at least I am consistant 😉
Regards
Darren
Hmm
It appears to support a range of CPU’s but no PowerPC.
Damn and I was wanting to run it on my new Amiga Too
Regards
Darren
An RC3 is supposed to be a “release-candidate” it’s not supposed to have major bugs. It’s mainly out there to find any last minor things or show-stoppers before the final release.
“An RC3 is supposed to be a “release-candidate” it’s not supposed to have major bugs. It’s mainly out there to find any last minor things or show-stoppers before the final release.”
Okay, but it’s less than a week. What are they expecting from the community in that time. I mean, you’ll have to upgrade your test machines or do a fresh install, configure your daemons, get the whole shebang up and running and then find bugs?
Why bother – just stress test the thing internally to the breaking point, fixed what shows up and then make an official 5.0 release.
I’d have to agree, barely anyone would commit themselves to a download of that size and only have it to test for 5 days. All of RC2’s fixes will be what makes 5.0 Release stable or not.
As generous as us BSDrs are with testing and bug reporting, we aren’t that generous. 5 days is just too big of an ask.
offtopic-ish question but why aren’t there (or are there?) different FreeBSD distributions like there are different Linux distributions…you know, why no one is trying to make FreeBSD “easy for the masses.”
Ah, Mr.Bochon. Whereas “Linux” is generally accepted as the Linux kernel with the GNU applications bundled, FreeBSD is a complete OS – a kernel and a specific set of applications and libraries. With FreeBSD, you know exactly what you have.
You could, if you wanted, do exactly that, but it isn’t FreeBSD anymore. In fact, NetBSD and OpenBSD are BSD OS’s with a specific purpose. There are no FreeBSD ditributions. There is FreeBSD, and NOT FreeBSD. Read more on the freebsd website at http://freebsd.org/
“why no one is trying to make FreeBSD “easy for the masses”
It’s called Apple OS X.
There are other bsd’s, netbsd, openbsd, bsdi?, xmach, etc.
My opinion though is that FreeBSD is one of the easiest, do you want a desktop then, cd /usr/ports/misc/instant-workstation make install You might need the cd pack or a good connection to the net.
Heh, if I controlled FreeBSD release dates, I would delay the release a good two weeks to shut you all up!
Big deal, try out RC3, see how it is, report the bugs to the developers, make FreeBSD 5.0-Release a successful one, not one known for a stupid bug some lazy RC testers didn’t want to test 
1. The number of bugs that are left open are either minor annoyances or are so small that they can easily be addressed in RC3.
2. SMP on FreeBSD should be quite an interesting development as it has adopted the same technique that Solaris uses, which, IIRC, does away with spinlock’s resulting in a very scalable kernel. IIRC, Linux 2.6 will has scalability pretty close to what AIX is capable of, which, although not mind blowing, is pretty good.
4. I am excited about FreeBSD 5.0 namely because of the inclusion of GCC 3.2.1 as the default compile, which should make OpenOffice, Mozilla and other C++ applications a little more tollerable.
5. From what I understand, KSE has been given an overhaul which should improve the pre-emptiveness and threading of FreeBSD. Not to say that FreeBSD 4.7, however, things can always improve.
They still don’t seem to close to a PowerPC version. That’s all I really want.
One thing several of the posters are missing, is that the majority of users do not upgrade by downloading the (large) ISO files made available. There are several ways to upgrade, and ISOs are the least preferable if you have already installed FreeBSD (in terms of bandwidth wasted). You can CVSup (download the changed sources) and recompile, as well as a few other methods described in the FreeBSD handbook. And yes one week is not a long time, however it has been in testing for quite a while. RC3 is probably a last chance for anyone to announce any showstopper bugs..
IIRC, does away with spinlock’s resulting in a very scalable kernel
Nope. There are still spinlocks in the kernel, and there is still a global kernel lock (which is still used quite a lot, as it happens). The difference is that there are also finer grained locks for individual subsystems and components.
Aaah, ok, see now. I must of either read the article incorrectly, or the person who wrote it was an idiot.
Anyway, I am still looking forward to its release.
I wouldn’t worry about only one week lifetime for this RC, RELEASEs are usually late. But who cares (except testers), I CVSuped to CURRENT a couple of weeks ago to get familiar with the system before the official release.
Also, SMPng and KSE are not finished yet. They won’t be finished for an extra minor release or two. I haven’t fully stressed SMPng yet but it does seem a bit smoother than 4.x despite being only 2/3 complete. It must have been an interesting process to rework SMP whilst trying to keep it working.
http://www.freebsd.org/smp/
http://www.aims.com.au/chris/kse/docbook/