There has been a lot of maturing technologies in FreeBSD 10, with many new features which make this release, I think, the most exciting one in years. A lot of development has gone into virtualisation support. Virtualisation with FreeBSD Jails has been available for a long time, but not so much “full virtualisation”.
Let’s have a look at the some of the most talked about, most requested and most interesting features that have found their way into or are planned for 10.0, but may not make the deadline.
Grrr, I’m so excited to dive into FreeBSD, but I feel like I can’t have a good experience with it until pkg-ng is back up and working.
PC-BSD has pkgNG repos available for 9.1-RELEASE, 9.2-RELEASE, 9.1-STABLE, and 9.2-STABLE. I use them at home (PC-BSD rolling release) and at work (9.2-STABLE) without any issues.
The plan is to have full binary package repos available for 10.0-RELEASE. The infrastructure is in place, the initial builds are running, and they are tracking down the last few issues with ports that don’t compile with Clang/LLVM.
IOW, if you wait until 10.0 is released, you can completely ignore the ports tree and never compile anything manually again.
Or, you can install 9.2 when it’s released, and use alternative repos for now, and switch to the official repos in a little bit.
You actually can already do this with just the standard package tools. The default package location points a repo that has the packages that are current at the time of the release (Say, 9.1-RELEASE). These don’t change, and are the same versions as the ports tree that is included on the install media.
There is also a pair of other repos, 9-CURRENT and 9-STABLE, with CURRENT being cutting edge and STABLE being a bit more settled-down. Currently, CURRENT and STABLE are the same, but this isn’t always the point. If you point to STABLE, you get the same versions as found in the latest ports tree, with about a week or so of lag-time.
There is a minor problem with this, though. If you were to do pkg_add -r firefox, it’d look for a package All/firefox.tbz, which would be a symlink to, say, ../www/firefox-22.tbz. If the package gets updated to firefox-22.1.tbz, the symlink sometimes isn’t updated completely (or might not be for some dependencies), and pkg_add will fail. If you point to the full and actual path, though, you won’t have any problems.
Of course, you might still need the bsdadmin out of ports to make upgrading easier. These can be found elsewhere, though.
But, yeah, pkgng is a huge improvement. The traditional pkg tools are slow as molasses to install/remove packages, especially a bunch of them, while pkgng is quite fast.
Except, none of those repos currently exist, due to the security incident, infrastructure shuffling, and switch to pkgng.
There are older pkg_install repos available for older releases. But nothing current. And nothing available for pkgNG.
IOW, if one wants a completely ports-tree-free, compile-free system using binary packages and pkgNG, one needs to either wait for 10.0 or use alternative repos.
The binary repos are back, and have been since May 14th.
I don’t think there was ever a pkgng repo planned for 9.x, since such large changes tend to be saved for major releases. Using the regular pkg tools currently works exactly as I described.
Also, like I said, there’s always the PC-BSD repos if you want stock software. If you pull KDE from the PC-BSD repo, you won’t get the PC-BSD customized version – you’ll get stock KDE as if you built it in ports.
Nope
You can have binary packages, but there will probably non-existent packages like LAME.
Also, if You need FFMPEG with LAM and FAAC support you still need to recompile it.
PC-BSD has a good pkgng repository. Here’s a good guide:
http://tinyurl.com/llqtjem
If you stop short of converting to a full PC-BSD system, you get an updated repo on you FreeBSD system.
I don’t see nothing wrong with the ports collection. I actually preferred it. It took me a while to get used to Linux way of doing things. Especially compiling a kernel, it is so much easier with freebsd.
Better support of SSD drives … nice!
I submitted an article on FreeBSD a couple weeks ago, and have had nary a response from you guys. What’s up?
I, for one, would maybe like to see someday a (port?) restoration of the legacy pkg (pre-pkgng) tools, as upgrades here often save a lot of time by CLI parsing of the +CONTENTS file(s), remedying duplicate installs by simply deleting an unwanted packages directory, etc. etc. Convenience over design, but at a more basic level.
(posted in the wrong spot)
Edited 2013-09-20 19:41 UTC
The pkgNG website (https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng) has this message:
Availability of pkgs for Download
As a consequence of the security incident on 11th November 2012, for the time being pre-compiled packages for pkgng are not available from any official FreeBSD repository. The test repository pkgbeta.freebsd.org contains only a copy of pkg-1.0.X.txz in order to facilitate the bootstrap procedure for enabling pkgng on a new system. Availability of the new official pkg build cluster has been set back, as resources have instead been devoted to cleaning up after the compromise, and the distributed package building software is being heavily revised for improved security.
Target dates for when service may be resumed have not been released. In the mean time, pkgng users are advised to investigate tools such as poudriere or tinderbox.
Anyone know if 10 will have these repos available.
Unfortunately nothing like apparmor in FreeBSD yet.
FreeBSD absolutely has SELinux/AppArmor features.
Those are primarily Mandatory Access Control and Capability-based security frameworks, which FreeBSD has had starting with the 5.x series nearly a decade ago.
It also has Sun’s Basic Security Module API, in the form of OpenBSM (which started at Apple for MacOS X), which provides a capable security audit system.
“Fortunately nothing like apparmor in FreeBSD yet.”
There, I fixed it for you.
Why?
Search for “capsicum” and “mandatory access control” along with “freebsd” and you’ll get tonnes of information on the FreeBSD way of doing AppArmor/SELinux stuff.
There are lots of smaller features that are not mentioned there and that are really nice: improved DTrace, read-only support fot ext4 extents, ipfilter update. Also the read-only support for XFS is gone.
The picture will only be complete when the Release Notes are out.
Ext4 write support is already possible with sysutils/fusefs-ex4fuse port using FUSE.
If you mean ext4fuse, it is read-only.
The FreeBSD kernel driver has received many improvements for this release and should be much faster than the fuse version.
Perhaps someone running CURRENT can chime in on this. How well does it work? Also, what sound system/modules does FreeBSD use as default these days? OSS?
Excuse the noobish question, but I’m mostly an OpenBSD user on teh BSD side, and it’s been some years since I last used FreeBSD or any of it’s variants. Reason I’m asking is because I’ve been unsuccessful getting audio piped out to my DAC (which works fine with ALSA/Linux) with any of the BSDs.
On a side note, incoming Thunderbolt support should be nice for those Mac owners that run virtualized FreeBSD sessions in OS X, though I still wonder if thunderbolt has a place outside the pro graphic/audio market, considering the prices. I’ve not met any “normal user” that has even considered buying a thunderbolt device of any sort.
Sorry to reply only to part, .. I found that v9 installed SND drivers as part of the GENERIC kernel (maybe not the case in v8, for example). As I recompiled without them, I tested and used OSS drivers (audio/oss) before reverting to the default command-loadable ones, and posted HowTo in the FreeBSD forums for the non-default (more commands to implement the sound, but maybe/maybe not more advantageous than the default sound drivers. [ both should not be loaded concurrently]. I am sure a search of the forum will mention USB audio in v9, and it should not change much to v10 unless it is in the wiki under the new release or what’s new pages …
FreeBSD still run Linux binaries faster than Linux do?