FreeBSD Release Engineering team’s Scott Long provides a status report for FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.x. He says that FreeBSD 4.9 Release will be pushed back a few weeks until instability reports are tracked down. FreeBSD 5-stable roadmap document received a major overhaul – among the highlights, KSE is progressing extremely well and is no longer a major source of concern for 5-stable. Stability is also at a very good level.
I need to do a little more research on how their development teams work, I would think that when 5.x is being released as stable that the 4.x dev would stop. I am sure it makes sense, I just need to do a little more googling
That’s pretty much it. You’ll still get some 4.x work being done (security, bug fixes, and possibly new important hardware), but the main thrust goes into 5-CuRRENT when 5-STABLE is tagged.
The best way to understand the current dev-tree naming problem is to first consider how things normally work. You have branches -CURRENT, -STABLE, N-REL_ENG, and N.x-RELEASE and maybe others (where N is the major version number). -CURRENT is the ‘bleeding edge’ — at some points it may not even be bootable they say. -STABLE is also a development branch! But, most changes here have passed through -CURRENT and shown themselves to be worthy. -STABLE is geared towards the next release, which will come with the minor version number (.x above). And -REL_ENG is just a bug and security fix branch for the latest -RELEASE (-RELEASE itself being frozen, of course).
So, the current problem/trick is that -CURRENT is version 5 and -STABLE is version 4. At some point, both -CURRENT and -STABLE will be version 5 animals (thought it was going to be at 5.2, but now it looks like 5.3), then version 4 will only get security and bug fixes (and maybe driver/HW upgrades, I guess).
Don’t confuse “stable” with -STABLE and it will all make a lot more sense. It’s only “stable” when it’s running reliably for you, no matter what the cvs tags say.
The 5-stable roadmap document mentions that a benchmarking performance team should be created to compare results of FreeBSD 4.x, 5.x and Linux 2.4 Kernel, Linux 2.6 Kernel. Does anyone know if this team has actually been formed? Have the results been published? Where can I find them if they have.
Thanks!
I wonder if there is really anything new and improved in FreeBSD 4.9 or if it’s mostly a maintenance release. I guess I’ll need to check the RELNOTES when I have a chance. I think they should upgrade OpenSSH while they’re at it even if it pushes back the release date a bit more.
Right now I’m running RELENG_5_1 at home and at work as “non-production” servers/workstations. So far so good, but I’m still getting used to it. I really liked the 4.x branch of FreeBSD though. Maybe when there’s some major changes to DragonflyBSD I’ll give that a try since it’s based on 4.x branch.
Long live BSD!!
One of the biggest changes is the introduction of PAE, to support more than 4GB of RAM. This is also the reason for the reported instabilities. It has to be seen wheather these can be ironed out.
MacOS 10.3, aka, “Panther” will be bought up into compatibility with FreeBSD 4.8, also, kqueues and poll have been added, gcc 3.3.1 will be the default compiler which includes the new DFA scheduler which produces nicer code and the performance benchmarks so far show and improvement for those who have older G3 era hardware (iBook etc).
The simplest way to answer your question is to say that version 4.9 will fix some bugs in a branch that people have used for a long time. It will continue on a tried and true path.
On the other hand, version 5 represents a new way of thinking (relatively speaking, of course). It is the place where kamikaze will try new stunts, hoping they don’t crash in the process 🙂
Ok, now I am beginning to understand, took a couple times rereading the posts but it’s making sense now. Thanks everyone !
I really hope that FreeBSD start considering to create a new installation tool soon. It doesn’t have to mean they should remove their current one, but I seriously think that a lot of users would appreciate if FreeBSD would be just a little bit simplified.
Unfortunately this doesn’t seem likely to happen =(… it’s such a loss.
I don’t understand what you mean about FreeBSD being hard to install. Sysinstall is one of the best installers out there and to me it makes perfect sense and is quite easy to use.
What exactly would you like to see change about it?
For one thing I’d like network configuration to become a lot smoother (I personally think of that as part of the installation). Without network you’re pretty much stranded and it can be quite a pain to configure it properly.
Just my opinion anyway… could also see some changes to default X.
I just really don’t get it. I’ve been using FreeBSD since version 2.2.2 and I’ve never had problems with the installer (/stand/sysinstall). It’s pretty straight forward.
I really don’t understand how it can get any easier. The way it installs and prompts you for input is pretty linear. Set disk, partitions, MBR type, Distribution sets, network, packages, etc. Any easier and some guy would be popping out of the computer and doing it for you.
I never use the help, but I’m pretty sure that if you hit F1 or some sort of key, it will give you a bit of help to guide you through. I don’t know how much this feature gets used, but it can be usefull. One thing I wish documentors can do though is explain why one would might want to make a certain selection and the consequences of making a certain selection.
One of the great things about the FreeBSD installer is that it’s fast. It gets you installed and ready to run in a very short amount of time. That’s one of the things I love about it. I also love that it doesn’t leave you with an overly bloated system, because in the packages selection menu you pick and choose exactly what you want.
I heard that /stand/sysinstall was going to use a different interface or something called libh but I don’t know whatever happened to that project. I think it was something that Jordan Hubbord was working on. Don’t know if he still working on it considering that he’s probably quite busy over at Apple enjoying his fancy wiz-bang desktop operating system.
I think those who complain about FreeBSD’s installer haven’t tried instlling OpenBSD. Now that’s a pretty basic installer. No frills there at all.
Long live BSD!
I really hope that FreeBSD start considering to create a new installation tool soon…Unfortunately this doesn’t seem likely to happen =(… it’s such a loss.
This project has been going on for quite awhile, with little progress as I believe it was originally the brainchild of Jordan Hubbard, who has since left FreeBSD to work at Apple:
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/libh.html