The FreeBSD project has posted a new status report for March and April of 2004. Work continues on locking down the network stack, ACPI made more great strides, an ARM port appeared in the tree, and the FreeBSD 4.10 release cycle wrapped up.
FreeBSD Status Report March-April 2004
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Among the technical details, you can find good news for the newbies and Mac OS X users, too: the new book “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System” is now in final production by Addison-Wesley and will be available in early August 2004. It is the successor of the legendary “The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD” book which has become the de-facto standard for teaching of Operating System internals in universities world-wide: the new and completely reworked edition is based on FreeBSD 5.2 and the upcoming FreeBSD 5.3 releases and contains in-details looks into all areas (from virtual memory management to interprocess communication and network stack) of the operating system on 700 pages.
We should be seeing this released any day now, yes?
Yes. RC3 is almost done building, and we plan to have the full relelase builds shortly after that.
Thanks! Am very much looking forward to it. You guys do great work.
Anyone know if nVIDIA will be releasing official drivers for FBSD 5 anytime soon? Also, how is the nforce2 support under FBSD?(Sound and NIC)
–Thanks
i’m looking forward to the updated book, perhaps its earlier iterations are curently online?
They work nicely… from what I remember reading on thier site, it requires 4.7 or newer.
Not sure about sound, but nic works. Check the mailing for more info.
When will Xorg finally be in ports?
nvidia port works on FreeBSD 5.x. just ‘portinstall nvidia-driver’ or if you want to use freebsd agp driver (make sure its in the kernel or loaded at boot time) make WITH_FREEBSD_AGP=yes install clean in /usr/ports/x11/nvidia-driver.
X.org: http://www.freshports.org/x11-servers/xorg-server/
Thanks for that, maybe ill install FBSD on here when I get my second HDD.
FreeBSD ARM !! This is gggrreeeattt !
In my opinion the only living architectures that will last for servers will be: x86-64, PPC-64, ARM, MIPS, IA-64, SPARC
Bingu: Anyone know if nVIDIA will be releasing official drivers for FBSD 5 anytime soon?
We already have it, but it’s old. Nvidia will not update driver for 5.x until the FreeBSD developers add the TLS support. Yes, they are working on the TLS as you can see in the status report link above.
csabimano: nvidia port works on FreeBSD 5.x.
Yes, as long you don’t use thread (libkse/libpthread/libthr). You have to use libc_r if you want to use the Nvidia driver.
I own the 4.4BSD edition, can’t wait for the new edition!
Thanks for the info!
The Xorg server already is in the ports tree along with most (if not all) the fd.org componentized libs.
I just trashed my -current system, time to celebrated by putting 5.2.1-release on it and X.org.. oh boy.. I’m so looking forward to running X.org on FBSD.
> The Xorg server already is in the ports tree along with most (if not all) the fd.org componentized libs.
Wow! I have to try FreeBSD again…
Very nice to see that there is a bsdtar. I hope it will get sparse file support in the near future.
I must say that though the Xorg server/libs are in the tree, the clients are not. You have to use the XFree86 clients. To make a long story short, the xorg port is not ready for public consumption just yet. Don’t go deinstalling your XFree86 server just yet unless you want headaches.
Thanks for the clarification … now I remember reading something about this. How do I set up kse to be the default threading library? I tried putting WITH_LIBMAP in make.conf & setting up a default libmap.conf as per man libmap.conf, but didn’t know whether it worked or not. In fact, I believe it didn’t… Also, should I recompile everything if I change the default threading library? And lastly, if I have KSE as default threading library, can’t I just libmap the nvidia driver to libc_r?
You only need to recompile if you have packages compiled from before 5.1. Not having to recompile to change threading libraries is rather the point of having libmap.conf. If you’re having trouble with programs linking or crashing, do a portupgrade -af.
lipmap.conf just needs to exist in /etc/ for it to work. You can see if it’s working by doing an ldd on a binary that is linked to a threading library. If it reports that it’s linked to pthread.so.1, then it’s using kse. There’s no need to define a make.conf variable.
No you can’t just map the nvidia driver. It’s a kernel module, it doesn’t use the threading library itself. The problem is threaded userland code. I believe the problem is a conflict in using a register that both the nvidia driver and kse both want to use. Thread Local Storage is supposed to be a work around.
Thanks for all the info folks