FreeBSD Archive

"By the time you read this, the 2004 holiday season will have dissolved into memory. I spent the last days of the year going through my list of "things I want to check out if I ever get the chance." As usual, I found some interesting tidbits." Read more here. Elsewhere, Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment.

I've started a project in anticipation of the upcoming release of OpenSolaris called ZoneBSD. The goal of the project will be to factor as much code from OpenSolaris as necessary into FreeBSD in order to support running FreeBSD from within a Solaris Zone, allowing virtualized FreeBSD instances to be run atop a host instance of Solaris.

After everything is installed and setup properly, it's important to keep an eye on updating the system. The emphasis is not so much slavishly chasing the cutting edge of BSD technology. Instead, Ed focuses on security updates and optimization in the latest part of his FreeBSD series.

This article examines some of the common command differences a Linux user might encounter on a FreeBSD system.

This is expected to be the last of the 4.X releases, and will be an Errata Branch. Well-tested fixes to basic functionality will be committed to the branch in addition to the normal security fixes. Most developers are now focused on 5.X or the cutting-edge development in HEAD.

Jeff Roberson has announced that he has has begun integrating the Giant-lock free VFS code into the FreeBSD 6.x development tree.

Scott Long has released the latest FreeBSD Project status report, describing technical and documentation activities of the FreeBSD Project over the last six months.

The third release candidate of FreeBSD 4.11 is now available.

In two posts on BSD News pointing at e-mails from Robert Watson, a FreeBSD Core Team Developer, presenting both recent accomplishments relating to IPX/SPX and the general status of SMPng and the network stack are discussed.

"The seemingly constant restructuring at Sun has made it difficult to find and retain consistent contacts in their licensing program. The latest blow to our efforts was the recent notification of Sun's desire to revoke and renegotiate the FreeBSD Foundation's SCSL license" says the FreeBSD Foundation. We hope that Sun will reconsider.

On the freebsd-ppc mailing list Peter Graham has announced the availability of the first minimal install ISO of FreeBSD CURRENT for PPC (Make sure you're a power user with nerves of steel and read the blurb.

This article is a sequel to the author's previous work "Keeping FreeBSD Up-To-Date".

Since the decision to demote ULE in favor of the 4BSD scheduler as the default for FreeBSD's 5.3-Release, many improvements to both schedulers have been committed. At the time it was marked broken, ULE was especially needy in light of the status of its maintainership, performance issues, and its unreliable nature in conjunction with threading and kernel preemption. Having resolved these problems, Jeff Roberson announces to -current that the ULE code is now in working order: More information can be found on kerneltrap.org.

After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems. NewsForge has the review.