FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE is now officially available. This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. New features from 4.x include massively upgraded SMP scalability including the new KSE M:N threading implementation, and the new ULE constant time scheduler (currently switched off per default). All in all these features bring scalability of kernel features on SMP systems (at least small to midrange systems) more or less on par with the Linux 2.6 kernel series with the NPTL threads library.

Release announcement of the FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 release available here.

LiveBSD has just released a LiveCD based on FreeBSD 5.3 which is a heavily modified FreeSBIE that includes an installer that can be invoked via NCurses, CGI and even QT.

FreeBSD has been known for excellent documentation and here is a rare sneak peak behind the scenes of the FreeBSD document project with FreeBSD's very own Tom Rhodes.

Fixes and enhancements made since BETA6 on FreeBSD 5.3: fix timekeeping on sparc64 and alpha that would result in the day of the week being stored incorrectly in NVRAM; add support to the fxp driver for the ICH6 chipset; fix the panic on detach problem with USB hubs; import BIND 9.3.0, this completely replaces the old BIND 8.x nameserver in the base system; fix panic when allocating swap on a busy system; fix loader crash when using the 'lsdev' command".

FreeBSD announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA6. This is the sixth BETA of the 5.3 release cycle and includes fixes and enhancements. There are five known critical issues in this release.

Diskless FreeBSD workstations work beautifully for many users. With recent changes in FreeBSD 5.x, the old methods of building a netbooting lab have changed. Read more at OnLamp.com.

There's August's BSD eZine which includes articles such as: DHCP server with Dynamic DNS, FreeBSD Documentation: An Interview with Tom Rhodes, SSH - The Secure Shell: An overview and Cross compiling from FreeBSD to Windows.

Looks like there is a new commercial OS on the block and its name is Triance. Triance OS is based on FreeBSD with KDE as the default DE. Beta testers wanted, for a completely gui'ed-up version of FreeBSD. Mandatory screen shots can be found here.

Of the 10 most reliable hosting providers in August, Netcraft finds that five ran Linux. One site ran Windows, another, Solaris...and two ran that still-rising system called... FreeBSD. Read the article.

André Oppermann has held a presentation on new things and changes in the 5.3-FreeBSD Network Stack at the SUNCON 04 in Zurich yesterday. His very informative summary is available here. The original announcement can be found here.

OnTap WAFL's .snapshot feature is such easy to use since years while on FreeBSD UFS2 the unprivileged users were not able to as easily use snapshots for retrieving old stages of their files. To solve this I've implemented a little snapshot management environment for FreeBSD around mount(8), mdconfig(8), amd(8) and cron(8) which provides a similar environment than what people are used to from WAFL. A summary article and proof of concept implementation is available.

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 is now available directly or via ISO images. Release notes have changed little since BETA1 but several showstopping bugs have now been swatted. Much of the recent work has centered around the network and filesystem layers, ACPI and testing of the ULE scheduler which will become the default in 5.3. Elsewhere, Open For Business, Ed Hurst has another in a series of articles introductory articles describes describing FreeBSD; for email (part 5) purposes.

FreeBSD is the most popular BSD flavor, however, it is not as popular as Debian/RH/Fedora/SuSE are even individually. Vote below to give us your take as to where do you pinpoint the roots of this fact.