FreeBSD Archive

From the DragonFly BSD Project website, "One year after starting the project as a fork off the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce our 1.0 release! ... We have done so much that it cannot all be listed here. Please check out the Diary for technical details."

SilverOS is a stable version of FreeBSD 4.x based on an early preview of the upcoming DragonFly BSD 1.0 release. SilverOS exists to be the convergence point of stablity and innovative design, drawing from successful research collaborations including IBM's K42 Research Project. SilverOS is a commercially supported BSD system from a company that has a proven track record in innovative BSD design, development, and deployment. http://www.crescentanchor.com.

Marcel Moolenaar has been very busy with GDB code as of late, having imported gdb version 6.1.1 in late June and now supplying a patch to freebsd-arch@ that adds kernel debugging and helpful features to FreeBSD's gdb and ddb code, including thread awareness. Other interesting additions include optimizations for the 64-bit platforms, compression for remote gdb, and improved symbol handling.

What is FreeSBIE? Simply: It's a live system on compact disk (CD), or an operating system that is able to load directly from a bootable CD, without any installation process, without any hard disk. It's based on the FreeBSD operating system. Here's how to build a cluster using it.

A programming error in the handling of some Linux system calls may result in memory locations being accessed without proper validation. This bugs affect all 4.x and 5.x lines of FreeBSD. Source is the german computer site, Heise, for more info about this bug here.

Here is an interesting tutorial with suggestions on what to do when things go wrong with FreeBSD.

After a (somewhat) long discussion in the FreeBSD 'current@' and 'hackers@' mailing lists concerning the status of KSE in -CURRENT, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team have decided to drop tier-ness of the alpha port to Tier-2 before 5.3 hits the road. This means, among other things, that 4-STABLE will be the last FreeBSD -STABLE branch for the alpha platform.

Given the rapid growth of Linux in the technology industry, it might be easy to overlook other open source Unix variants. But recent numbers from research outfit Netcraft show that past is prologue. FreeBSD, that other Unix variant, has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year.

Bosko Milekic imported mbuma, an mbuf and cluster allocator built on the UMA (Uniform Memory Access) framework, that will replace mballoc, the old allocator. Bosko has written a paper talking about the new allocator.

FreeBSD 4.10 has been released and is now available on the master ftp. It should be showing up on mirrors shortly. Changes include the addition of USB2 support, a "dumb console" driver, a host of security fixes and many other tweaks. Userland utilities such as ifconfig, killall and rtld have also been updated. This release is very much an incremental one and contains no major new features. The current plans are for one more FreeBSD 4.X release which will be FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE. After that, it's expected that FreeBSD 5.3 release will have reached the maturity level necessary for most users to be able to migrate to 5.X.

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.

Here is a new FreeBSD-based distro, HawkinsOS, but this time is commercial and offers services.

Kerneltrap covers recent progress with the Kqueue code in FreeBSD-current. Kqueue testing is a major focus area for the release of 5.3 and it looks like freebsd dev is making steady progress in knocking out major showstoppers. The code would also benefit from testing.

FreeBSD 4.10-RC2 is available for download. There are only a few changes since RC1, but it does include the release package set, so feel free to test things like KDE and Gnome. Due to some late issues that are cropping up, it will probably be an RC3 before the final release.