FreeBSD Archive

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.

While FreeBSD -current is still moving toward more stable footing, many users have posted issues with panics and deadlocks in recent kernel builds. Bjoern A. Zeeb has kindly compiled a running list of lock order reversals, links to relevant threads, PRs, and existing patches. Lock order reversal messages are the result of FreeBSD's lock validation facility, witness(4), notifying the system of potential deadlocks as a means for developers to isolate bugs. Robert Watson explains in a Dec. 2003 thread.

As a writer, the only reason Ed Hurst ever got his first computer was because it was far more efficient than a typewriter, and certainly more readable than his own handwriting. To enjoy that efficiency, however, you need a working printer, and Ed explores accomplishing just that on FreeBSD in this piece.

FreeBSD core team member Scott Long posted the latest bi-monthly status report, covering FreeBSD development for May and June of 2004. Scott begins: "May and June were yet again busy months; the Netperf project passed major milestones and can now be run with the debug.mpsafenet tunable turned on from sources in CVS. The ARM, MIPS, and PPC ports saw quite a bit of progress, as did several other SMPng and Netgraph projects. FreeBSD 5.3 is just around the corner, so don't hesitate to grab a snapshot and test the progress!" Read the rest over at KernelTrap.

Being freely available, easy to develop for, secure, and stable made FreeBSD the operating system of choice for Adelaide company Genesis Software's radar systems which are now being exported around the world. Genesis software and network engineer Daniel O’Connor said FreeBSD was the best choice when research and development on the radars began eight years ago.

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.