FreeBSD Archive

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA4. This is the fourth BETA of the 5.3 release cycle. It is intended for early adopters and those wishing to help find and/or fix bugs.

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.

FreeBSD has released a new Beta of 5.3. Release notes can be viewed at here.

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.

This paper on how to tune FreeBSD to better withstand DoS attacks was at OnLamp a few months ago. It is now up on Silverwraith.com, along with several other FreeBSD tuning papers by the author.

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.

Only two days behind schedule, the FreeBSD team released the first in a series of betas leading up to what will (possibly) become the 5.3-STABLE milestone. FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1 one can be obtained from here or one of many mirrors. Release notes here.

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.

Hendrik Scholz has mined the FreeBSD source code for references to other operating systems, undocumented features, and developers cursing the dark corners of the system. His results are tabulated graphically and summarized in this well-written article.

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.

This is a step-by-step guide to installing FreeBSD 5. It assumes moderate experience with linux and leaves you with a fully updated FreeBSD system.

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."

This bit of interview with DragonflyBSD's core from ONLamp's BSD advocacy page will give you a nice introduction into what is DragonflyBSD, how it evolved from FreeBSD's 4.x series.

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.