FreeBSD Archive

DistroWatch has a a review of the latest release of FreeBSD 5. In the first part of the story they are looking at the history of BSD, compare BSD with Linux from a technical perspective, and talk about licensing considerations. The second part will bring you practical information about installing FreeBSD, followed by a handful of useful tweaks, and configuration examples.

One of the greatest advantages that *BSD has over other Unix variants is the cvsup/make world process. The cvsup/make world process allows you to update your system at any time.

Scott Long announced the availability of FreeBSD 4.10-BETA for i386. 4.10-BETA for alpha will be following shortly as they work out some problems. 4.10 is the next step in the 4-STABLE branch, and as such contains primarily bug fixes and incremental functionality improvements. One significant new feature is the merging of the USB stack and drivers from 5.x.

FreeBSD kernel hacker Poul-Henning Kamp lost recently his biggsest contracting job and so he has plenty of free time to work on getting rid of the giant lock on the FreeBSD kernel (found on disk and device I/O path) which would benefit the system performance and scalability.

A recent patch submission from Bosko Milekic features on-demand memory allocation for mbufs and flexible sysctl tuning options - no more fiddling with NMBCLUSTERS and recompiling. The code does not appear to be committed yet and could probably stand some testing by the willing user population.

The FreeBSD January-February 2004 Status Report has been published to the freebsd-current and freebsd-stable mailing lists. The archived messages are available online here, and the report is here.

Scott Long has announced the release of FreeBSD 5.2.1. This point release contains security and bug fixes, as well as improvements to the ATA/IDE and SATA handling. A list of mirror sites is here.

The second release candidate of the 5.2.1 is now available (mirrors). It includes fixes to mksnap_ffs, SysV Shared Memory, devfs, IPSec, GEOM, the ata driver and many others. This is probably users' last chance for bugfinding as the final release is expected to be less than a week away.

The FreeBSD status reports are back again with the 2003 year-end edition. Many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including XFS, MIPS, PowerPC, and networking locking and mutlithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004 (our review), while we learned FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE is expected sometime next week with some critical fixes in it.

FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE is the third major 5.x release for the next generation of the FreeBSD Unix system (release notes). For the last few years I only used the 4.x stable releases, waiting for a mature 5.x release to come out before trying it. I felt that the time had come with 5.2, but has it?

Here's a review of the new FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. A few new improvements were made to the kernel and several to the userland, and of course there was a bug or two. If you're looking for an AMD64 operating system, FreeBSD 5.2 might be for you.

soup4you2 writes "A cluster is used to make a collection of 2 or more computers run as a single super computer. Clusters can be used to increase reliability and/or increase performance and resources available. A Beowulf cluster is a group of usually identical PC computers that are networked together into a TCP/IP LAN, and have libraries and programs installed which allow processing to be shared among them."

Here is a detailed introduction to FreeBSD especially geared for current Linux users.

Frenzy is a "portable system administrator toolkit", LiveCD based on FreeBSD. It generally contains software for hardware tests, file system check, security check and network setup and analysis. The system is oriented to Russian-speaking users, but this could change if project will get more popularity.