FreeBSD Archive

Siberian coal mine digs out FreeBSD funding

Submitted by Arjan van Leeuwen 2004-06-20 FreeBSD 20 Comments

From ZDNet: A Danish developer of the popular FreeBSD operating system, who was seeking sponsorship to support him while he works on the filesystem and disk-I/O subsystem, says he has been successful in his search (OSNews was among the first to post about it). Donations came in from firms as far afield as Siberia. The funding is significant for those who develop and use FreeBSD because it illustrates that the users are willing to support full-time development at least of parts of the OS.

FreeBSD Drops Alpha Port Status to Tier-2

Submitted by Nikos Ntarmos 2004-06-15 FreeBSD 19 Comments

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.

FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project

Submitted by FreeBSD_User 2004-06-14 FreeBSD 41 Comments

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.

IEEE & Open Group Okay FreeBSD to Utilize POSIX

Submitted by FreeBSD_User 2004-06-02 FreeBSD 25 Comments

The IEEE and The Open Group have granted permission to the FreeBSD Project to incorporate material from the joint IEEE 1003.1 POSIX standard and The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 6.

mbuma mbuf allocator added in FreeBSD

Submitted by Stelianos Sfakianakis 2004-06-02 FreeBSD 4 Comments

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 Released

Submitted by Matthew Baulch 2004-05-27 FreeBSD 59 Comments

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.

FreeBSD 4.10-RC3 Available

Submitted by Scott Long 2004-05-17 FreeBSD 15 Comments

FreeBSD 4.10-RC3 is available. Changes from RC2 include a full package set for Alpha, fixes for the twe(4) driver under load, fixes for the twa drives not being seen by sysintall, along with various other bug fixes. i386 ISO images are available now, Alpha ISO images are still uploading.

FreeBSD Status Report March-April 2004

Submitted by Arjan van Leeuwen 2004-05-16 FreeBSD 21 Comments

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.

HawkinsOS: Commercial FreeBSD Distribution & Service

Submitted by Tim H. 2004-05-15 FreeBSD 60 Comments

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

FreeBSD: GEOM Gate Committed

Submitted by FreeBSD_User 2004-05-15 FreeBSD 5 Comments

Pawel Dawidek has been working on GEOM Gate since Aug. of last year, adding incremental features and making requests for testing as required. Earlier this month the code was committed to -current.

Potential Solution for FreeBSD’s Kqueue Issues in 5.x

Submitted by Anonymous 2004-05-11 FreeBSD 15 Comments

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 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-05-03 FreeBSD 27 Comments

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.

FreeBSD – The Power to Serve

Submitted by Ladislav Bodnar 2004-04-27 FreeBSD 61 Comments

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.

Painless FreeBSD System Updating

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-26 FreeBSD 32 Comments

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.

FreeBSD 4.10-RC1 Released

Submitted by Matthew Baulch 2004-04-23 FreeBSD 15 Comments

The first release candidate of the next version of FreeBSD's STABLE branch, FreeBSD 4.10-RC1 has been released. It contains many changes including bugfixes and backported features from the development branch such as enhanced USB support. Get it from a mirror before using the master server. Testers should get their hands on this now as the final release is expected in a couple of weeks.

FreeBSD 4.10-Beta Available for i386

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-13 FreeBSD 57 Comments

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.

Donate to Help Get Rid of FreeBSD’s Giant Lock

Eugenia Loli 2004-04-10 FreeBSD 34 Comments

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.

FreeBSD 5.2.1 on SPARC64

Guest post by Tony Bourke 2004-03-31 FreeBSD 28 Comments

FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform.

FreeBSD: Dynamic Mbuf Allocation via UMA

Submitted by AnonUser 2004-03-24 FreeBSD 47 Comments

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.

FreeBSD Jan-Feb 2004 Status Report available

Submitted by Zarafa 2004-03-18 FreeBSD 51 Comments

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.