FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD 5.2, the latest in the 5.x development series has been released and is now available from the master server and should appear at mirrors shortly. New features include ACPI 2.0, a much refined ATAng, a new swap pager providing improved throughput and many other changes. For the UI-inclined users, GNOME has been updated to version 2.4.1 and KDE to 3.1.4.

This article discusses how to get your FreeBSD system to act as a NetFlow probe exporting records to a collector. Elsewhere, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long says that at the September DevSummit, Peter Wemm proposed changing the device driver API so that interrupt routines return an INT instead of a VOID, while FreeBSD's Greg Lehey discusses the future of Vinum and GEOM on FreeBSD. Greg says that with the advent of GEOM, there may be some overlap with the features and functionality offered by Vinum. On the other hand, GEOM and Vinum do some things not only differently but in an incompatible manner.

There are several tasks to which we must attend before actually making use of our freshly installed FreeBSD system. Immediately upon reboot, you will find yourself in the console. While it is possible to setup and use the graphical login managers -- kdm, gdm or others -- it is important to note that this uses extra resources. One of our assumptions is that you might not have all that excess horsepower, so we'll stick with the console login for now. Read more at OfB.biz.

"Any systems around the world have been possessed by penguins and dead rats. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult without physical access to the machines in question. Thanks to a new depenguinator, it is now possible to upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x without requiring anything more than an SSH connection." Read it here.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has outlined future plans for FreeBSD 5.3 now that FreeBSD 5.2-RC2 is getting close to release quality.

The latest of the FreeBSD 5.2-RCx series has been released. FreeBSD 5.2-RC2 fixes a showstopper filesystem bug that could occur when using soft-updates. Get it now from the main ftp server or try one of the mirrors. Promptly report any bugs you find as this is likely to be the last release candidate.

This is an interesting article on how a 300 node cluster was built, using FreeBSD. A nice bonus with the article is that it has a list of major vendor that work with FreeBSD. Elsewhere, if you ever wanted to graph your network traffic, disk usage, system load, or anything else about your network, servers or workstations, then RRDTool is your best friend and SNMP is it's very sexy spouse. Between the two you can collect data on almost element in your network, either local or remote, and graph it almost any way you want. Read the paper here.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures.

FreeBSD's Scott Long says that new set of sparc64 5.2-BETA ISO images are available and should be getting out to the mirrors over the night. This should fix the data corruption that existed in the previous set. The MD5 sums for the new set are attached.

What follows is a tutorial aimed specifically at the ordinary desktop user interested in getting started with FreeBSD. Ed provides an easy to understand guide through FreeBSD's Sysinstall installer in part one of this series. Read the full story at OfB.biz.

It is 12:10 AM PST (Tuesday morning) now that I write this, we just came back from FreeBSD's 10th Year Anniversary Party at the DNA Lounge club in San Francisco. Dig in for info and some pictures.

We've all heard the age old argument second only to the vi vs. emacs religious wars: FreeBSD Vs Linux. As a long time linux user, I decided that is was time I spent some time on the other side of the fence to see if it was any greener. Oh, and by the way, vi rules.

FreeBSD's John Baldwin says he will be committing some very significant changes to the i386 interrupt and SMP code for FreeBSD. Some new features include runtime selection of using the I/O APICs or the AT PICs to route interrupts; SMP can now be enabled in GENERIC kernel and the SMP kernel config is no longer necessary. His new code can largely be pulled over to amd64 to support APICs and SMP based on that architecture.

Robert Watson posted another bi-weekly version of the FreeBSD 5.2 open issues list, slightly restructured. At this time, there are four "show stopper defects" listed: panics when building ata-raid arrays, ATAng crashdump causes disk corruption, pipe/VM corruption on Alpha, and lingering PSE instability. There are only 5 issues left of on the "required features" list: KSE support for sparc64, KSE support for alpha, Fine-grained network stack locking without Giant, MAC framework devfs path fixes, and ACL_MASK override of umask support in UFS.