FreeBSD Archive

What is FreeSBIE? It is a live system on 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 OS.

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.

As expected, the FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC update is now available either by CVS'upping your sources or by downloading an ISO image from the FTP mirrors. This comes out 20 days after the 5.2.0 release and brings bug fixes mainly for mksnap_ffs, NFSv4, KUser, GEOM and ATA drivers, and also IPsec. It does not load by default the new high-performance ULE scheduler (manual kernel recompile required).

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's Jeff Roberson says that the ULE scheduler has entered into its probationary period as the default scheduler on FreeBSD. He says that if all goes well, it will remain the default through the rest of FreeBSD 5.x releases. The ULE scheduler was designed to address the growing needs of FreeBSD on SMP/SMT platforms and under heavy workloads. It supports CPU affinity and has constant execution time regardless of the number of threads.

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.

Here is a quick guide for upgrading your FreeBSD 5.1 to the newly released 5.2.

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

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.