FreeBSD Archive

Free UNIX-derived operating systems have traditionally have a simplistic approach to process synchronization which is unsuited to multiprocessor application. Initial FreeBSD SMP support kept this approach by allowing only one process to run in kernel mode at any time, and also blocked interrupts across multiple processors, causing seriously suboptimal performance of I/O bound systems. This paper describes the work done to remove this bottleneck, paying particular attention to the project management aspects and the particular challenges of a large open source development project.

Several hours ago, the FreeBSD team quietly released FreeBSD 4.9, the next version in the 4.x stable series. It features support for a number of new NICs, an improved ipfw, PAE support (allowing up to 64GB of RAM) and numerous other enhancements. Desktop users will be pleased to know that GNOME 2.4 and KDE 3.1.4 are included. Changelog here, mirrors here.

If you haven't read part 1 of this -- "Babe in the Woods: A Linux User Migrates to FreeBSD" -- you may be at a loss. For those who did read it, many are still at a loss. That is, they didn't grasp the subtle purpose behind the article. Of those who commented, most were hardcore geeks, the techies who are in a position to really understand computers. Find out how Ed is doing in FreeBSD these days at OfB.biz.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely says that a number of the issues brought up with FreeBSD 4.9 RC2 have been resolved, and the latest release candidate (RC3) is now available for i386.

Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major free BSD variants. Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Find out at OfB.biz.

Scott Long released the March-Sepetember 2003 Status report, reviewing the past seven months of FreeBSD development. The paper is loaded with updates covering Bluetooth, ACPI, dynamically linked /bin, icc support, cryptographic support, java, KSE, porting OpenBSD's pf, and much more. Elsewhere, this paper describes an automated system for building and distributing binary security updates for FreeBSD, and describes the challenges encountered.

BSDForums.org features the latest news about BSD: FreeBSD's Luigi Rizzo has made some changes to the ipfw code so it can forward packets also when acting as a bridge. Lennart Augustsson says that there's been a long standing problem with some USB printers running in bidirectional mode on NetBSD. An article by Miod Vallat describes how the m88k-specific backend of the GNU C compiler, gcc, was fixed, from the discovery and analysis of the problems to the real fixing work.

FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of first release candidate for FreeBSD 4.9 (RC1). To-do for 4.9 is here. Also, Robert Watson posted another FreeBSD 5.2 "Open Issues" list, still containing 18 "must resolve issues" before 5.2 will be released.

FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely has put together a 4.9-BETA ISO image for i386 with the latest package build.

FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long provides a status report for FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.x. He says that FreeBSD 4.9 Release will be pushed back a few weeks until instability reports are tracked down. FreeBSD 5-stable roadmap document received a major overhaul - among the highlights, KSE is progressing extremely well and is no longer a major source of concern for 5-stable. Stability is also at a very good level.

No more hours of compiling! Binary distributions of Java on FreeBSD are finally here. The FreeBSD Foundation today announced the availability of a binary distribution of the Java JDK version 1.3.1 for the widely used FreeBSD operating system. Wes Peters of the FreeBSD Core Team commented "This announcement hallmarks a new era of Java support for FreeBSD. Having easy to install binary Java packages will ensure that all users can enjoy the benefits of Java technology on the FreeBSD platform."

Soeren Schmidt announced this weekend that ATAng has been merged into the FreeBSD -current kernel tree. Described by the author as "rather radical changes to the ATA driver", ATAng offers a number of impovements over the old ATA driver. This includes removal of the 'GIANT' lock, an improved framework that supports newer ATA controllers, merging of ATA and ATAPI code, and the removal of numerous bugs.

It came to my attention today that there has been a new release of nVidia detonator drivers for FreeBSD. Apparently released on 1st July, the first I heard of them was when I randomly checked the nVidia website today. The new drivers support 4.8 onwards, including -RELEASE -STABLE and -CURRENT branches. The drivers support the most recent hardware including the FX based cards.

DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. Prominent former FreeBSD developer Matthew Dillon is a major player in the development. According to the website, DragonFly gives "the BSD base an opportunity to grow in entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series."