FreeBSD Archive

"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.

This useful tutorial-article will explain how you can move your FreeBSD installation from one hard disk drive to another.

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.

Matt Olander, CTO of Offmyserver and Brooks Davis, FreeBSD cluster engineer, demonstrate how computers can be used to create a giant supercomputer.

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.

These papers were written against FreeBSD 4.x systems but should be equally applicable to 5.x systems on almost all counts: "Compiling and tuning the FreeBSD kernel" and "Performance tuning FreeBSD for different applications".

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.

FreeBSD's Scott Long announced the availability of 5.2-BETA ISO images and ftp install sets for i386 and alpha. Amd64, sparc64, ia64, and pc98 sets will be available shortly.

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.

I've been using computers since I was quite young and have been using Unixlike OSes for about two years. Most of my life I've used Macs and only started using Windows and Unixlike OSes recently for programming. I'm good at learning OSes as long as they are documented. I've been using FreeBSD for about a year and a half.

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.

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.

FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 is now available for testing from here. Mirrors to be synced shortly.

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.