FreeBSD Archive

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.

A common security breach involves exploiting one application to gain access to another. Keeping separate applications separate can limit the potential damage. Mike DeGraw-Bertsch explains how FreeBSD's jails can help secure necessary applications. On other FreeBSD news, a specific schedule for the release of FreeBSD 4.9 is now available.

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.

ACLs take care of access control problems that are overly complicated or impossible to solve with the normal Unix permissions system. By avoiding the creation of groups and overuse of root privileges, ACLs can keep administrators saner and servers more secure. On other FreeBSD news, there is a FreeBSD 4.9 code freeze and release schedule announced.

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."

Although nearly all of the public focus is geared around advocacy of Linux and Windows, there is a third Intel based operating system, which generates a tiny fraction of the publicity surrounding these operating systems, and has a much smaller user and developer community. FreeBSD secured a strong foothold with the hosting and internet services communities at the genesis of the web and has anything but gone away. Indeed it is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey, Netcraft says.

"New tech" release supports more platforms but is less stable than 4.8, says eWEEK for FreeBSD.

Get the basic information necessary to begin installing FreeBSD on a system with another operating system that was previously installed. You will see how to prepare for a FreeBSD installation that will allow the system to operate with Windows, and you will also see how to install FreeBSD on a system that is running Linux.

This is a significant milestone to be shared with everyone! Khairil Yusof reports that libkse is now running quite well on his FreeBSD 5.1+ current based SMP system. He has tested a bunch of apps on his system, taking the approach of enabling kse one app at a time. Read more at FreeBSDForums.

FreeBSD turned 10 years old yesterday. Happy Birthday FreeBSD.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded FreeBSD RC1 for i386, he says that alpha RC1 is in the works. Kris Kennaway has uploaded i386 packages. Marcel Moolenaar is working on RC1 ia64, ISOs for which will be available sometime tomorrow. You can find RC1 at one of your preferred mirror sites.

FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long has written a bootloader front-end script that allows one to enable/disable acpi, boot single users, etc. Elsewhere, Matthew N. Dodd has implemented per-executable ELF prebinding in FreeBSD-current. Initial performance measurements are very encouraging. Relocatable objects (executables and libraries) contain elements that require relocation before they are usable. By 'prebinding', much of this work can be done beforehand and speed up the actual relocation process. As a result, apps like KDE and other library happy executables take a little less time to load.

"Robert Watson has started the automatic posting of open issues for the upcoming 5.1 and 5.2 releases. The list for 5.1 is automatically posted to -current every other day, with the most up-to-date version found here. The list is divided into the following four sections: "Must Resolve Issues", "Desired Features", "Documentation items that must be resolved", and "Areas requiring immediate testing". Read it at KernelTrap.

FreeBSD 5.1 Beta 1 was released during the last few days and can be obtained from here (ISOs here, select a mirror). The release notes are available from here. They will be replaced with RC-1 in 3-4 weeks.