FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely announced the availability of FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 for i386 and he says that the alpha build is in progress.

Scott Long recently posted this year's first FreeBSD status report. The document begins with a quick look at the recently released FreeBSD 5.0, then looks to the future roadmap with the 5.1 maintenance release coming within a couple of months, and the stable 5.2 release by the end of the summer. Also mentioned is the upcoming 4-STABLE release, 4.8 (24th March), which includes XFree86 4.3 and support for HyperThreading. Read the detailed report at KernelTrap.

The Journaled File System for FreeBSD (JFS4BSD) Project has the goal of porting the JFS Technology from IBM/Linux to FreeBSD. It uses a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems. Scalable and robust, its advantage over non-journaled file systems is its quick restart capability: JFS can restore a file system to a consistent state, fsck times go down, and it is easy to fall-back to the last good state of the filesystem in a matter of seconds or minutes. The jfsutils is under a compilable state on FreeBSD. Read more at BSDForums.
Our Take: Anyone's working on porting SGI's XFS to FreeBSD?

The new FreeBSD 4.8 Release schedule has been announced. Hidetoshi Shimokawa has added new functionality to Firewire on this scheduled FreeBSD 4.8 release. New features include built-in DV support, improved recovery process & timeout stability and Write/ioctl support for /dev/fwmem0. He has not tested this on PAL and is looking for volunteers.

Maksim Yevmenkin announces the latest engineering release of the Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD. Updates include new in-kernel RFCOMM implementation with SOCK_STREAM interface, OBEX support, setup scripts and minor bug fixes.

This article describes the efforts at "FreeBSD From Scratch": a fully automated installation of a customized FreeBSD system compiled from source, including compilation of all your favorite ports and configured to match your idea of the perfect system. If you think make world is a wonderful concept, "FreeBSD From Scratch" extends it to make universe. This article, describes the visions in BSD security features and how to build a secure OS.

One of the most prolific and active developers of FreeBSD, Matt Dillon, responsible for a lot of the latest advances in the FreeBSD kernel, lost his right to commit code to the source tree. The FreeBSD Project didn't give a solid reason on what lead them to this decision. Last year, OSNews interviewed Matt about his (truly immense) work on FreeBSD.

From BSDForums: "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.

Terminus wrote in to tell us that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 is now available on the FreeBSD FTP servers. He also reminds us "The final release is scheduled for January 17th 2003."

Stephen Beckwith writes: "Over at MacSlash, the "Last" interview with Jordan Hubbard, Mr. FreeBSD. Catch it while you can!" Read the full interview at MacSlash.

FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 was just released, download its ISO from an ftp server near you.

This is an initial FreeBSD beta driver for 2D and OpenGL for FreeBSD. It requires FreeBSD -STABLE, version 4.7 or later. It can run single threaded aplications even in linux compatability mode.

"In the last few articles, I've concentrated on configuring a FreeBSD system and various applications suited for multimedia. I'll wrap up that series today by tweaking a browser's plug-in support and installing some apps which can be either called by a browser or used on their own." Read the article at ONLamp.