FreeBSD Archive

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.

Since the introduction of the UFS2 filesystem (to the general public) in FreeBSD 5.0, there have been many questions from BSD users asking what does it actually mean for them. Recently when browsing the freebsd-current mailing list, I stumbled across a micro-FAQ about UFS2, which might be of interest to OSNews readers.

FreeBSD's Robert Watson says that effective today, newfs(8) and sysinstall(8) will create UFS2 file systems by default, unless explicitly specified.

I have read many OS/distribution reviews in the last couple of years, but it always seems like it is distros like Red Hat, SuSe and Mandrake (and the fairly new distro, Lindows) that get all the attention. The light has sometimes moved towards other less "user friendly" distros as Slackware, Debian and so forth, but the main concern of the authors has always been the distros meant to be used by Joe User.

Daily Daemonnews reports that support for PAE and bigger than 4GB Ram on x86 has been committed to FreeBSD -current. Also, Peter Wemm posted a message showing a dmesg output of a real AMD Clawhammer x86-64 processor booting up 5.0-CURRENT.

Yar Tikhiy has ported Apple's HFS and HFS Plus filesystem module and tools from Darwin to FreeBSD 5. He says that the port is experimental - he is looking for your help with testing and feedback. Read the announcement at BSDForums.

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.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely announces that FreeBSD 4.8-RC1 i386 mini ISO and FTP installation directory are on ftp-master. He says that the Alpha release will be available shortly. The plan is to make FreeBSD 4.8 available only for i386 and alpha platforms. Subsequent 5.1+ releases will have FreeBSD available for all platforms including sparc64, ia64, etc. Read the announcement at BSDForums.org.

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?

FreeBSD team's Scott Long lays out a roadmap for FreeBSD-5 stable in this informative email. He says that although the latest release of FreeBSD 5 marks a major milestone in FreeBSD's history, there are significant improvements necessary in the areas of SMP, kernel lockdown, performance, network driver stability, ACPI and much more. He also presents a tentative schedule for the rest of the year for FreeBSD 5.1 and 5.2 releases.

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.