FreeBSD Archive

"A short time ago a 'local root' exploit was posted to the full-disclosure mailing list; as the name suggests, this allows a local user to execute arbitrary code as root. Normally it is the policy of the FreeBSD Security Team to not publicly discuss security issues until an advisory is ready, but in this case since exploit code is already widely available I want to make a patch available ASAP."

Astute readers probably already saw this one waiting in our backend, but since there was no official announcement yet, I decided to wait. Now that it's officially here, let's rejoice: the FreeBSD team has released version 8.0 of their operating system, packed with new features and improvements.

"Though the open source FreeBSD operating system has changed in many aspects over the last 16 years of its life, one item that has remained relatively static is its underlying network routing architecture. No more: It's getting an overhaul with the upcoming FreeBSD 8.0 release. FreeBSD 8.0, due out next month, will include a new routing architecture that takes advantage of parallel processing capabilities. According to its developers, the update will provide FreeBSD 8.0 with a faster more advanced routing architecture than the legacy architecture."

The FreeBSD team has started the beta cycle for FreeBSD 8.0 by releasing this new version's first beta. It was intended as an evolutionary release with few groundbreaking features, but as time went by, more and more interesting features crept in. As always, the What's cooking for FreeBSD? page has a good overview.

FreeBSD's jails technology received an interesting new feature. "Add hierarchical jails. A jail may further virtualize its environment by creating a child jail, which is visible to that jail and to any parent jails. Child jails may be restricted more than their parents, but never less. Jail names reflect this hierarchy, being MIB-style dot-separated strings."

For all of you using FreeBSD and ZFS, Kip Macy (kmacy) and Pawel Jakub Dawidek (pjd) merged ZFS Version 13 into FreeBSD 7-STABLE. Here is a breakdown of some of the new features: kmem now goes up to 512GB so arc is now limited by physmem, the arc now experiences backpressure from the vm (which can be too much - but this allows ZFS to work without any tunables on amd64), L2ARC Level 2 cache for ZFS which allows you to use additional disks for cache, and more.

Last week it was BSD week: OpenBSD 4.5, NetBSD 5.0, and DragonFlyBSD 2.2.1. FreeBSD 7.2 completes the picture, with every major BSD now having a new and fresh release waiting to be installed on your desktop, laptop, or server.

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 7.2 has been released. "The second of the two planed Release Candidates for the 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. We believe with the exception of the new bce(4) driver not working with lagg(4) all the major issues that have come up from the testing have been addressed. We will work with the vendor to get that issue addressed post-release."

The FreeBSD team has pushed out the first test build of FreeBSD 7.2, a beta release. "The first of the test builds for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of two recent changes to the system would be particularly valuable. The bce(4) network driver was updated a few days ago. And some significant work was done on the threading libraries a short time ago that is known to fix several major issues but testing to see if it introduced any regressions would be appreciated."

If you wanted to try FreeBSD but didn't have the right hardware, or enough time to make it useful on the desktop, VirtualBSD might fit the bill: it's a VMware appliance based on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE and features the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment and a few of the most common applications to make it very functional right out of the box. If you're curious you can have a look at the screenshots, or proceed to the download page and grab the torrent file right away (note: VirtualBSD also works in VirtualBox 2.x as long as you create a new virtual machine and select the virtual disk from the archive instead of creating a new one).

Even though FreeBSD 7.x is already out and updated, the FreeBSD team keeps working on the FreeBSD 6.x branch, now designated the legacy branch. They released FreeBSD 6.4 today, with lots of new features, fixes, and updates. They are expecting FreeBSD 6.4 to be the last release in the 6.x branch.

"FreeBSD 7.0 has already been released. If you are a real hacker, the best way to jump in and learn it is hacking together an introductory kernel module. In this article I'll implement a very basic module that prints a message when it is loaded, and another when it is unloaded. I'll also cover the mechanics of compiling our module using standard tools and rebuilding the stock FreeBSD kernel. Let's do it!"

"Since the conclusion of the SMPng project, the focus of SMP development in FreeBSD has shifted from deploying locking infrastructure to careful profiling and optimization of kernel SMP strategies for increased performance on common workloads. FreeBSD 7.0 was the first release to benefit from this optimization work." The status of this work includes MySQL workload benchmarks and memory allocator performance in the new FreeBSD 8 branch. Also, here is a recent presentation showing FreeBSD compared to several other operating systems like NetBSD, DrangonFly, Solaris, and Linux.

"The next major update of FreeBSD 7, due this December, is in the running to be one of the most impressive FreeBSD releases to date. The ULE scheduler has now reached maturity, leading to significant gains across the board (particularly in server workloads). This new scheduler brings notably impressive performance improvements to both MySQL and PostgreSQL. In the first section of this article, I'm going to take a look at what's new. In the second section, I will discuss what the future holds for FreeBSD beyond the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release, including screen shots of the revamped FreeBSD installer 'finstall'."