FreeBSD Archive

"FreeBSD 7.0 will be the next release of FreeBSD, and is the first major release in 2 years. It's due out some time later this year (currently in pre-release and available for testing). FreeBSD 7.0 brings major changes to the BSD and open source operating system landscape." This document describes all the changes.

FeeBSD 7.0-beta1 has been released, with 6.3-beta1 on its way. "We have entered the final phases of the FreeBSD-7.0 Release cycle which also means the beginning of the FreeBSD-6.3 Release cycle. Because the people who support the ports for FreeBSD also need to go through a freeze cycle as part of releases we had decided to combine the two releases to try and minimize the impact on the ports maintainers."

"The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google Summer of Code 2007. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the 25 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We are happy to report that all students made some progress towards their goals for the summer, and the 22 students listed below completed the program successfully."

The latest issue of the FreeBSD newsletter contains a letter from the Vice President of the FreeBSD Foundation about the GPLv3. "On June 29th, the Free Software Foundation unveiled version 3 of the GNU General Public license. Even though the majority of software included in the FreeBSD distribution is not covered by any version of the GPL, our community cannot ignore this very popular license or its most recent incarnation. Through extremely successful evangelization, and the popularity of Linux, the misconception that OpenSource and the GPL are synonymous has become pervasive."

The next major release of FreeBSD, version 7, is one of the most significant so far, with amount of new technologies and improvement largest since introduction of 5.0. Since constantly searching the mailing lists for important changes can be a bit tedious, this page lists some of the more interesting new things in one place.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and June 2007. Again an exciting quarter for FreeBSD. In May we saw one of the biggest developers summits to date at BSDCan , our 25 Google Summer of Code students started working on their projects - progress reports are available in this report, and finally the 7.0 release cycle was started three weeks ago."

The 2-day by invitation only FreeBSD developer summit at BSDCan 2007 in Ottawa has just ended. Over 60 FreeBSD developers attended the summit, along with representatives from large BSD-friendly corporations such as Apple, Yahoo, Nokia, Juniper, NetApp and Ironport. A variety of topics were discussed, such as ZFS, the BLUFFS file system, SMP scalability improvements and the new virtualized network stack. Video recordings from the summit are available, as well as pictures.

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between January and March 2007. This quarter ended with a big bang as a port of Sun's critically acclaimed ZFS was added to the tree and thus will be available in the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release. Earlier this year exciting benchmark results showed the fruits of our SMP work. Read more on the details in the 'SMP Scalability' report."

"This document will show the steps to take to deploy a FreeBSD server. This server will have the latest stable from the Apache 2.2 tree, PHP 5, MySQL 5.0, Sendmail with SMTP-AUTH, Webmail, Bind DNS, SNMP, synchronized local time, and Webmin. I have also included steps to take to build a network graphing solution with Rrdtool/Cacti, and this part can be considered optional."

"Explore how to remotely debug a FreeBSD kernel that is running on a target machine without affecting system performance. In this article, examine setting up the debug environment using serial communication port, compiling modified kernel code, debugging, and troubleshooting tips."

It's been a long road to recovery, but after years of mediocre releases, and months of delays in the development process, FreeBSD is finally back on its feet with 6.2-RELEASE. Though it is an excellent operating system, even this latest version offers few or no competitive advantages over Solaris or the other BSDs in a server role, and can never hope to compete with commercial GNU/Linux distributions for desktop computers. FreeBSD 6.2 is what FreeBSD 5.0 needed to be, and for those who have already switched to other operating systems, there are few or no compelling reasons to go back. More here.

FreeBSD has a reputation of being slow in combination with MySQL, especially when compared to Linux. However, some recent improvements in the scheduler shows that FreeBSD now is pretty much on par with Linux. It also shows that Linux scales very badly after a certain amount of threads per CPU.

"Linux has a large amount of device drivers for hardware not supported on FreeBSD, especially USB devices. Not rarely, such drivers have been written based on information derived by protocol sniffing, reverse engineering and the like. This makes the code highly undocumented, and renders the porting effort extremely error prone. To help with this task, I decided to start working on an emulation layer that would let us recompile the linux source code on FreeBSD, and provide a sufficiently complete emulation of the kernel APIs so that device drivers (or at least certain classes) could be used without modifications to their source code."

FreeBSD 6.2, one of the most popular versions of the free BSD Unix operating system, is out with new features and updates. It plugs holes and, in addition to the usual route of installing directly to a hard drive this time around, offers a LiveCD that can be used to rescue a broken system. Developers on the free version of the BSD Unix operating system hope it will help build momentum for what is arguably the most popular BSD variant in use.