“The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the beginning of both the FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 release cycles with the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA1 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA1. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture.” Please select a download mirror for downloading.
Uhm, sorry if I’m blind, but where is the information concerning what the changes are? That mail announcement only links to a todo page (??) and desired feature page (??). I tried a bit of googling to no avail.
Edited 2006-02-10 19:50
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.0R/relnotes.html
Click the link on that page that corresponds to your architecture.
I know what 6.0R was, I run it.
I was looking for 6.1, luckily somebody posted it right below your link to 6.0 
You know, I still haven’t seen an answer to “what is different” or “what has changed” other than that there have been bug fixes. The link to 6.0-R is silly; the next link is to the article, and the to-do is listed in the article.
I too have googled for this answer, and looked on the FreeBSD lists, and I see no answer. It is not that I don’t believe the announcement. I started with 6.0 at the beta1 stage, because it was such a huge improvement on 5.4. This version bump seems pretty minor, and if it is, it does not seem worthwhile to go through the -beta series and rather just wait for the release.
FWIW, 6.0 has been really good, and I was only bitten by one minor bug early in the -beta cycle. That was fixed in one day after I reported it.
Dr_J
To be honest, such a list does not exist outside of manually looking at CVS-checkins, not until the release is made anyway.
An “easy” listing of the changes is done in the final days leading up to a release and goes online when the release is done. TBH, that is a good way of doing it. 6-STABLE has accumulated quite a lot of changes “under the hood” and 6.1 will be an improvment IMO (not to say 6.0 is bad, cos it is really good).
Unix done right, clean and simple
Doh!
Apologies for my inattention to detail. I now understand why it was harder to find than I imagined it was. It’s not listed on the page that shows the release information. But using the format of all the other links to release information you can get there.
My thanks to vikramsharma for actually doing what I only thought I was doing.
You can also goto http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-February/01… to fnid information about both 5.5 beta and 6.1 beta releases. Also do check out the todo listing for both FreeBSD 6.1 and 5.5 on the respective pages
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.1R/todo.html
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.5R/todo.html
I’ve upgraded to -STABLE (running 6.1-PRERELEASE now) a few days ago, and it’s solved quite a few annoying problems I had with regards to one or two custom scripts in /usr/local/etc/rc.d/ that would execute manually but refused to start at bootup and that were working normally on 5.4., and I never found out why they wouldn’t on 6.0.
As for the rest of the system, things have been running smoothly so far, no hangups, no stability problems, so I can say I’m one of a gazillion happy BSDers.
Thanks to everyone involved.
The rc engine has been updated. Most rc scripts need to be fixed or modify to work with the new rc system. You might want to take a look at current mailing list to know what happened there. I remember in december/jan they were discussing that.
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-current
even prerelease has been so stable I have yet to see freebsd crash or freeze at all. I admire the great dev team behing freebsd and the great goals that all of them are set to accomplish. This will be another good release from freebsd.
Couldn’t agree more. I’ve been running FreeBSD 6.0 from the day it was released and not a single freeze and my PC is online almost 24/7.
My FreeBSD 6.0 machine freezes often if running with IPFIREWALL + DUMMYNET. Any suggestion to overcome this problem?
Use pf and ALTQ. In my opinion (and I’ve worked with firewalling/shaping traffic on multigigabit links) it’s a far superior solution.
dummynet was never meant to do the things it is now, it was for testing network protocols.
http://www.dummynet.com/
Needless to say, pf comes from OpenBSD (and has extensive testing because of the general use of OpenBSD) and ALTQ was designed from the ground up to do shaping, and do it well. They work. There is a learning curve if you’re coming from ipfw and dummynet, but it’s well worth it in the end. There are a LOT of resources to help with pf/altq, because of the extensive deployment of OpenBSD as a firewall/router.
Also, if you use NAT, pf’s built in NAT functionality is far superior to running natd and redirecting traffic through it. That would be the #1 reason to switch, if it’s something you use/intend on using. People might make argument about ipfw/pf, but nobody will debate (nobody sane) the superiority of pf’s nat functionality vs. ipfw’s hackish natd solution.
Cheers.
While I swear by pf too, I have to add that there are things that IPFW/Dummynet can do that pf/ALTQ cannot. However for simple NAT, pf is a superior solution at least configurationwise. The performance are more than good enough(tm) for the routing for both at least as far as I’ve put them through.
IPFW has quite easy configuration too but pf syntax (derived from IPF) has a more natural language component that just kills anything outside of the BSD firewalls.
You are also correct.
There are niche cases, in all solutions. The thing is, I cannot name one that would be useful in a production environment, that ALTQ is incapable of and dummynet is. To me, that is what matters. 
Again, the reality is – no matter what problem you encounter, choose the best soltuion for the job that fits the requirements. pf/altq will fit those requirements in all likelyhood, and are absolutely robust and a pleasure to work with. Then again, I now do all of above-said things with Juniper gear. 
Thanks for the reply. I’ve tried pf+altq, and it works well. But until now, I don’t know the equivalence of mask in dummynet. For example, if I specify
ipfw pipe 2 config bw 300Kbit/s queue 20 mask src-ip 0x0000000f
it will divide bandwidth per /4 subnet. I need this because I saw some users try to gain high download speed by using all computers in the local network as proxy.
Read this thread (make sure to read followups):
http://www.csl.sony.co.jp/~kjc/altq-ml-2002/msg00439.html
Hope that helps.
I dunno much about ipfirewall, but you might try to ask over at a forum like bsdforums.org or the freebsd mailing list
Use pf and ALTQ. In my opinion (and I’ve worked with firewalling/shaping traffic on multigigabit links) it’s a far superior solution.
True so true. Especially the “quick” keyword rules (as in: no further rules wil get processed if the rule matches and contains the “quick” keyword). Also tables (constant and/or persistant) are very handy for scripts to automaticly add IP adresses without having to reload the config. I do prefer simplicity and the KISS principle.
Edited 2006-02-11 10:09