FreeBSD Release Engineering Team’s Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures.
FreeBSD 5.2-RC1 Released
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If I download this release, how easy is it to update the entire system from RC1 to the proper 5.2 release? Or should I wait before downloading? Or should I stick with 4.9 or 5.1? I want to grab a version ASAP. Thanks in advance!
PS. I want to run Samba + apache + MySQL + PHP (+ others probably) on it.
look for the early adopters file on the website. that should tell you all you need
// Asenchi
Upgrades happen pretty flawlessly. At least they do for me anyway. If you can test RC1, that would be great, as long as you provide feedback to the development teams on the mailinglists if you have any problems. I am planning on testing RC1 later tonight.
Just waiting on a version that supports Atheros without sounding scary (BETA, RC1, etc).
’cause for some reason I find it very troublesome as a BSD n00b to sort it out.
One of the strengths of FreeBSD is that there is a reliable, fairly easy process to upgrade the base system. The process is outlined in the FreeBSD Handbook:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/index.htm…
Basically, when you install, you should install sources for everything. Then, when you want to upgrade you use cvsup to go to FreeBSD’s cvs server and updates your source to whichever release or branch you specify in your supfile, which is a kind of control file for the cvsup process. Then you compile the new system, compile a new kernel, install the new kernel, then install the newly-compiled system. There is even a utility, mergemaster, that helps you update files in /etc while still preserving what you want to keep from your old configs.
I used this process to upgrade from 4.6 to 4.7 to 4.8, then to 4.9. It has always worked flawlessly (and I’m a relative newbie).
For an idea of typical download/compile times: I have a p3-800 and use a dialup connection. It usually takes around an hour to synchronize the sources via cvsup, 2 hours to compile the system, 15 minutes to compile the kernel, and then just a few minutes to install them.
Good Luck! I think if you try FreeBSD you will like it.
Many thanks for the advice Mark!
Will FreeBSD 5.2 FINALLY fix the horrible threads implementation that was being used before? Last I checked FreeBSD’s threads didn’t even work on more than one processor at once. What is bad is FreeBSD is using M:N threads which have been proven to be less scalable than 1:1 threads. Sun even moved Solaris to 1:1 threads. Linux has 1:1 threads with NPTL.
I think it’s funny that Linux 2.6 will be coming out at the same time. From everything I’ve read it seems that FreeBSD 5.2 will be the equivalent of Linux 2.4, so FreeBSD is still an entire generation behind.
Actually, M:N threads haven’t conclusively been proven to be worse. Go read the NPTL documentation. The reason they selected 1:1 for NPTL was because it fit better with the preexisting paradigms.
Robocop (IP: —.auckland.clix.net.nz)
If I download this release, how easy is it to update the entire system from RC1 to the proper 5.2 release?
Extremely easy. You should have no problems doing a binary upgrade between 5.2-RC1 and 5.2-RELEASE through /stand/sysinstall which is much less tedious than doing a source upgrade and should take a sum total of about 10-20 minutes with a decent Internet connection.
Anonymous (IP: —.cm-upc.chello.se)
Will this one autoconfigure the sound card? ’cause for some reason I find it very troublesome as a BSD n00b to sort it out.
For 90% of the sound cards out there, getting a sound card going on FreeBSD is significantly easier than getting the same card going under Linux. All you need to do is load the “pcm” kernel module, which can be done automatically at boot by adding snd_pcm_load=”YES” to /boot/loader.conf to load the module at boot time or just “kldload pcm” to load the module on a running system.
keefer (IP: —.anhmca.adelphia.net)
Will FreeBSD 5.2 FINALLY fix the horrible threads implementation that was being used before?
FreeBSD 5.2 should ship with libkse as the default threads implementation, yes.
Last I checked FreeBSD’s threads didn’t even work on more than one processor at once.
FreeBSD’s rfork() has parameters which make it virtually identical to Linux’s _clone(). Consequently LinuxThreads could be compiled on top of FreeBSD, with virtually identical performance characteristics to LinuxThreads on a Linux system. True, Linux has now moved to NPTL, but FreeBSD will be moving to libkse.
What is bad is FreeBSD is using M:N threads which have been proven to be less scalable than 1:1 threads.
M:N threads are theoretically more scalable than 1:1 threads because they reduce the number of system calls required for threads operations. Unfortunately, this incurs an added degree of complexity in the implementation, but should be better in the long run.
Would you care to point to your source on M:N threads being “proven to be less scalable” than 1:1 threads? I’d greatly like to read it. However, I would wager that you’re just trolling…
Sun even moved Solaris to 1:1 threads.
Yes, but the context switch penalty on SPARC is significantly less than on x86. For x86, an M:N implementation is ideal.
From everything I’ve read it seems that FreeBSD 5.2 will be the equivalent of Linux 2.4, so FreeBSD is still an entire generation behind.
While FreeBSD 5.x may not stack up to Linux 2.6 in terms of overall system scalability, it will, in general, have much better performance characteristics Linux 2.4. FreeBSD 4.x even had O(1) I/O multiplexing, something Linux didn’t have until 2.6 with epoll().
You probably ment to say that with 2.6, Linux will finally reach roughly the same system responsiveness as FreeBSD 5.x without having to patch the hell out of your kernel ?
I think thats because FreeBSD and Linux have different development strategies and philosophies. If it takes a little extra time to create a well thought out and solid system then I’m all for waiting. I’m not saying that Linux is bad because I have seen some good implementations but I’ve dealt with both FreeBSD and Linux on servers and FreeBSD is definitely much easier to work with in my experiences. It just does what I ask it to, and after all thats what a computer is meant to do in the first place.
I think it’s funny that Linux 2.6 will be coming out at the same time. From everything I’ve read it seems that FreeBSD 5.2 will be the equivalent of Linux 2.4, so FreeBSD is still an entire generation behind.
This is quite funny. I suggest that you read freebsd mailing list about it. 2.6 kernel is optimized for specific benchmarks (there is also notion of A. Cox about it) which is not the same as realworld tests. 1:1 will slow down buildworld for example (not only). So you would have to prove that in your specific situaton 1:1 is better. Don’t repeat what you have read without understanding it first.
Is it worth the time to learn BSD? I just switched from windowsXP to Fedora Core 1 because I think linux is going to be one of the dominant OSes in the future and wanted a head start. But everyone keeps saying that “BSD is dead” and that its marketshare is being eaten away by linux. Does FreeBSD offer something substanial that I wont be able to do in linux?
Have you even bothered to read the LIBKSE implementation details for FreeBSD 5? The “bad” thread implementations you are speaking of is actually “bad” applications that work better using Linux because their cloned tasks implementation of threads masks the problems with their coding. Linux using “tasks” and “cloned tasks” rather than an actual threading implementation. Linux 2.6 will actually improve their threading implementation a great deal over 2.4…. Maybe then those applications that had problems in FreeBSD will have problems in 2.6 … =)
everyone keeps saying that “BSD is dead”
everyone? u mean linux zealots? :p
————————————————
I wish to try out RC1 if there’s no compatibility issue between 5.1 and 5.2rc1. I have once suffered from the breakage last month. I think i tried to upgrade while alot of changes were made on CVS
poor me.
> I wish to try out RC1 if there’s no compatibility issue
> between 5.1 and 5.2rc1. I have once suffered from the
> breakage last month. I think i tried to upgrade while alot
> of changes were made on CVS
poor me.
There’s a big difference between upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2-CURRENT and upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2RCx. Release candidates (FreeBSD ones anyway) are designed to be properly usable and reasonably stable. You should have little (if any) problems.
“I think it’s funny that Linux 2.6 will be coming out at the same time. From everything I’ve read it seems that FreeBSD 5.2 will be the equivalent of Linux 2.4, so FreeBSD is still an entire generation behind.”
The ironic thing about Linux is that it doesn’t really do anything really well. It might scale better than FreeBSD on 32 cpu systems, but it still doesn’t compare to Solaris, AIX, HPUX, IRIX, etc. So basically, saying Linux is better than Freebsd in scalability is analogous to a runner who came last in a 1500M Run dissing a 1st place runner who’s specialty is the 100 M Dash.
What FreeBSD does, it does well. Linux doesn’t do anything really well, but it’s claim to fame is that it can do somethings better than FreeBSD. FreeBSD already dominates uniprocessor and dual processor systems, where most people deploy Linux and FreeBSD. It now scales extremely well on 4-8 cpu systems, where people will now only start deploying Linux and FreeBSD. Except for a few fringe cases (mostly for advertising purposes), noone will choose to deploy either Linux nor FreeBSD on a 32+ cpu monster for at least 3-4 years. At that time, FreeBSD will be ready for that too.
In the meanwhile, FreeBSD dominates Linux under extreme server loads, administration, documentation, uptime, etc., everywhere people who actually deploy these technologies care about.
But I’m quite sure that you won’t bother caring about any of this. Instead you are very happy just knowing that if you ever were to upgrade your 2 processor system to a 64 processor sytem, you’d cream FreeBSD. Of course, you’d be killed by the real Unix solutions, but at least you will be better than BSD.
Is it worth the time to learn BSD? I just switched from windowsXP to Fedora Core 1 because I think linux is going to be one of the dominant OSes in the future and wanted a head start. But everyone keeps saying that “BSD is dead” and that its marketshare is being eaten away by linux. Does FreeBSD offer something substanial that I wont be able to do in linux?
In my opinion and experience………FreeBSD is a much cleaner system than Linux. For example, look at the FreeBSD handbook…a nice clean clear manual all beautifully formatted. Linux seems fragmented all over the place while FreeBSD is all one nice coherent package. Installing software is easy in FreeBSD compared to many Linux distros (perhaps Debian excepted).
No BSD is not dead or dieing. Those are just slashdot trolls.
FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD are plenty alive and doing rather bloody well. Yes, it is very much worth your time. It is far easier to use than linux, nice performance, and uber nice docs.
The idea that market space is being taken away by linux is also false. Linux is actually gaining more space for BSD… it works a little like this… they get linux and get annoyed with it, thus they go and discover BSD after learning linux and getting annoyed with it. =]
I personally like working with FBSD far more than linux and recently drivers for the PVR250 and possibly 350 have come up, so I really can’t think of a reason for me to use linux what so ever out side of the occasional game that does not play nicely under the linux compat layer.
Mac OS X is based on BSD. Apple has bet their billions on it.
BSD includes the reference implementation of TCP/IP.
OpenBSD is the most secure operating system in the world.
Apache is developed on FreeBSD.
Yahoo! runs on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD is an operating system; Linux is a kernel packaged up with other tools into “distributions”.
Is it worth the time to learn BSD? … Does FreeBSD offer something substanial that I wont be able to do in linux?
It’s mostly a difference of style rather than substance. Pretty much everything that you can do in FreeBSD you can do in Linux and vice-versa. I would subjectively characterize the differences thusly:
Linux
– broad variety of hardware support
– development teams responsible for different parts co-operate loosely
– many distributions to choose from
– documentation of variable quality
– all unix apps run
– focus on adding new features
FreeBSD
– supports standard hardware well, but check compatibility before buying proprietary peripherals
– development teams responsible for different parts co-operate tightly
– documentation usually good (especially the online man pages)
– almost all unix apps run – a minority of closed source products and linux specific products require a linux emulation layer to run, a very small number won’t run at all.
– focus on maintainability
So the answer depends on what you want to use it for. To run an ISP I would use FreeBSD. To use on a home desktop I would use Linux. But really either can be used for either. If you want to learn about Unix, pick one and dive in, because honestly there’s a lot more to learn that’s the same between them than there are differences.
… advice cont’d:
If you run several machines pick one O/S and stick with it. Don’t be tempted to run a few of each. The hassles of managing and updating different versions of different O/Ss are truly trying. The only times when you’d want to run both FreeBSD and Linux are (a) to learn about the differences between Unix versions (b) to develop software to run on different Unix versions.
Thanx for the advice fellas.
Does anyone know if theres a GUI installer or maybe something like a Slackware installer for FreeBSD?
let me just add that when i was learning about unix, i found freebsd to be much easier than linux due to the excellent online documentation, overall better consistancy, the fact that there’s no distro-specific crap to learn about (theres only one freebsd), and the fact that freebsd doesnt change the world on you after every new release. play with it for a month or two, and i guarantee that you’ll never look back. bsd is definitely not dying. i cant even tell you how many linux users ive converted to freebsd users over the last few years. and btw, when it comes to the desktop, i find bsd to be just as good as linux (assuming that your hardware is supported).
The FreeBSD installer (Sysinstall) is similar in appearance and function to the Slackware installer. Quite frankly, if you can use one, you can use the other. Click the link for pics.
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/using-sys…
“Is it worth the time to learn BSD? I just switched from windowsXP to Fedora Core 1”
For home desktop use Linux is obviously a better choice because there are Linux distros specially designed for this purpose. FreeBSD may be a better choice if you plan to set up servers but in the home desktop use you’ll miss the GUI config tools that you have in WinXP and Fedora. Besides, the desktop responsiveness enhancements that come with the new Linux 2.6 kernel are very nice for desktop users, although they may have little value for servers. In short, use the OS or distro that is in the first place designed to do what you want it to do.
well FreeBSD sounds pretty good. What the heck, ill give it a try.
Good points, but the main reason I want to give FreeBSD a chance is that I want to gain some serious UNIX experince before I go to universtiy (~1yr to go). Im planning on becoming a computer engineer and was told that a solid foundation in UNIX would give me an edge.
Fedora/Mandrake/SUSE are fantastic distros but I really didnt learn that much. Right now im planning on a dual-booting system with FreeBSD and maybe Gentoo/Slackware. Best of both worlds I guess.
I dual boot between FreeBSD 4.9 and Arch Linux. Can’t decide which I like better. 😉
Is it worth the time to learn BSD? I just switched from windowsXP to Fedora Core 1 because I think linux is going to be one of the dominant OSes in the future and wanted a head start.
It’s definitely worth the time. Once you get to know it, you’ll love it.
But everyone keeps saying that “BSD is dead” and that its marketshare is being eaten away by linux.
Ummm… That’s a Slashdot troll. You knew that, right? Actually, FreeBSD is growing very fast. Just look at Netcraft’s statistics: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/07/12/nearly_2_million_activ…. Quote:
Indeed it is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey.
Does FreeBSD offer something substanial that I wont be able to do in linux?
You can do the same in FreeBSD that you can do in Linux, it just works a little differently (and sometimes better, IMHO).
Will FreeBSD 5.2 FINALLY fix the horrible threads implementation that was being used before? Last I checked FreeBSD’s threads didn’t even work on more than one processor at once. What is bad is FreeBSD is using M:N threads which have been proven to be less scalable than 1:1 threads. Sun even moved Solaris to 1:1 threads. Linux has 1:1 threads with NPTL.
You sir, are a troll. And one that doesn’t have his facts straight.
1) M:N is in theory a lot more scalable than 1:1. Sun moved to 1:1, not because it was faster, but because they weren’t able to properly debug M:N in time. It was a political choice. Even a high profile OS such as Tru64 has a M:N threads library! Read this quote from HP’s David Butenhof:
Yes, it is hard to get M:N working right, though there are real advantages. (System Software development is not generally dedicated to the principle of avoiding “hard” problems, after all.) But the history of Sun’s trouble with M:N isn’t nearly as much technical as political. Even when developers tried to address design problems, they weren’t allowed. So, yes, giving up on M:N probably was the best course, for Sun. M:N isn’t something that can be done halfway — you either commit to the whole thing and follow through, or you’re better off not trying. Unlike Solaris, the Tru64 UNIX M:N scheduling model was actually designed to work, and does. It (like all else) isn’t perfect, but it scales, it supports detailed and effective debugging, and it’s cleanly and deeply integrated with the kernel.
Source: http://groups.google.com/groups?q=M+x+N+group:comp.programming.thre…
2) You can choose between M:N and 1:1 on FreeBSD! There’s more than one thread library, you know. libkse is the M:N one, and libthr is the 1:1 one. You can choose the one you like best, or the one that gives you the best result in the applications you use. It’s all about choice!
Although it may take a bit of time to install something from source via the ports in FreeBSD, it’s less hassle then getting all rpms that something depends on IMO.
For your average desktop use I find FreeBSD cleaner and easier to use then Linux distros like RedHat/Mandrake/SuSE
Of course you can use Slack, which means that you can as well learn to use FreeBSD, as there is not a lot of difference in how to achieve things in Slack compared to FreeBSD.
Never meddled with Debian though, so that might be the killer distro that you should try to get the best of both worlds.
Sure forget both of them and use IRIX 😉
just kidding, both are excellent systems tbh and arguring over the differences is quite petty. One should have a broad enough mind to try different OS’s and not to troll.
As for debian well fedora with apt installed gives you all the bonuses of debian tbh. I used it to install full mplayer (all the codecs etc.) and flash.
FreeBSD i havn’t seriously played around with. i did once do an install, and it’s fairly simple, then again i find the non-gui (ncurses?) install on redhat simple as well so i would say that.
Unless you have the time and resources to waste, don’t dual boot between gentoo and freebsd. Go for a slack/fsbd combination. Using the ports system is fun, but you don’t want to duplicate the time that goes into compiling packages
– Besides, the init system of linux is a nightmare (sysv), and the only distro I know of that uses a bsd-like init system is slackware.
btw I use fsbsd 5.1 and my roommate uses gentoo – so I don’t have anything against the latter, except for a very cluttered /etc/… but at least I had a good laugh when “emerge mc” wanted to install XFree86 4.3 as a dependency after a fresh install
)
quote:
but at least I had a good laugh when “emerge mc” wanted to install XFree86 4.3 as a dependency after a fresh install
)
—
Try ‘cd /usr/ports/editors/vim && make install’
Same result 🙂
Luckily there’s a vim-lite port
The problem with source based stuff is the first program that uses something gnome-ish takes a week to compile all dependencies for us non-gnome desktop users.
“2) You can choose between M:N and 1:1 on FreeBSD! There’s more than one thread library, you know. libkse is the M:N one, and libthr is the 1:1 one. You can choose the one you like best, or the one that gives you the best result in the applications you use. It’s all about choice!”
And let’s not forget the fact that you can choose which one to use on an application by application basis as well if you are so inclined. Come to think of it, that would be part of a good method for testing which one really is “better.”
btw I use fsbsd 5.1 and my roommate uses gentoo – so I don’t have anything against the latter, except for a very cluttered /etc/… but at least I had a good laugh when “emerge mc” wanted to install XFree86 4.3 as a dependency after a fresh install
)
Well, you probably got what you asked for… Take a look at /etc/make.conf, the USE flag for using XFree is there by default.
I know mc is a console client, but it has probably a dependency that can use X. @_@
Will FreeBSD 5.2 FINALLY fix the horrible threads implementation that was being used before? Last I checked FreeBSD’s threads didn’t even work on more than one processor at once. What is bad is FreeBSD is using M:N threads which have been proven to be less scalable than 1:1 threads. Sun even moved Solaris to 1:1 threads. Linux has 1:1 threads with NPTL.
1) It was up until Red Hat 9 was released when the only way threads were created in Linux was via forking LWP. Bascule went into some interesting detail a while back over the issues bought up and why even he hacked method used by FreeBSD 4.x is better.
2) M:N thread algorithm are superior and have been shown on paper, the downside is that it is more complicated to implement and yield the “theoretical” performance advantage, hence the reason why NPTL was chosen over NGPL. It had nothing to do with technical superiority but the fact that the performance is easier to obtain, there is a downside to this “easiness” and I am sure there are some “gurus” here who can shed light on the issue.
Well, for first you may consider this solution… (I myself use this configuration on my laptop)
Partition your HD in 4 primary partitions. On the first install Windows (what you prefer), on second Linux (I advise you to choose Debian) and on third FreeBSD.
Now the fourth partition shall be formatted with ext2fs. Why ? Becouse will be your data partition, and you will be able to mount it from Windows (yes for RW), from FreeBSD and from linux.
So you will never have to reboot in order to find or modifie your documents/files.
Also you may consider using wine/winex as an windows emulator in order to play your favourites games/applications, and Linux Binary compatibility.
I’m using this formula for a year now, and I can say that I did 99.99% of my job with FreeBSD… and I’m an Microsoft SQL Dba.
I like more FreeBSD because is more stable and is easyer to configure… I don’t remeber when I last booted on in Windows, and Linux I used to repair the /data partition (after I don’t know how FreeBSD corupted the ext2fs)
Good Luck !