Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by merlincorey on Sunday December 30, 2012 @04:31PM
(#4987188)
That article is still fairly good of a read, with a couple things slightly out of date, which I will note here simply for pedantry or anyone interested.
BSD no longer uses CVS; FreeBSD specifically has moved to SVN for their primary revision control system, and CVS and related tools (such as csup) are deprecated and in some cases disabled. Along with that, linux kernel is now in git, not bitkeeper.
While source is still the "base" method of installing and updating a FreeBSD system, and it will certainly always be available; now, binary base system and add-on utilities are becoming more popular. Specifically, `freebsd-update` can be used to update the base system's binaries and source. `pkg-ng` adds `apt-get` like binary package management.
ZFS is definitely one of the major things that has FreeBSD on all of my systems. I even run ZFS on single drive laptops:
pool: zroot
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
zroot ONLINE 0 0 0
ada0p3 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by zanny on Sunday December 30, 2012 @06:08PM
(#4987485)
I run btrfs on my main arch installation. Have for ~6 months. If you get the fsck.btrfs tool (it is upstream) you eliminiate the only real showstopper with btrfs on Linux.
You get the online compression (meaning you use less space and read and write faster on mechanical storage because you have less to read / write at a time), you get the snapshots, you get subvolumes, checksums, etc.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by rauar on Sunday December 30, 2012 @07:13PM
(#4987676)
I follow the btrfs development because I'd love to have at least the features of ZFS on Linux. However I would not dare (yet) to use it as a replacement for my current home fileserver (which owns ALL my data).
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by benjohnson on Sunday December 30, 2012 @06:13PM
(#4987505)
I'm amazed at how generally unreliable drives are at retrieving stored data with ZFS checksums in place to highlight the problem - it seems that on average every TB of storages has a problem with a block every half-year or so.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by mkup on Sunday December 30, 2012 @05:40PM
(#4987413)
Jails. Recently I have configured a dedicated server to run nginx + php-fpm in jail: an entire jail consists of two static executable files, a few config files, and a few logs. There's nothing to pwn there, even if there's unpatched stack vulnerability somewhere. Jails are a very impressive security feature of FreeBSD.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by Spooky23 on Monday December 31, 2012 @12:33AM
(#4988517)
They are similar.
My trepidation with LXC would be from a documentation POV... Jails are very much known quantities, while LXC is newer, not known for great docs, and thus is probably easier to screw up.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by tquai on Sunday December 30, 2012 @05:52PM
(#4987445)
First, keep in mind that BSD is an operating system in the same way that Latin is a language: they each live on only in their descendants. Latin became French, Spanish, Italian, and a few others, and BSD became NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Dragonfly BSD. There are different pros and cons to using a BSD operating system, depending on which one you choose. But the common themes are increased security and stability.
For a better answer, the websites of the 4 BSD projects give details on their focuses and strengths.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by yawaramin on Tuesday January 01, 2013 @05:42PM
(#4994315)
Actually, I'd say English claims the title of being the truest descendant of Latin. English not only directly uses descendants of Latin vocabulary, it also uses plenty of words from the other Latin descendants. It's kind of like a C++ diamond inheritance pattern.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by tquai on Thursday January 03, 2013 @09:36PM
(#5005971)
English actually comes from West Germanic (not Latin). But you're right; there are lots of shared words between Latin and English, and this is mostly due to the historical relationship between England and France.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by hosay123 on Sunday December 30, 2012 @03:27PM
(#4986978)
For anyone interested in high throughput/low latency networking, netmap ( http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/ ) looks really exciting in combination with a userspace TCP stack (e.g. unetstack). Pity I have no applications that could use it, would love to experiment.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by justincormack on Sunday December 30, 2012 @03:49PM
(#4987047)
Not sure I see why you would want to use it with a userspace network stack, I am sure at that point kernel networking is going to be faster. Netmap seems more useful for bridging, logging and UDP applications to me...
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by hosay123 on Sunday December 30, 2012 @03:55PM
(#4987066)
Localizing packet processing significantly improves cache performance, in addition to avoiding copies and context switches. Receiving data from a socket almost always necessitates it being copied from a SKB to userspace memory, and prior to that from the driver's rx ring to a SKB. Grep for all references to 'cache' in http://lwn.net/Articles/169961/ which is Van Jacobsen's earlier work on a system of comparable design. Another (insanely more complex) implementation is http://www.openonload.org/
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by protomyth on Sunday December 30, 2012 @01:23PM
(#4986585)
"Please note that precompiled third-party packages are not available for 9.1-RELEASE at the time of release. See the Availability section below for further details."
"With the exception of systems relating to the building and testing of packages, all FreeBSD.org infrastructure has now been brought back online. A full audit of the third party package build infrastructure code ("pointyhat") and package testing infrastructure ("redports") continues, and neither system will be brought back online until audits are complete."
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by Luyt on Sunday December 30, 2012 @03:06PM
(#4986911)
I use FreeBSD on my servers, most of them with ZFS. I wish there was some facility (like in Solaris) than as soon as a harddisk in a mirrorset fails, a spare is automatically swapped in. I will probably have to write that myself ;-)
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by antonios on Sunday December 30, 2012 @03:48PM
(#4987043)
Not necessarily :-) There's a ZFS fault management daemon up and coming in version 10. Look at the very bottom for the link to the source code in this page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD10
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by checker659 on Sunday December 30, 2012 @06:03PM
(#4987472)
Although my research in this case only consists of a quick google search, I can't seem to find any information on the Capsicum (sandboxing) project. I think I read somewhere that they were going to be publishing a userspace library / make the feature non-experimental etc in 9.1. However, I see no mention of it at all in the release notes. Does any one know what the state of that project is?
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by msbarnett on Sunday December 30, 2012 @04:13PM
(#4987123)
Tilaa (http://tilaa.nl) is my go-to for a few reasons. It's not as popular/well known as it ought to be, at least in English.
There's also ARP Networks (http://www.arpnetworks.com), which seems to have a good reputation, and RootBSD (https://www.rootbsd.net), which seems expensive for what you get. I haven't personally tried either.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by nomadlogic on Monday December 31, 2012 @10:42AM
(#4989587)
I can give a huge thumbs up for ARPnet. They are based in downtown LA (and peer @ 1 Wilshire and I think they also are part of the Any2Net exchange from CoreSite), they also fully support IPv6 on VPC's as well as managed servers.
I've had both from them and have found support to be excellent. Honestly can't say enough good things about these guys.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by msbarnett on Sunday December 30, 2012 @06:19PM
(#4987520)
I don't have the energy to type up a big long thing. Been with them over a year no problems encountered in that time, network seems stable and performant, they do not appear to oversell. If you have specific questions I'll try to answer them.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by rauar on Sunday December 30, 2012 @05:25PM
(#4987369)
Which version of ZFS does 9.1 implement (could not find any info on that) ? Want to replace OpenIndiana b151 with FreeBSD 9.1 and reconnect my ZFS storage...
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by emaste on Sunday December 30, 2012 @09:00PM
(#4988000)
I'm running FreeBSD-CURRENT on a Thinkpad X220 and have no issues with any of the built-in peripherals. This laptop has an i5-2540M. The e1000 Ethernet is supported by the em(4) driver and I have a "Centrino Ultimate-N 6300" supported by iwn(4). The Intel GPU support was merged back to stable/9 in time for 9.1.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by emaste on Monday December 31, 2012 @12:42PM
(#4990023)
Right now suspend / resume is non-functional from a user's perspective: that is, suspend works, and I can resume, but the screen does not turn back on. I hope that this can be fixed for 9.2.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Release Announcement
by darklajid on Thursday January 03, 2013 @03:58AM
(#5001501)
I have no idea. zfs on linux [1] is a different approach: It's a kernel module, out of the official tree (due to the license issues).
FUSE should work as well, I .. just didn't try. So ZFS for me is now a ~normal~ kernel filesystem, with some caveats about the external dependency and ignoring the big 'solaris layer' it needs to provide before zfs even starts.
What are the advantages/differences of using bsd over any other linux distro?
Edit: For anyone interested, I actually Googled the question and found a pretty interesting article: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01
BSD no longer uses CVS; FreeBSD specifically has moved to SVN for their primary revision control system, and CVS and related tools (such as csup) are deprecated and in some cases disabled. Along with that, linux kernel is now in git, not bitkeeper.
While source is still the "base" method of installing and updating a FreeBSD system, and it will certainly always be available; now, binary base system and add-on utilities are becoming more popular. Specifically, `freebsd-update` can be used to update the base system's binaries and source. `pkg-ng` adds `apt-get` like binary package management.
ZFS is definitely one of the major things that has FreeBSD on all of my systems. I even run ZFS on single drive laptops:
Snapshotting.
Cloning.
Transparent deduplication.
Transparent compression.
Silent corruption detection.
Self-healing (when using copies=2 or higher, obviously the only way to provide redundancy on a single-drive setup).
NFSv4 ACLs.
You get the online compression (meaning you use less space and read and write faster on mechanical storage because you have less to read / write at a time), you get the snapshots, you get subvolumes, checksums, etc.
Does btrfs provide cifs export like ZFS ?
Edit:
from the btrfs wiki https://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/FAQ#Is_btrfs_stable.... :
Is btrfs stable? Short answer: No, it's still considered experimental.
My trepidation with LXC would be from a documentation POV... Jails are very much known quantities, while LXC is newer, not known for great docs, and thus is probably easier to screw up.
See this HN thread for more discussion:
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4015172
For a better answer, the websites of the 4 BSD projects give details on their focuses and strengths.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4895022
"With the exception of systems relating to the building and testing of packages, all FreeBSD.org infrastructure has now been brought back online. A full audit of the third party package build infrastructure code ("pointyhat") and package testing infrastructure ("redports") continues, and neither system will be brought back online until audits are complete."
There's also ARP Networks (http://www.arpnetworks.com), which seems to have a good reputation, and RootBSD (https://www.rootbsd.net), which seems expensive for what you get. I haven't personally tried either.
I've had both from them and have found support to be excellent. Honestly can't say enough good things about these guys.
FreeBSD 9.1 Amazon ami has been released. I've been running on FreeBSD on EC2 for a while without issue.
(at least on 8.x I had to move kern.timecounter.hardware away from HPET)
How is device (ethernet, wireless, Intel GPU) support on laptops?
Some related recent links: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2012-Dece... http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=kern/174504
I use ZFS on Arch (although not on this laptop, actually). I don't think you _need_ to choose?
FUSE should work as well, I .. just didn't try. So ZFS for me is now a ~normal~ kernel filesystem, with some caveats about the external dependency and ignoring the big 'solaris layer' it needs to provide before zfs even starts.
1: http://zfsonlinux.org/