FreeBSD 6.0 Released

Reyad Attiyat writes FreeBSD 6.0 is ready for release! New features, and there are lots, can be reviewed at the official site. One of the biggest and most anticipated features (mentioned before on Slashdot) is wireless support, which has been greatly improved upon. This includes support for a lot more cards, WAP support, and integration into the dhcpd client. This release comes only mere days off NetBSD's release and an OpenBSD release. Version 6.0 was intended to be released way back in August but due to a number of factors it had to be delayed till now. Aside from this major release the FreeBSD project has also had some major changes, including most recently a new logo and also a brand new website."

Real improvement over 5.x

[Just Some Guy]

I've been comfortable enough with the release candidates to upgrade my production servers from 5.x to 6 a while back. I really have nothing but good to say about it: it's faster, more stable, and more worthy of the FreeBSD name than 5 ever seemed to be.

Congratulations, Release Engineering team! You've turned out a great product.

And as a side note, we've seen big releases from each of the major BSDs within the last week. Dying, my foot.

New logo on web site?

[bhirsch]

I thought the web site was going to reflect the new logo...

Re:Real improvement over 5.x

[Anonymous Coward]

Please don't take this as criticism, because it's not meant in that spirit, but I really wish we'd stop even acknowledging the whole "dying" joke. The problem is, I've run into one stupid manager who, amazingly, bought it. Yes, oh yes, he was stupid, but somehow he got the job and I wish that I could say that he's the only guy I've ever met who was in a position he shouldn't have had.

Of course BSD isn't dying. Either that, or it's the longest death in history. Some Linux-based asswads -- and please understand that I'm not equating Linux usage with being an asswad, heck, I use Linux every day and I wouldn't want to incriminate myself; no, I'm just specifying asswads who somehow have found Linux -- just can't shut up. They're like the annoying nerd in the back of the room who has found an expert mix of geekness and insufferable rudeness that, for some reason, he mistakes for wit. Think "Malvin" in WarGames, and you get the idea. They're the guys who think they're experts because they've managed to install Debian and, oh, Gnome maybe, but they only use Synaptic for package management and they're afraid of cron even though they talk about how they use it all the time, even for personal tasks(!).

God.

They're *dying* to appear knowledgable, so they perpetuate this dying joke without ever really knowing what situations the BSDs are best suited for or the philosophies behind them. I mean, the BSD Web sites, have you seen them? That have all that *text*, I mean, God, you have to read and stuff.

FreeBSD has its issues, I'm aware of them. But I've used it for many, many moons now, and honestly, it rocks my world as a server system. I might use something else, but I'd have to have a really, really good reason. My mail servers run on fairly close-to-stock OpenBSD systems, and they're rock solid. Package management and upgrades are a breeze.

Bottom line, the BSDs make my job easy.

Re:6-STABLE?

[DigitalNate]

There were a lot of problems in the early 5.x releases, which led to a lot of criticizm from everyone who was used to the rock solid 4.x versions. If you browse through the release engineering section on the FreeBSD website http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html [freebsd.org], you will find some articles discussing changes to the release engineering process that occured in response to the problems experienced during 5.x.

Re:memory management and scheduler?

[Anonymous Coward]

5.x didn't retreat from those goals, and as the releases progressed from 5.2 onwards, the code matured and became faster/more stable. 6.0 is arguably a refinement of that work: now it has seen a few years of deployment, the developers have significantly optimized it, applied the refined approach to more components (VFS), etc. Whereas 5.x was about introducing the new architecture, 6.x is all about making it blindingly fast and stable.

Re:Vast performance improvements.

[Just Some Guy]

That's not to suggest that OpenBSD is bad, but performance wise, FreeBSD has taken the lead.

Erm, has OpenBSD ever had the lead in performance? I really doubt it; that's not what it was designed for. All of those little niceties like ultra-paranoid memory protection, cryptographically random process IDs, etc. take resources. Basically, it's tuned for security and correctness with a nod toward performance, while FreeBSD emphasizes raw performance over watertight security.

That doesn't mean that FreeBSD has bad security, or that OpenBSD doesn't incorporate performance enhancements when they can safely do so. All of the BSDs are heavily cross-pollinated, and the best ideas tend to get broad support from all of them.

Still, it's pretty reasonable to say that OpenBSD is more secure and FreeBSD is faster. I wouldn't be the least surprised that FreeBSD can process more email or web hits, especially when you through SMP or HTT systems into the mix.

Re:But are the ports ready?

[Danzigism]

you didn't update your ports collection.. when you upgrade to a completely new version, you have to do so..

check out the handbook.. here's the LINK [freebsd.org]

Re:Live-CD?

[misleb]

What do you think you are going to learn from a Live CD of FreeBSD? Whether or not it supports your hardware? I assume you've run Linux or some kind of unix variant. It'll have a shell and maybe a desktop like KDE or GNOME. What's to see? You can get that on just about any Unixy system. IMO, you don't really know what an OS or distribution is like until you have to actually manage a box.

Unless, of course, you've never run a unix-like system before. Then by all means, try Freesbie.

-matthew

>386BSD

[tverbeek]

This is something of a landmark, kind of like when Mac OS stopped supporting 68000 processors. These are the CPUs that these OSes were built for, and whose consistent feature set made it possible to engineer software to run on "any" computer of that kind. The idea of 386BSD not running on a 386 is a bit... eye-opening.