6 ms·

FreeBSD 10.2

192 points by forkandwait 11y ago

zxcvcxz 11y ago
Is there an easy way to install a FreeBSD container on a Linux system? For example, I can do # debootstrap --arch=amd64 unstable ~/debian-tree/ # systemd-nspawn -D ~/debian-tree/ And be in a debian container. Is there a simple way to get a FreeBSD container?
- cperciva 11y ago
  No, because Linux containers are still running the Linux kernel, and the Linux kernel doesn't know how to run FreeBSD binaries. You can do the opposite however -- running Linux inside jails on FreeBSD hosts. This is how docker-on-freebsd works, and also how FreeBSD desktop systems usually cope with software like Flash plugins which are only available as Linux binaries.
  - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
    Btw, thanks for FreeBSD compat work for running on AWS/Xen, even if it might've been mostly to host Tarsnap on it. ;) It's possible to run a NetBSD Xen dom0 (host system) on bare metal, under VMware or Xen HVM: it takes a few patches, building a kernel and config tweaks to get going but it works stably. [0] (There's no XAPI (the Xen remote management API) support however, so XenServer tools and other 3rd-party XAPI integrations probably won't work. FYI: XAPI server-side is coded in OCaml; don't ask how I know that. ;) [1]) For most people w/ baremetal or rented colo that just want a turn-key supportable hypervisor, I would advise using Citrix XenServer (commercial official Xen, free download, it seems be more stable than XCP and includes XAPI) or VMware ESXi (free download, very stable, $$$ quickly). After that, you can run whatever OS/es you like. (IIRC a ton of AWS boxes run heavily-modified Xen open-source 3.3.x.) For desktop/laptop dev: VirtualBox, VMware Fusion/Workstation or qemu. References: 0. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto/ 1. https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api EDIT: pronouns
    - cperciva 11y ago
      FreeBSD compat work on AWS/Xen I did no such thing. My work was all to add AWS/Xen compatibility to FreeBSD. :-) In all serious though, while wanting to host Tarsnap on an OS I knew and trusted was my justification for spending so much time on FreeBSD/EC2, my actual reason had more to do with wanting to make sure that FreeBSD didn't fall behind.
      - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
        Ah cool. Adoption is like a stochastic transfer function with a dependent variable "modern usability." Speaking of usability, here's a patch to libfetch to ignore crusty ftp server non-RFC spurious responses https://gist.github.com/steakknife/b4772a5deb6afc8851e0 https://gist.github.com/steakknife/b4772a5deb6afc8851e0 (I have absolute zero idea how to contribute code/patches to FreeBSD or it's not obvious/easy from docs.) s/on/for/ That's what I meant. ;)
    - pjmlp 11y ago
      > XAPI server-side is coded in OCaml; don't ask how I know that. Everyone that follows Mirage should know that. ;) I remember Anil saying something about it in one of his talks, if I am not mistaken.
  - jstoiko 11y ago
    Reminds me: I have to give tarsnap a shot
    - msbarnett 11y ago
      It's 100% excellent. Highly, highly recommended.
      - tdurden 11y ago
        Technically, I agree...however, you are trusting your backups to a one man operation.
        cperciva 11y ago
        Not a one-man operation any more! Admittedly still a bus-factor-one operation though, since man #2 doesn't know how to keep everything running yet.
        tdurden 11y ago
        Great to hear!
        bmir-alum-007 11y ago
        Having done this a few dozen times: A best practice is to ask the next new person to keep notes of obvious questions/unclear details to put in an internal, secure wiki. The issue, as founders, we often don't think about what is obvious to us when we deployed an app and all the server tweaks necessary to get it going, for teaching someone else or replicating what was done. Then, they learn some things and put them into the wiki. Rinse-later-repeat until there's few/no questions as the team grows. It's continual DR/BCP housekeeping: architecture diagrams, instance inventory/config and other critical info (contact / escalation info) updated so that it's run-over-by-a-bus and EC2-burns-down (almost) resilient. As you scale, having someone put server config all in Chef or Puppet (cfg management stored in git) will also help reduce deployment pain at the expense of initial setup pain. Initially, a wiki page containing a giant shell script for each server box kind is usually a faster hack.
- e-Minguez 11y ago
  Not a container, but maybe you can take a look at vagrant (vagrant box add freebsd/FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE and it is done)
msbarnett 11y ago
Downloading the VM image to a new Linode right now! edit: that was fast $ uname -a FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE #0 r286666: Wed Aug 12 15:26:37 UTC 2015 root@releng1.nyi.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64
bmir-alum-007 11y ago
Running this on our AWS sandbox ec2 instance after snapshotting it: freebsd-update fetch install && freebsd-update -r 10.2-RELEASE upgrade EDIT: Updates to 10.1-RELASE-p17 (currently) before upgrading
- cperciva 11y ago
  Quick reminder (not that you necessarily need it, but lots of people do forget this): It's usually a good idea to run freebsd-update fetch and install any updates (rebooting if necessary) before you try to upgrade to a new release. On occasion there have been problems in freebsd-update which need to be fixed. EDIT: Don't run 'freebsd-update fetch install && freebsd-update ... upgrade', since if the first command installs kernel updates you might need to reboot before downloading upgrades. (Ok, it's very unlikely. But it's theoretically possible that a kernel update would affect the upgrade-downloading process.)
  - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
    Ah thanks. It happens this box was updated from 10.1 -p16 to -p17 recently. Generally, on most OSes/apps, smaller upgrade deltas = less breakage. Afterwards, folks may want to rebuild outdated ports to avoid stale shared libs from the previous release using something like: (cd /usr/ports && make update && portmaster -a) # or: -aBg saves new packages for re/installation on other boxes Finally, check ports for any unpatched security issues (should be 0): pkg audit -F EDIT: only rebuild outdated ports
    - feld 11y ago
      Only for some kernel modules because a few occasionally have an issue but generally they're not supposed to. Otherwise FreeBSD is backwards compatible. You can run FreeBSD 2.0 binaries and libraries just fine if you want. There's some on the official FreeBSD cluster, I think. In case you didn't know, the official FreeBSD packages for 10.1 and 10.2 will continue to be built on 10.1 -- the oldest supported release in the 10.x train.
bleomycin 11y ago
Does anyone know how the virtio network performance is on this release when virtualized under qemu/kvm? I know that pfsense is moving to 10.2 soon and i've been unable to use it virtualized due to its atrocious virtio net performance. While the linux based firewall alternatives are incredibly fast they just don't have anywhere near the ease of use/feature set of pfsense!
- napkindrawing 11y ago
  I had that same problem when I was proofing out FreeBSD to replace Linux at $work but found an errata that fixed everything by disabling hardware checksum offloading: ifconfig xn0 -tso4
gergles 11y ago
What about this change from 'latest' to 'quarterly' with no good way to change that for pkg? I don't want to only get new packages 4 times a year. Is that what's going to happen? It also feels like the documentation around doing things like pinning you could do in apt is lacking; if there are some packages I can say "retrieve these packages from latest" then I'd be more okay with everything else only updating 4x a year.
- msbarnett 11y ago
  > What about this change from 'latest' to 'quarterly' with no good way to change that for pkg? I don't want to only get new packages 4 times a year. From the Release Notes: > The default pkg(8) repository set in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf now defaults to the quarterly package set. To use the latest branch (as was the previous default), the comment at the top of /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf explains how to disable the default repository and specify an alternative repository. If I'm reading /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf correctly, swapping over to use HEAD instead of the Quarterly branch is as simple as creating /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf with the following content? FreeBSD: { url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest" } edit: originally I replicated all of the contents of /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf in /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf, but based on pkg.conf(5), the contents of the latter override keys in the former, so you only have to specify the differences
  - hyperknot 11y ago
    Thanks for this information! It's strangely missing from the release and the comment in the /etc file. Do you know how are the security updates propagated to quarterly branch? Are they backported till the latest Q release and shipped immediately?
    - msbarnett 11y ago
      Did you upgrade from a previous release? It might not have changed your /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf. I'm basing this off a fresh install. And yes, my understanding is that the quarterly branch is supported for 3 months with backports of security fixes.
olavgg 11y ago
FreeBSD 10.2 do come with some ZFS fixes which could occur under high load.
asymmetric 11y ago
I'll state the obvious, but coming from Linux it's impressive and at the same time weird to look at a full OS's changelog.
- mapleoin 11y ago
  You'll have to explain. Linux distros have release notes, too: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/22/html/Release_Notes/ http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/22/html/Release_N... https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/ReleaseNotes https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/ReleaseNotes or if you really meant Linux: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges
protomyth 11y ago
Did the upgrade, and it seemed to go ok, but now the pw command is really slow (around 1 minute to complete). This might be a bit of fun figuring out.

192 points by forkandwait 11y ago

Is there an easy way to install a FreeBSD container on a Linux system? For example, I can do # debootstrap --arch=amd64 unstable ~/debian-tree/ # systemd-nspawn -D ~/debian-tree/ And be in a debian container. Is there a simple way to get a FreeBSD container?

cperciva 11y ago
No, because Linux containers are still running the Linux kernel, and the Linux kernel doesn't know how to run FreeBSD binaries. You can do the opposite however -- running Linux inside jails on FreeBSD hosts. This is how docker-on-freebsd works, and also how FreeBSD desktop systems usually cope with software like Flash plugins which are only available as Linux binaries.
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  Btw, thanks for FreeBSD compat work for running on AWS/Xen, even if it might've been mostly to host Tarsnap on it. ;) It's possible to run a NetBSD Xen dom0 (host system) on bare metal, under VMware or Xen HVM: it takes a few patches, building a kernel and config tweaks to get going but it works stably. [0] (There's no XAPI (the Xen remote management API) support however, so XenServer tools and other 3rd-party XAPI integrations probably won't work. FYI: XAPI server-side is coded in OCaml; don't ask how I know that. ;) [1]) For most people w/ baremetal or rented colo that just want a turn-key supportable hypervisor, I would advise using Citrix XenServer (commercial official Xen, free download, it seems be more stable than XCP and includes XAPI) or VMware ESXi (free download, very stable, $$$ quickly). After that, you can run whatever OS/es you like. (IIRC a ton of AWS boxes run heavily-modified Xen open-source 3.3.x.) For desktop/laptop dev: VirtualBox, VMware Fusion/Workstation or qemu. References: 0. https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto/ https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/xen/howto/ 1. https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api https://github.com/xapi-project/xen-api EDIT: pronouns
  - cperciva 11y ago
    FreeBSD compat work on AWS/Xen I did no such thing. My work was all to add AWS/Xen compatibility to FreeBSD. :-) In all serious though, while wanting to host Tarsnap on an OS I knew and trusted was my justification for spending so much time on FreeBSD/EC2, my actual reason had more to do with wanting to make sure that FreeBSD didn't fall behind.
    - bmir-alum-007 11y ago
      Ah cool. Adoption is like a stochastic transfer function with a dependent variable "modern usability." Speaking of usability, here's a patch to libfetch to ignore crusty ftp server non-RFC spurious responses https://gist.github.com/steakknife/b4772a5deb6afc8851e0 https://gist.github.com/steakknife/b4772a5deb6afc8851e0 (I have absolute zero idea how to contribute code/patches to FreeBSD or it's not obvious/easy from docs.) s/on/for/ That's what I meant. ;)
  - pjmlp 11y ago
    > XAPI server-side is coded in OCaml; don't ask how I know that. Everyone that follows Mirage should know that. ;) I remember Anil saying something about it in one of his talks, if I am not mistaken.
- jstoiko 11y ago
  Reminds me: I have to give tarsnap a shot
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    It's 100% excellent. Highly, highly recommended.
    - tdurden 11y ago
      Technically, I agree...however, you are trusting your backups to a one man operation.
      - cperciva 11y ago
        Not a one-man operation any more! Admittedly still a bus-factor-one operation though, since man #2 doesn't know how to keep everything running yet.
        tdurden 11y ago
        Great to hear!
        bmir-alum-007 11y ago
        Having done this a few dozen times: A best practice is to ask the next new person to keep notes of obvious questions/unclear details to put in an internal, secure wiki. The issue, as founders, we often don't think about what is obvious to us when we deployed an app and all the server tweaks necessary to get it going, for teaching someone else or replicating what was done. Then, they learn some things and put them into the wiki. Rinse-later-repeat until there's few/no questions as the team grows. It's continual DR/BCP housekeeping: architecture diagrams, instance inventory/config and other critical info (contact / escalation info) updated so that it's run-over-by-a-bus and EC2-burns-down (almost) resilient. As you scale, having someone put server config all in Chef or Puppet (cfg management stored in git) will also help reduce deployment pain at the expense of initial setup pain. Initially, a wiki page containing a giant shell script for each server box kind is usually a faster hack.
e-Minguez 11y ago
Not a container, but maybe you can take a look at vagrant (vagrant box add freebsd/FreeBSD-10.2-RELEASE and it is done)

msbarnett 11y ago

Downloading the VM image to a new Linode right now! edit: that was fast $ uname -a FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE #0 r286666: Wed Aug 12 15:26:37 UTC 2015 root@releng1.nyi.freebsd.org:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/GENERIC amd64

bmir-alum-007 11y ago

Running this on our AWS sandbox ec2 instance after snapshotting it: freebsd-update fetch install && freebsd-update -r 10.2-RELEASE upgrade EDIT: Updates to 10.1-RELASE-p17 (currently) before upgrading

cperciva 11y ago
Quick reminder (not that you necessarily need it, but lots of people do forget this): It's usually a good idea to run freebsd-update fetch and install any updates (rebooting if necessary) before you try to upgrade to a new release. On occasion there have been problems in freebsd-update which need to be fixed. EDIT: Don't run 'freebsd-update fetch install && freebsd-update ... upgrade', since if the first command installs kernel updates you might need to reboot before downloading upgrades. (Ok, it's very unlikely. But it's theoretically possible that a kernel update would affect the upgrade-downloading process.)
- bmir-alum-007 11y ago
  Ah thanks. It happens this box was updated from 10.1 -p16 to -p17 recently. Generally, on most OSes/apps, smaller upgrade deltas = less breakage. Afterwards, folks may want to rebuild outdated ports to avoid stale shared libs from the previous release using something like: (cd /usr/ports && make update && portmaster -a) # or: -aBg saves new packages for re/installation on other boxes Finally, check ports for any unpatched security issues (should be 0): pkg audit -F EDIT: only rebuild outdated ports
  - feld 11y ago
    Only for some kernel modules because a few occasionally have an issue but generally they're not supposed to. Otherwise FreeBSD is backwards compatible. You can run FreeBSD 2.0 binaries and libraries just fine if you want. There's some on the official FreeBSD cluster, I think. In case you didn't know, the official FreeBSD packages for 10.1 and 10.2 will continue to be built on 10.1 -- the oldest supported release in the 10.x train.

bleomycin 11y ago

Does anyone know how the virtio network performance is on this release when virtualized under qemu/kvm? I know that pfsense is moving to 10.2 soon and i've been unable to use it virtualized due to its atrocious virtio net performance. While the linux based firewall alternatives are incredibly fast they just don't have anywhere near the ease of use/feature set of pfsense!

napkindrawing 11y ago
I had that same problem when I was proofing out FreeBSD to replace Linux at $work but found an errata that fixed everything by disabling hardware checksum offloading: ifconfig xn0 -tso4

gergles 11y ago

What about this change from 'latest' to 'quarterly' with no good way to change that for pkg? I don't want to only get new packages 4 times a year. Is that what's going to happen? It also feels like the documentation around doing things like pinning you could do in apt is lacking; if there are some packages I can say "retrieve these packages from latest" then I'd be more okay with everything else only updating 4x a year.

msbarnett 11y ago
> What about this change from 'latest' to 'quarterly' with no good way to change that for pkg? I don't want to only get new packages 4 times a year. From the Release Notes: > The default pkg(8) repository set in /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf now defaults to the quarterly package set. To use the latest branch (as was the previous default), the comment at the top of /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf explains how to disable the default repository and specify an alternative repository. If I'm reading /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf correctly, swapping over to use HEAD instead of the Quarterly branch is as simple as creating /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf with the following content? FreeBSD: { url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest" } edit: originally I replicated all of the contents of /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf in /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf, but based on pkg.conf(5), the contents of the latter override keys in the former, so you only have to specify the differences
- hyperknot 11y ago
  Thanks for this information! It's strangely missing from the release and the comment in the /etc file. Do you know how are the security updates propagated to quarterly branch? Are they backported till the latest Q release and shipped immediately?
  - msbarnett 11y ago
    Did you upgrade from a previous release? It might not have changed your /etc/pkg/FreeBSD.conf. I'm basing this off a fresh install. And yes, my understanding is that the quarterly branch is supported for 3 months with backports of security fixes.

olavgg 11y ago

FreeBSD 10.2 do come with some ZFS fixes which could occur under high load.

asymmetric 11y ago

I'll state the obvious, but coming from Linux it's impressive and at the same time weird to look at a full OS's changelog.

mapleoin 11y ago
You'll have to explain. Linux distros have release notes, too: http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/22/html/Release_Notes/ http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/22/html/Release_N... https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/ReleaseNotes https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividVervet/ReleaseNotes or if you really meant Linux: http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges http://kernelnewbies.org/LinuxChanges

protomyth 11y ago

Did the upgrade, and it seemed to go ok, but now the pw command is really slow (around 1 minute to complete). This might be a bit of fun figuring out.