5 ms·

FreeBSD 11.0-RC1 Now Available

113 points by vasili111 10y ago

themartorana 10y ago
"The Release Engineering build tools have been updated to include support for producing virtual machine disk images for various cloud hosting providers. [r277458] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)" We're running FreeBSD in AWS rather successfully. 11 seems to add a few things that are aimed directly at first-class support for building and running VMs and AMIs. Good to know continued support is being focused in this direction.
- ereli1 10y ago
  what's the advantage for running FreeBSD over linux for your application?
  - themartorana 10y ago
    Mostly ease of use. It's a rock. I have a special place in my heart for BSD, but that aside, when the SystemD battles started and I was on Ubuntu, I was interested in using ZFS for a few things. So the choices were ZFS on Linux, or go back to BSD. After about an hour of playing around, I ended up back on FreeBSD. So, it's partly personal, as all things are. But it's mostly how easy it is to use, especially for someone that wouldn't describe themselves as a server admin of any special level of skill. There are a few core tenets of design in BSD/FreeBSD that are both beautiful and very easy to understand. So I can ignore the OS a lot of the time and just get to work on the app side.
    - atmosx 10y ago
      I use openRC with Gentoo and ZFS in my a file server. The simplicity is close to FreeBSD's rc system.
akerro 10y ago
Maybe someone will be interested, on 11.0 syncnthing doesn't crash system when quitting.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Christ. Multiple reports, none have been closed, no link to changesets. https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200846 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200846. Userspace should never be able to crash the kernel!
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    In case anyone cares, I have chased this up with very helpful people in #freebsd-bugs on Freenode. I am unable to reproduce this bug myself either on 10.2 or 10.3. Any more info would be appreciated.
kev009 10y ago
Matt Macy added support for current Intel and amdgpu graphics out of tree for now https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-next https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree.... It is up to Linux 4.7. The graphics stuff is MIT licensed and the linuxkpi is re-implemented so it will eventually trickle into 11.x or 12 and/or a loadable module packaged with FreeBSD Ports. Still lots of rough edges but it's pretty fun to watch and participate.
- cm3 10y ago
  Matt's github profile has a NextBSD repository, so is he related to Kip Macy in any way?
  - josh64 10y ago
    Rumour has it they are the same person.
- byuu 10y ago
  So then, there won't be Haswell graphics support out of the box on FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE? :(
  - cm3 10y ago
    That sounds right[1], but it's very possible that 11.1 will get it. [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11 https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11
  - notaplumber 10y ago
    Meanwhile OpenBSD has had Haswell support since 5.5, Broadwell/Bay Trail since 5.9. http://www.openbsd.org/55.html http://www.openbsd.org/55.html http://www.openbsd.org/59.html http://www.openbsd.org/59.html
    - byuu 10y ago
      That they do, and that's quite admirable (and important, since nVidia won't port their binary blob drivers; and nouveau doesn't run on OpenBSD either.) Out of the box ZFS boot is still more important to me than getting rid of my Radeon card, though.
kev009 10y ago
People try to keep the big ticket items in major releases on the wiki: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11 https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11 Async sendfile, TCP/IP improvements, RSS are things that stand out for my workload. bhyve with UEFI and graphics is probably pretty neat to many folks. VNET (jails closer to Solaris zones with their own network stack) is also closer to correct. There's a lot of groundwork that will make 11.1 exciting as a followup too (for new TCP stacks, memory management scalability)
corv 10y ago
Is VNET going to be in the kernel by default?
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Doesn't look like it - http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC?view=log http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC?v...
cfallin 10y ago
It's good to see the DRM (graphics) stuff more up-to-date in 11.0. FreeBSD is frustratingly close to natively-just-works on my 2014 Asus Haswell ultrabook (support for scrolling with the touchpad, of all things, is the main thing missing; also volume/screen hotkeys). I hope the laptop hardware support keeps improving! Anyway, I really appreciate the simplicity of rc.conf and the well-curated config/boot infrastructure in general; pkg(ng) just works; ZFS is insanely cool; LLVM-as-system-compiler is nice... I sometimes wonder where we'd be if the BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago.
- cm3 10y ago
  > BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago Linus said he wouldn't have written Linux if he had 386bsd at that time, which took longer. What that means is up for speculation, but Linux became wildly popular as a host for Apache and Samba before anything else. Similarly, if Oracle hadn't closed off Solaris, maybe FreeBSD wouldn't be the best compromise between hardware support and ZFS+DTrace availability. PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally available next year.
  - nisa 10y ago
    > PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally available next year. Do you have link for that? XFS supports metadata checksumming already and cp --reflink IIRC but I've never heard about data checksums and "real" COW e.g. snapshots?
    - cm3 10y ago
      http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1608.0/04662.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1608.0/04662.html
      - nisa 10y ago
        Great news! Thanks!
- 10y ago
Raizq 10y ago
Are the multiple root compromise exploits (that've been known since May) fixed yet in this RC? https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2016-July/009016.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2016-Ju...
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-16:25.bspatch.asc https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-16:25... for bspatch There was another announcement about pkg itself, but I can't find it. I believe it's being rewritten/modified to fix the issue.
old-gregg 10y ago
Quick question from a clueless Linux person: are codebases of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD diverging over time, or actively reusing each others code?
- empthought 10y ago
  They port code from one codebase to the other, and often it's the same dev doing the work for more than one OS, but there isn't any principled coordination of effort to keep a unitary codebase for anything.
  - crudbug 10y ago
    A unified package system for BSD family can reduce some friction.
    - empthought 10y ago
      Some, but things that would be package-compatible are likely to be source-compatible anyway and shared among Linux, BSD, and Illumos pretty well with existing mechanisms. It's the base operating system that is hit-and-miss with code sharing.
    - groovy2shoes 10y ago
      The three of them already use basically the same package system. The package management suite (pkg_add, pkg_info, etc.) and the ports collections all originated from work Jordan Hubbard did for FreeBSD in 1994. OpenBSD re-wrote all the tools, but they are functionally the same. NetBSD (pkgsrc, really) added a frontend (pkgin) to offer a more "modern", apt-like experience. FreeBSD added a similar frontend (pkg) in version 10. As far as I know, there is no binary compatibility between the three of them, so sharing package repositories would be a no-go, but if you know the tools on one system, that knowledge is transferable to the others, for the most part. If you want to use the same exact ports collection on each of them, NetBSD's pkgsrc is quite portable, and will work not only on the other BSDs, but on Linux, Mac OS X, Minix, Solaris, and a few others as well. I use pkgsrc to manage packages on my Mac Mini -- Joyent provides binaries for most things, and the other stuff is usually just a `bmake` away.
voltagex_ 10y ago
What would the risk be of taking my 10.3-RELEASE box (with VNET enabled kernel) and upgrading it to RC1?
geff82 10y ago
Quick note: Lenovo x240 and T440 Laptops can still be had new in some places and they can run FreeBSD 11 quite well.

113 points by vasili111 10y ago

"The Release Engineering build tools have been updated to include support for producing virtual machine disk images for various cloud hosting providers. [r277458] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)" We're running FreeBSD in AWS rather successfully. 11 seems to add a few things that are aimed directly at first-class support for building and running VMs and AMIs. Good to know continued support is being focused in this direction.

ereli1 10y ago
what's the advantage for running FreeBSD over linux for your application?
- themartorana 10y ago
  Mostly ease of use. It's a rock. I have a special place in my heart for BSD, but that aside, when the SystemD battles started and I was on Ubuntu, I was interested in using ZFS for a few things. So the choices were ZFS on Linux, or go back to BSD. After about an hour of playing around, I ended up back on FreeBSD. So, it's partly personal, as all things are. But it's mostly how easy it is to use, especially for someone that wouldn't describe themselves as a server admin of any special level of skill. There are a few core tenets of design in BSD/FreeBSD that are both beautiful and very easy to understand. So I can ignore the OS a lot of the time and just get to work on the app side.
  - atmosx 10y ago
    I use openRC with Gentoo and ZFS in my a file server. The simplicity is close to FreeBSD's rc system.

akerro 10y ago

Maybe someone will be interested, on 11.0 syncnthing doesn't crash system when quitting.

voltagex_ 10y ago
Christ. Multiple reports, none have been closed, no link to changesets. https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200846 https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200846. Userspace should never be able to crash the kernel!
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  In case anyone cares, I have chased this up with very helpful people in #freebsd-bugs on Freenode. I am unable to reproduce this bug myself either on 10.2 or 10.3. Any more info would be appreciated.

kev009 10y ago

Matt Macy added support for current Intel and amdgpu graphics out of tree for now https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree/drm-next https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/tree.... It is up to Linux 4.7. The graphics stuff is MIT licensed and the linuxkpi is re-implemented so it will eventually trickle into 11.x or 12 and/or a loadable module packaged with FreeBSD Ports. Still lots of rough edges but it's pretty fun to watch and participate.

cm3 10y ago
Matt's github profile has a NextBSD repository, so is he related to Kip Macy in any way?
- josh64 10y ago
  Rumour has it they are the same person.
byuu 10y ago
So then, there won't be Haswell graphics support out of the box on FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE? :(
- cm3 10y ago
  That sounds right[1], but it's very possible that 11.1 will get it. [1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11 https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11
- notaplumber 10y ago
  Meanwhile OpenBSD has had Haswell support since 5.5, Broadwell/Bay Trail since 5.9. http://www.openbsd.org/55.html http://www.openbsd.org/55.html http://www.openbsd.org/59.html http://www.openbsd.org/59.html
  - byuu 10y ago
    That they do, and that's quite admirable (and important, since nVidia won't port their binary blob drivers; and nouveau doesn't run on OpenBSD either.) Out of the box ZFS boot is still more important to me than getting rid of my Radeon card, though.

kev009 10y ago

People try to keep the big ticket items in major releases on the wiki: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11 https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11 Async sendfile, TCP/IP improvements, RSS are things that stand out for my workload. bhyve with UEFI and graphics is probably pretty neat to many folks. VNET (jails closer to Solaris zones with their own network stack) is also closer to correct. There's a lot of groundwork that will make 11.1 exciting as a followup too (for new TCP stacks, memory management scalability)

corv 10y ago

Is VNET going to be in the kernel by default?

voltagex_ 10y ago
Doesn't look like it - http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC?view=log http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC?v...

cfallin 10y ago

It's good to see the DRM (graphics) stuff more up-to-date in 11.0. FreeBSD is frustratingly close to natively-just-works on my 2014 Asus Haswell ultrabook (support for scrolling with the touchpad, of all things, is the main thing missing; also volume/screen hotkeys). I hope the laptop hardware support keeps improving! Anyway, I really appreciate the simplicity of rc.conf and the well-curated config/boot infrastructure in general; pkg(ng) just works; ZFS is insanely cool; LLVM-as-system-compiler is nice... I sometimes wonder where we'd be if the BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago.

cm3 10y ago
> BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago Linus said he wouldn't have written Linux if he had 386bsd at that time, which took longer. What that means is up for speculation, but Linux became wildly popular as a host for Apache and Samba before anything else. Similarly, if Oracle hadn't closed off Solaris, maybe FreeBSD wouldn't be the best compromise between hardware support and ZFS+DTrace availability. PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally available next year.
- nisa 10y ago
  > PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally available next year. Do you have link for that? XFS supports metadata checksumming already and cp --reflink IIRC but I've never heard about data checksums and "real" COW e.g. snapshots?
  - cm3 10y ago
    http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1608.0/04662.html http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1608.0/04662.html
    - nisa 10y ago
      Great news! Thanks!
10y ago

Raizq 10y ago

Are the multiple root compromise exploits (that've been known since May) fixed yet in this RC? https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2016-July/009016.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-security/2016-Ju...

voltagex_ 10y ago
https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-16:25.bspatch.asc https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-16:25... for bspatch There was another announcement about pkg itself, but I can't find it. I believe it's being rewritten/modified to fix the issue.

old-gregg 10y ago

Quick question from a clueless Linux person: are codebases of FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD diverging over time, or actively reusing each others code?

empthought 10y ago
They port code from one codebase to the other, and often it's the same dev doing the work for more than one OS, but there isn't any principled coordination of effort to keep a unitary codebase for anything.
- crudbug 10y ago
  A unified package system for BSD family can reduce some friction.
  - empthought 10y ago
    Some, but things that would be package-compatible are likely to be source-compatible anyway and shared among Linux, BSD, and Illumos pretty well with existing mechanisms. It's the base operating system that is hit-and-miss with code sharing.
  - groovy2shoes 10y ago
    The three of them already use basically the same package system. The package management suite (pkg_add, pkg_info, etc.) and the ports collections all originated from work Jordan Hubbard did for FreeBSD in 1994. OpenBSD re-wrote all the tools, but they are functionally the same. NetBSD (pkgsrc, really) added a frontend (pkgin) to offer a more "modern", apt-like experience. FreeBSD added a similar frontend (pkg) in version 10. As far as I know, there is no binary compatibility between the three of them, so sharing package repositories would be a no-go, but if you know the tools on one system, that knowledge is transferable to the others, for the most part. If you want to use the same exact ports collection on each of them, NetBSD's pkgsrc is quite portable, and will work not only on the other BSDs, but on Linux, Mac OS X, Minix, Solaris, and a few others as well. I use pkgsrc to manage packages on my Mac Mini -- Joyent provides binaries for most things, and the other stuff is usually just a `bmake` away.

voltagex_ 10y ago

What would the risk be of taking my 10.3-RELEASE box (with VNET enabled kernel) and upgrading it to RC1?

geff82 10y ago

Quick note: Lenovo x240 and T440 Laptops can still be had new in some places and they can run FreeBSD 11 quite well.