15 ms·

FreeBSD 12.0 is now available

327 points by tachion 8y ago

tachion 8y ago
Some of the highlights: * OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS). * Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been enabled by default. * OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1. * Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8). * Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to version 6.0.1. * The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been update to version 4.46. * The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation option. * The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default. * The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations. * The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a system panic. * The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements, drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster. * Various improvements to graphics support for current generation hardware. * Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default. * The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously. * The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support. * The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9). * The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation. * The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run withing a jail(8). * Various Lua loader(8) improvements. * KDE has been updated to version 5.12.5.
- amaccuish 8y ago
  The url that was posted shows that perfectly well.
- floatboth 8y ago
  And the biggest highlight that wasn't mentioned anywhere in the release notes for some reason… (drum roll) 64-bit inodes!!
  - rsync 8y ago
    I assume that is 64-bit inodes for UFS2 ? I would be concerned about the ability to fsck a UFS2 filesystem with enough inodes in it to require 64-bit inodes... As late as 2010/2011 fsck would fail to allocate enough memory to successfully repair a filesystem with <200M inodes ... I have it on good authority (the author of UFS) that there is no reason to use UFS instead of ZFS unless you are severely memory constrained. Perhaps I misunderstand the new feature you are highlighting ?
    - markjdb 8y ago
      No, various kernel entry points have been modified to be able to handle 64-bit inode numbers. UFS itself still uses 32-bit inode numbers.
    - loeg 8y ago
      > I assume that is 64-bit inodes for UFS2 ? No, it's a kernel ABI change such that all of the stat(2), getdirents(2), etc, ABIs take and pass a 64-bit value instead of a 32-bit one. This enables: (1) 64-bit NFS fileservers (2) Direct-pointer "inode" numbers for FUSE filesystems or cd9660/UDF (3) Probably other uses I'm forgetting Additionally, other ABI enhancements were committed as part of the ino64 work: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=318736 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=31873... In particular, I'd point you at d_namlen bumping to 16 bits, MNAMELEN to 1024 bytes (from the anemic 88), and nlink_t from 16 bits to 64 bits. None of these are necessarily used in any particular filesystem, yet, but the generic ABI support is now present. > there is no reason to use UFS instead of ZFS unless you are severely memory constrained. Eh, that's an oversimplification. Here a few reasons: (1) Addressing the "severely" in the above: ZFS memory usage is astronomical, and it is sort of designed to be a filer — it thinks all of the RAM is for its use. It eats all of memory for cache (which is fine, that's what any filesystem cache does) but is slow to release memory under pressure. Also, it requires significantly larger caches than most other filesystems to perform acceptably. (2) Database and similar workload performance — ZFS is a CoW filesystem. That has all of the same problems for databases and similar workloads as any other CoW filesystem. Namely, overwritten blocks will be reallocated to a completely different part of disk and you lose any physical contiguity you might have had. This matters on spinning media and is a factor in why ZFS requires large caches to perform acceptably. (3) Journaling. ZFS intent log essentially duplicates the number of bytes written to media. This definitely has benefits (powerfail consistency) but also is an obvious cost. (Also, that same UFS author continues to work on adding UFS features, because Netflix pays him to. Netflix isn't a charity; they've pretty clearly determined that UFS provides better value to them than ZFS. And they have a phenomenal engineering organization, so I'd tend to trust them on that. YMMV, of course; unless you run a CDN, your workload likely isn't anything like Netflix's.)
- loeg 8y ago
  You've just copy-pasted the first page of the linked article.
polskibus 8y ago
please delete this comment, I was commenting on the wrong thread!
- saagarjha 8y ago
  I think you're commenting on the wrong article.
- ComputerGuru 8y ago
  This article is about FreeBSD, not Firefox.
2trill2spill 8y ago
Sweet, I've been waiting for VIAMGE to be default for awhile. VIMAGE was the main reason I custom compiled FreeBSD for the last few years.
- whalesalad 8y ago
  Does this finally make jails on-par with containers as far as full isolation (with this adding the network element) ? I'm a BSD noob.
  - 2trill2spill 8y ago
    Jails are containers and provide more isolation then Linux containers.
jlg23 8y ago
As a long term FreeBSD user who was bitten by recent (8 up to 11) source update issues I would have loved a disclaimer upfront: "we broke it again" or "we finally got back to normal"....
- siffland 8y ago
  Support for FreeBSD 8 ended sometime in 2015, FreeBSD 11 did not come out until mid 2016 and if it was a recent update i can see why the huge jump could cause update issues. The answer to what caused your issue was most likely in the UPDATING file in the source directory. I have been using FreeBSD since 3.x in 1999 and have only been bitten by source updates when I failed to follow procedure and read the UPDATING file. Anyway source update from 11.2 to 12 worked for me fine.
- jandrese 8y ago
  Going from 8 to 11 you would probably be best off by backing up your data (do this anyway) and making a fresh 11 install. Reinstalling apps is super easy with pkg. I've never seen an OS updater that is happy to jump 3 major versions at once, especially since the old one has fallen off of even legacy support.
  - jlg23 8y ago
    I am not talking about 8 to 11 in one go. With 8.x I experienced the first literally broken source update and a few came after that. I've switched from Linux to FreeBSD in 1999 because I was fed up with chunky/broken binary updates. One used to be able to compile 3 versions ahead on a running system and boot into a working, clean setup. I am lazy, of course I tried (and succeeded most of the time). But since 8 even the standard practice of migrating one major version at a time as well as updates from latest n.x to m.0 was broken for people who did not drink the "pkg and freebsd-update!" kool-aid. My allergies to that are raid controllers not supported by GENERIC kernel and a general preference to include into software only what I need - make.conf makes that really easy and maintenance is a breeze simply because we're not hit by as many security issues.
- GalacticDomin8r 8y ago
livueta 8y ago
Neat! I haven't yet found the commit that did it, but it appears that dtrace's stop(), which was broken in 11.2-RELEASE, now doesn't cause kernel panics. Also interesting: > The dtrace(1) utility has been updated to support if and else statements. I believe that it's only a change in the front-end parser and that logic of this sort is still implemented via the old predicate/multiple clauses trick, but some syntactic sugar is still welcome.
- loeg 8y ago
  > I believe that it's only a change in the front-end parser and that logic of this sort is still implemented via the old predicate/multiple clauses trick, but some syntactic sugar is still welcome. Correct.
krylon 8y ago
Aawww, I just upgraded my home server from 11.1 to 11.2, now I have to do it again? Fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is a lot more convenient these days than it used to be.
- toast0 8y ago
  FreeBSD 11.2 continues to be a supported release. There's no need to upgrade at this point. Also, from experience, unsupported FreeBSD releases generally continue to work as well as they did while they were supported (which is to say, pretty well); they don't turn into a pumpkin when support stops.
  - krylon 8y ago
    I was half joking. When I first got to know FreeBSD, the way to upgrade was to rebuild from source and then perform all kind of magic incantations to merge the new configuration files and whatnot. freebsd-update(8) has made this whole experience much more convenient. I consider myself a competent Unix user, but I am glad these days I do not need to be a wizard to keep things working. I guess I will upgrade my trusty home server over the holidays, and I am looking forward to it. ;-)
    - krylon 8y ago
      FWIW, I just upgraded my VPS today, using freebsd-update(8), worked like a charm.
  - jandrese 8y ago
    The problem is when the packages disappear from the mirrors. Even if you're ok with running older and possibly insecure packages, it makes it more difficult to update. Best to just keep with the supported versions and avoid the headaches.
- njt 8y ago
  > I just upgraded my home server from 11.1 to 11.2, now I have to do it again? You don't have to do anything. As with other software, FreeBSD supports multiple releases. 11.2 is still a supported version, and 11.x will be supported until the year 2021. See this page for more info: https://www.freebsd.org/security/ https://www.freebsd.org/security/ > Fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is a lot more convenient these days than it used to be. Agreed. freebsd-update has made life so much easier.
ChuckMcM 8y ago
I have been trying out FreeBSD 12 as a desktop using the "TrueOS" distribution[1], as a UNIX user it has been very refreshing. I did this because the Ubuntu 18.04 experience felt to me strongly that the Linux community was focused on turning the desktop into a Windows clone. [1] https://www.trueos.org/ https://www.trueos.org/
- mixmastamyk 8y ago
  You don't say exactly why a clone is bad, but I enjoy the BSDs as well as Ubuntu Mate.
- iagovar 8y ago
  Does BSD have a packet system like APT? How about troubleshooting? I guess there is way less info out there than in Linux.
  - kryptiskt 8y ago
    FreeBSD has the pkg package manager. There is also a ports system if you want to build from source. There's no shortage of info or places to seek help about BSDs on the net, FreeBSD has an active forum at https://forums.freebsd.org https://forums.freebsd.org
    - trasz 8y ago
      Note that those two are not really disjoint - packages are built from ports; ports are a bit like source packages in the Linux world.
      - floatboth 8y ago
        deb/rpm source packages are a bit weird. AUR and Gentoo Portage are very closely inspired by Ports though.
  - zozbot123 8y ago
    The only resource you need is here: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ This is the first and only resource you have to hit when the question is: "how do I do that in FreeBSD?" Section 4. answers your second question. There is no less information about BSD than "Linux", it is simply that BSD has no advertisement or companies behind pushing it...
ggm 8y ago
No BBR yet.
- notaplumber 8y ago
  Can you explain what BBR is? Thank you.
  - loeg 8y ago
    TCP congestion control algorithm: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cardwell-iccrg-bbr-congestion-control-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cardwell-iccrg-bbr-congest...
  - ggm 8y ago
    Sorry, good point. its a modification to how TCP backs off under loss, and then re-approaches the prior rate. Traditional TCP does an exponential back-off and recovery model. This takes a long time to get back to the fastest achieved rate. Its a very jaggy sawtooth. BBR gets back to the prior rate faster. BBR is a very fast recovery algorithm. Its not always very "fair" to other forms of TCP. BSD and Linux both have kernels which allow selection of different methods of backoff. BSD has cubic, and some other choices, at this point only Linux appears to have the BBR method integrated. It is in test in the BSD stack (I believe) If you have sole use of a host, and want to do long-distance file transfer, with loss, BBR can sometimes get you things faster. If you're in a Data Center (DC) BBR can cope really well with dumb switch packetloss, getting you significantly faster recovery.
- kev009 8y ago
  If you need it and have the ability to maintain your own tree shoot me a note and I will put you in contact with the right folks. Not ready for unrestricted use but it is usable and in wide use. The RACK stack is in 12.0 and provides many wanted benefits outside of BBR's proficiency against channel loss. I can blog or something about how to build and use it if interested.
  - ggm 8y ago
    "need" is moot. I want it, but in general release. I don't want to have to maintain kernel independently unless I get a strong signal of other benefit (eg better ZFS/Memory tuning) I run a clutch of Dells, on FB and they're moving to Debian for other reasons, where I get BBR. I would have fought harder to retain them on BSD if we'd had signs the network stack was getting the same amount of attention. When VJ moved to coding against Linux instead of BSD, I think the writing was on the wall. When Grenvilles team in Melbourne disintegrated, and that source of TCP energy dissipated, the writing pushed the wall over. (I think they moved to netflix)
UI_at_80x24 8y ago
I've had the chance to meet several of the developers at the BSDCan conferences; kudos people, you really deserve it. I moved to BSD world when Debian adopted SystemD and I am happy that I did. It is often said that Linux is more stable then Windows, well BSD could be considered like Granite compared to Linux. I really love it. OpenBSD for the edge, and FreeBSD for internals and workstations. The driver updates are very welcome too, getting my video card to work 4k@60Hz was a bit of a task finding the correct driver, but I see this update addresses that too. Once again, thank-you to everybody who contributes.
- _rs 8y ago
  As someone who hasn't used BSD, but is considering it for a small server (not mission critical, so OK for me to be learning with), could you expand on the major differences to you between OpenBSD and FreeBSD (vs possibly other options)? When you say you like OpenBSD "for the edge", do you mean cutting-edge, or edge network equipment? Thanks!
  - wonks 8y ago
    Well, they contracted "edge" with "internal", so I think they mean network edge?
  - akerro 8y ago
    NetBSD is for network edge.
    - pbalau 8y ago
      and your toaster
  - thijsvandien 8y ago
    OpenBSD is more conservative and security-minded, so I'd say network edge. Interestingly though, its laptop hardware support has historically been better.
    - 8y ago
eindiran 8y ago
I was considering setting up a new desktop machine with either OpenBSD or DesktopBSD (which is based on FreeBSD). Does anyone have any recommendations on which to choose? Any interesting experiences using BSD as a daily driver?
- howard941 8y ago
  Speaking for FreeBSD as my desktop, no, no interesting experiences to report. I ran my law office for almost 10 years on FreeBSD straying only to Windows to run accounting software. Please consider the lack of interesting experiences a positive from someone who views an interesting tool as a thing to study but probably not something to rely on day in day out.
- akerro 8y ago
  Use TrueOS https://www.trueos.org/downloads/ https://www.trueos.org/downloads/ It's FreeBSD based and has a company behind it.
- tpfour 8y ago
  OpenBSD if you don't mind the performance hit. It does feel a little bit slower when browsing the web for example. I don't mind. The installation is very quick and then it just work on my t470. Documentation is excellent. Try it.
  - bubblethink 8y ago
    I found OpenBSD in my brief stint to be too useless as a desktop. The installer is quite hostile and stupid (and I don't mean advanced or unix-like before someone tries to defend it; it's actually hostile and retarded. It wiped my gpt table without asking me). The performance was terrible out of the box. It couldn't saturate a standard gigabit Ethernet link on my w530 in iperf, scp etc. pkg management was really slow. pkg_add takes ages like a windows 95 machine. And it doesn't have a standard package update mechanism without relying on a third party like mtier. All in all, the impression I got from using OpenBSD was that it's best used either as an ingredient like OpenSSH in other better operating systems, or maybe for some other specific use cases where these flaws can be overlooked.
j0e1 8y ago
I setup my (decade) old laptop as a server running on FreeBSD. And the elaborate documentation is a real lifesaver, especially as someone who is new to the ecosystem. Even, for the obscure hardware specific setup (yea, looking at you sony vaio), I could find relevant information on their forum which interestingly had relevant information from ages ago. Really great job guys and thank you! Can't wait to upgrade!
- akavel 8y ago
  Could you share what you found, by any chance? I've been having some trouble configuring GRUB for Linux on an old VAIO with UEFI (kinda works, but required weird workarounds and seems still flaky); I'm really interested in any success stories with booting OSes on their hardware.
adetrest 8y ago
The only thing keeping me away from using BSD is the WiFi support. If it started supporting 802.11ac, I'd switch in a heartbeat.
- 2trill2spill 8y ago
  Yea kinda a bummer that I had to buy a USB dongle for a brand new XPS-13 I wanted to install FreeBSD on. I knew I had to, and considering the rest of the hardware was supported I considered it a fair trade off, because I really wanted a FreeBSD dev laptop. I would like to help with the lack of wifi drivers situation, I'm solid programing in C, but writing network drivers seems intimidating.
  - tachion 8y ago
    Then check out the relevant mailing lists and/or join the IRC channels; there are developers out there focusing solely on WiFi drivers for FreeBSD and they’ll welcome your effort with open arms if you’re willing to learn the ropes. :)
  - qyz721 8y ago
    I got roped into writing network drivers for a research project back in undergrad. The actual work to be done was fairly straightforward; the difficulty was collecting all the different undocumented hardware APIs and figuring out how to use them. :P
    - chilledheart 8y ago
      Then it might be even harder to do it right in Linux than FreeBSD. It is because Linux's ABIs change so frequently that you have to stick to some distributions to follow even if you want broader support :-)
2trill2spill 8y ago
The biggest thing I'm waiting for with FreeBSD is the TLS sendfile work that Netflix has done. They have said a few times they are open to open sourcing it, but the code needs to be cleaned up. Also I'm interested in whats been going on with concurrencykit[1]? I saw it got imported into the kernel a couple years ago[2]. What's the progress on incorporating concurrencykit? [1]: http://concurrencykit.org/ http://concurrencykit.org/ [2]: https://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/src/309260 https://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/src/309260
- loeg 8y ago
  Netflix's TLS sendfile probably won't ever be imported. It isn't full TLS, just single-key output. It works for Netflix because they control the client software and if the client requests a re-key or other session change, they can just drop the connection and let the client reconnect. It isn't really obvious how it would be cleaned up to be general enough to import, and it would be a ton of work with little payoff. ConcurrencyKit is imported and used for efficient read-mostly datastructures in FreeBSD 12, mostly in networking applications such as IP routing and link-level address caching (i.e., ARP in IPv4 Ethernet). It's also used in network interface drivers, HWPMC, TCP, and the linuxkpi emulation layer (to emulate RCU). You might be interested in this blog post: http://scalebsd.org/blog/2018/06/16/UDP-and-epoch-for-liveness-guarantees http://scalebsd.org/blog/2018/06/16/UDP-and-epoch-for-livene... and https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html .
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - toast0 8y ago
    I don't think it would be desirable for the kernel to handle rekeying, the socket should get sent back to userspace for that. That would probably require some wrangling, and it's certainly easier to do it in a good enough fashion rather than try to clean it up and get it upstreamed, but it's not impossible. I'm certainly guilty of not getting enough energy around upstreaming patches too, though.
toddnni 8y ago
"pNFS server support" Very welcome suprise! I was excited about pNFS four years ago, but couldn't find any open source system to play with. Finally it is time for some mirrored pNFS testing.
favadi 8y ago
Any practical advantage of using *BSD on workstation over Linux at this moment? I heard that most of BSD developers use macOS, so the hardware compatibility is terrible.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  Better zfs support out of the box would be big one for freebsd
- umanwizard 8y ago
  If 1) Your workstation is a desktop as opposed to a laptop, 2) You have an NVidia graphics card (or use your motherboard default graphics card), and 3) You do not need CUDA then FreeBSD is pretty likely to work out of the box with your hardware. The biggest practical advantage for me is that the source code to the entire OS is installed in /usr/src and is very easy to read, modify, learn from, and build/install. So if you need to know how some obscure OS tool works, instead of browsing weird forums all day you can just read the source.
- alxlaz 8y ago
  The hardware support isn't all that bad, but FreeBSD is indeed pickier than Linux or Windows :-). Reasons why I like it include excellent documentation (light years ahead of anything in Linux land), ports & friends (things like Poudriere), and ZFS. I also like Capsicum but I don't use it much. If that's relevant to you, it also doesn't use systemd (I don't mind it because I learned how to use it properly, but I'd certainly love a break from troubleshooting it...)
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
  BSDs have significantly better documentation and are far more consistent because the base system is developed with the kernel as part of a complete whole. Administering FreeBSD is quite refreshing by comparison to administering GNU/Linux.
msiyer 8y ago
My 10 year old Dell XPS M1330 with Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 and 4 GB RAM with original HDD still running strong, had 11.2 installed on it. I just finished updating it to 12.0 release without any issues. I have only good things to say. I use Xfce. The filesystem is ZFS. A while back, I took a snapshot of /root and installed Gnome 3. It was too big for my laptop. I rolled back. The snapshot and rollback were amazingly fast. I find FreeBSD more cohesive. I have not tried it on modern devices, but my experience with it on my decade old laptop and VMs is extremely positive. A similar cohesiveness is achieved only when I handcraft my Arch. Maybe, it is just the feeling.
kieranph 8y ago
I was so close (about a nanometer!) to adopting FreeBSD as my desktop OS due to it's plethora of software, amazing package management, great usage of RAM, and roots in true Unix, but one sad day, I installed WINE. It was working with all the applications I expected it to, except for one... Steam. The WINE version was too old. I tried and tried again, even compiling it straight from the staging git branch, but it didn't compile. Alas, FreeBSD is my server OS. It keeps my at least a bit sane knowing I have FreeBSD somewhere in my home.

327 points by tachion 8y ago

Some of the highlights: * OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS). * Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been enabled by default. * OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1. * Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8). * Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to version 6.0.1. * The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been update to version 4.46. * The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation option. * The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default. * The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations. * The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a system panic. * The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements, drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster. * Various improvements to graphics support for current generation hardware. * Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default. * The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously. * The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support. * The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9). * The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation. * The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run withing a jail(8). * Various Lua loader(8) improvements. * KDE has been updated to version 5.12.5.

amaccuish 8y ago
The url that was posted shows that perfectly well.
floatboth 8y ago
And the biggest highlight that wasn't mentioned anywhere in the release notes for some reason… (drum roll) 64-bit inodes!!
- rsync 8y ago
  I assume that is 64-bit inodes for UFS2 ? I would be concerned about the ability to fsck a UFS2 filesystem with enough inodes in it to require 64-bit inodes... As late as 2010/2011 fsck would fail to allocate enough memory to successfully repair a filesystem with <200M inodes ... I have it on good authority (the author of UFS) that there is no reason to use UFS instead of ZFS unless you are severely memory constrained. Perhaps I misunderstand the new feature you are highlighting ?
  - markjdb 8y ago
    No, various kernel entry points have been modified to be able to handle 64-bit inode numbers. UFS itself still uses 32-bit inode numbers.
  - loeg 8y ago
    > I assume that is 64-bit inodes for UFS2 ? No, it's a kernel ABI change such that all of the stat(2), getdirents(2), etc, ABIs take and pass a 64-bit value instead of a 32-bit one. This enables: (1) 64-bit NFS fileservers (2) Direct-pointer "inode" numbers for FUSE filesystems or cd9660/UDF (3) Probably other uses I'm forgetting Additionally, other ABI enhancements were committed as part of the ino64 work: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=318736 https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=31873... In particular, I'd point you at d_namlen bumping to 16 bits, MNAMELEN to 1024 bytes (from the anemic 88), and nlink_t from 16 bits to 64 bits. None of these are necessarily used in any particular filesystem, yet, but the generic ABI support is now present. > there is no reason to use UFS instead of ZFS unless you are severely memory constrained. Eh, that's an oversimplification. Here a few reasons: (1) Addressing the "severely" in the above: ZFS memory usage is astronomical, and it is sort of designed to be a filer — it thinks all of the RAM is for its use. It eats all of memory for cache (which is fine, that's what any filesystem cache does) but is slow to release memory under pressure. Also, it requires significantly larger caches than most other filesystems to perform acceptably. (2) Database and similar workload performance — ZFS is a CoW filesystem. That has all of the same problems for databases and similar workloads as any other CoW filesystem. Namely, overwritten blocks will be reallocated to a completely different part of disk and you lose any physical contiguity you might have had. This matters on spinning media and is a factor in why ZFS requires large caches to perform acceptably. (3) Journaling. ZFS intent log essentially duplicates the number of bytes written to media. This definitely has benefits (powerfail consistency) but also is an obvious cost. (Also, that same UFS author continues to work on adding UFS features, because Netflix pays him to. Netflix isn't a charity; they've pretty clearly determined that UFS provides better value to them than ZFS. And they have a phenomenal engineering organization, so I'd tend to trust them on that. YMMV, of course; unless you run a CDN, your workload likely isn't anything like Netflix's.)
loeg 8y ago
You've just copy-pasted the first page of the linked article.

polskibus 8y ago

please delete this comment, I was commenting on the wrong thread!

saagarjha 8y ago
I think you're commenting on the wrong article.
ComputerGuru 8y ago
This article is about FreeBSD, not Firefox.

2trill2spill 8y ago

Sweet, I've been waiting for VIAMGE to be default for awhile. VIMAGE was the main reason I custom compiled FreeBSD for the last few years.

whalesalad 8y ago
Does this finally make jails on-par with containers as far as full isolation (with this adding the network element) ? I'm a BSD noob.
- 2trill2spill 8y ago
  Jails are containers and provide more isolation then Linux containers.

jlg23 8y ago

As a long term FreeBSD user who was bitten by recent (8 up to 11) source update issues I would have loved a disclaimer upfront: "we broke it again" or "we finally got back to normal"....

siffland 8y ago
Support for FreeBSD 8 ended sometime in 2015, FreeBSD 11 did not come out until mid 2016 and if it was a recent update i can see why the huge jump could cause update issues. The answer to what caused your issue was most likely in the UPDATING file in the source directory. I have been using FreeBSD since 3.x in 1999 and have only been bitten by source updates when I failed to follow procedure and read the UPDATING file. Anyway source update from 11.2 to 12 worked for me fine.
jandrese 8y ago
Going from 8 to 11 you would probably be best off by backing up your data (do this anyway) and making a fresh 11 install. Reinstalling apps is super easy with pkg. I've never seen an OS updater that is happy to jump 3 major versions at once, especially since the old one has fallen off of even legacy support.
- jlg23 8y ago
  I am not talking about 8 to 11 in one go. With 8.x I experienced the first literally broken source update and a few came after that. I've switched from Linux to FreeBSD in 1999 because I was fed up with chunky/broken binary updates. One used to be able to compile 3 versions ahead on a running system and boot into a working, clean setup. I am lazy, of course I tried (and succeeded most of the time). But since 8 even the standard practice of migrating one major version at a time as well as updates from latest n.x to m.0 was broken for people who did not drink the "pkg and freebsd-update!" kool-aid. My allergies to that are raid controllers not supported by GENERIC kernel and a general preference to include into software only what I need - make.conf makes that really easy and maintenance is a breeze simply because we're not hit by as many security issues.
GalacticDomin8r 8y ago

livueta 8y ago

Neat! I haven't yet found the commit that did it, but it appears that dtrace's stop(), which was broken in 11.2-RELEASE, now doesn't cause kernel panics. Also interesting: > The dtrace(1) utility has been updated to support if and else statements. I believe that it's only a change in the front-end parser and that logic of this sort is still implemented via the old predicate/multiple clauses trick, but some syntactic sugar is still welcome.

loeg 8y ago
> I believe that it's only a change in the front-end parser and that logic of this sort is still implemented via the old predicate/multiple clauses trick, but some syntactic sugar is still welcome. Correct.

krylon 8y ago

Aawww, I just upgraded my home server from 11.1 to 11.2, now I have to do it again? Fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is a lot more convenient these days than it used to be.

toast0 8y ago
FreeBSD 11.2 continues to be a supported release. There's no need to upgrade at this point. Also, from experience, unsupported FreeBSD releases generally continue to work as well as they did while they were supported (which is to say, pretty well); they don't turn into a pumpkin when support stops.
- krylon 8y ago
  I was half joking. When I first got to know FreeBSD, the way to upgrade was to rebuild from source and then perform all kind of magic incantations to merge the new configuration files and whatnot. freebsd-update(8) has made this whole experience much more convenient. I consider myself a competent Unix user, but I am glad these days I do not need to be a wizard to keep things working. I guess I will upgrade my trusty home server over the holidays, and I am looking forward to it. ;-)
  - krylon 8y ago
    FWIW, I just upgraded my VPS today, using freebsd-update(8), worked like a charm.
- jandrese 8y ago
  The problem is when the packages disappear from the mirrors. Even if you're ok with running older and possibly insecure packages, it makes it more difficult to update. Best to just keep with the supported versions and avoid the headaches.
njt 8y ago
> I just upgraded my home server from 11.1 to 11.2, now I have to do it again? You don't have to do anything. As with other software, FreeBSD supports multiple releases. 11.2 is still a supported version, and 11.x will be supported until the year 2021. See this page for more info: https://www.freebsd.org/security/ https://www.freebsd.org/security/ > Fortunately, upgrading FreeBSD is a lot more convenient these days than it used to be. Agreed. freebsd-update has made life so much easier.

ChuckMcM 8y ago

I have been trying out FreeBSD 12 as a desktop using the "TrueOS" distribution[1], as a UNIX user it has been very refreshing. I did this because the Ubuntu 18.04 experience felt to me strongly that the Linux community was focused on turning the desktop into a Windows clone. [1] https://www.trueos.org/ https://www.trueos.org/

mixmastamyk 8y ago
You don't say exactly why a clone is bad, but I enjoy the BSDs as well as Ubuntu Mate.
iagovar 8y ago
Does BSD have a packet system like APT? How about troubleshooting? I guess there is way less info out there than in Linux.
- kryptiskt 8y ago
  FreeBSD has the pkg package manager. There is also a ports system if you want to build from source. There's no shortage of info or places to seek help about BSDs on the net, FreeBSD has an active forum at https://forums.freebsd.org https://forums.freebsd.org
  - trasz 8y ago
    Note that those two are not really disjoint - packages are built from ports; ports are a bit like source packages in the Linux world.
    - floatboth 8y ago
      deb/rpm source packages are a bit weird. AUR and Gentoo Portage are very closely inspired by Ports though.
- zozbot123 8y ago
  The only resource you need is here: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ https://www.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/ This is the first and only resource you have to hit when the question is: "how do I do that in FreeBSD?" Section 4. answers your second question. There is no less information about BSD than "Linux", it is simply that BSD has no advertisement or companies behind pushing it...

ggm 8y ago

No BBR yet.

notaplumber 8y ago
Can you explain what BBR is? Thank you.
- loeg 8y ago
  TCP congestion control algorithm: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cardwell-iccrg-bbr-congestion-control-00 https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-cardwell-iccrg-bbr-congest...
- ggm 8y ago
  Sorry, good point. its a modification to how TCP backs off under loss, and then re-approaches the prior rate. Traditional TCP does an exponential back-off and recovery model. This takes a long time to get back to the fastest achieved rate. Its a very jaggy sawtooth. BBR gets back to the prior rate faster. BBR is a very fast recovery algorithm. Its not always very "fair" to other forms of TCP. BSD and Linux both have kernels which allow selection of different methods of backoff. BSD has cubic, and some other choices, at this point only Linux appears to have the BBR method integrated. It is in test in the BSD stack (I believe) If you have sole use of a host, and want to do long-distance file transfer, with loss, BBR can sometimes get you things faster. If you're in a Data Center (DC) BBR can cope really well with dumb switch packetloss, getting you significantly faster recovery.
kev009 8y ago
If you need it and have the ability to maintain your own tree shoot me a note and I will put you in contact with the right folks. Not ready for unrestricted use but it is usable and in wide use. The RACK stack is in 12.0 and provides many wanted benefits outside of BBR's proficiency against channel loss. I can blog or something about how to build and use it if interested.
- ggm 8y ago
  "need" is moot. I want it, but in general release. I don't want to have to maintain kernel independently unless I get a strong signal of other benefit (eg better ZFS/Memory tuning) I run a clutch of Dells, on FB and they're moving to Debian for other reasons, where I get BBR. I would have fought harder to retain them on BSD if we'd had signs the network stack was getting the same amount of attention. When VJ moved to coding against Linux instead of BSD, I think the writing was on the wall. When Grenvilles team in Melbourne disintegrated, and that source of TCP energy dissipated, the writing pushed the wall over. (I think they moved to netflix)

UI_at_80x24 8y ago

I've had the chance to meet several of the developers at the BSDCan conferences; kudos people, you really deserve it. I moved to BSD world when Debian adopted SystemD and I am happy that I did. It is often said that Linux is more stable then Windows, well BSD could be considered like Granite compared to Linux. I really love it. OpenBSD for the edge, and FreeBSD for internals and workstations. The driver updates are very welcome too, getting my video card to work 4k@60Hz was a bit of a task finding the correct driver, but I see this update addresses that too. Once again, thank-you to everybody who contributes.

_rs 8y ago
As someone who hasn't used BSD, but is considering it for a small server (not mission critical, so OK for me to be learning with), could you expand on the major differences to you between OpenBSD and FreeBSD (vs possibly other options)? When you say you like OpenBSD "for the edge", do you mean cutting-edge, or edge network equipment? Thanks!
- wonks 8y ago
  Well, they contracted "edge" with "internal", so I think they mean network edge?
- akerro 8y ago
  NetBSD is for network edge.
  - pbalau 8y ago
    and your toaster
- thijsvandien 8y ago
  OpenBSD is more conservative and security-minded, so I'd say network edge. Interestingly though, its laptop hardware support has historically been better.
  - 8y ago

eindiran 8y ago

I was considering setting up a new desktop machine with either OpenBSD or DesktopBSD (which is based on FreeBSD). Does anyone have any recommendations on which to choose? Any interesting experiences using BSD as a daily driver?

howard941 8y ago
Speaking for FreeBSD as my desktop, no, no interesting experiences to report. I ran my law office for almost 10 years on FreeBSD straying only to Windows to run accounting software. Please consider the lack of interesting experiences a positive from someone who views an interesting tool as a thing to study but probably not something to rely on day in day out.
akerro 8y ago
Use TrueOS https://www.trueos.org/downloads/ https://www.trueos.org/downloads/ It's FreeBSD based and has a company behind it.
tpfour 8y ago
OpenBSD if you don't mind the performance hit. It does feel a little bit slower when browsing the web for example. I don't mind. The installation is very quick and then it just work on my t470. Documentation is excellent. Try it.
- bubblethink 8y ago
  I found OpenBSD in my brief stint to be too useless as a desktop. The installer is quite hostile and stupid (and I don't mean advanced or unix-like before someone tries to defend it; it's actually hostile and retarded. It wiped my gpt table without asking me). The performance was terrible out of the box. It couldn't saturate a standard gigabit Ethernet link on my w530 in iperf, scp etc. pkg management was really slow. pkg_add takes ages like a windows 95 machine. And it doesn't have a standard package update mechanism without relying on a third party like mtier. All in all, the impression I got from using OpenBSD was that it's best used either as an ingredient like OpenSSH in other better operating systems, or maybe for some other specific use cases where these flaws can be overlooked.

j0e1 8y ago

I setup my (decade) old laptop as a server running on FreeBSD. And the elaborate documentation is a real lifesaver, especially as someone who is new to the ecosystem. Even, for the obscure hardware specific setup (yea, looking at you sony vaio), I could find relevant information on their forum which interestingly had relevant information from ages ago. Really great job guys and thank you! Can't wait to upgrade!

akavel 8y ago
Could you share what you found, by any chance? I've been having some trouble configuring GRUB for Linux on an old VAIO with UEFI (kinda works, but required weird workarounds and seems still flaky); I'm really interested in any success stories with booting OSes on their hardware.

adetrest 8y ago

The only thing keeping me away from using BSD is the WiFi support. If it started supporting 802.11ac, I'd switch in a heartbeat.

2trill2spill 8y ago
Yea kinda a bummer that I had to buy a USB dongle for a brand new XPS-13 I wanted to install FreeBSD on. I knew I had to, and considering the rest of the hardware was supported I considered it a fair trade off, because I really wanted a FreeBSD dev laptop. I would like to help with the lack of wifi drivers situation, I'm solid programing in C, but writing network drivers seems intimidating.
- tachion 8y ago
  Then check out the relevant mailing lists and/or join the IRC channels; there are developers out there focusing solely on WiFi drivers for FreeBSD and they’ll welcome your effort with open arms if you’re willing to learn the ropes. :)
- qyz721 8y ago
  I got roped into writing network drivers for a research project back in undergrad. The actual work to be done was fairly straightforward; the difficulty was collecting all the different undocumented hardware APIs and figuring out how to use them. :P
  - chilledheart 8y ago
    Then it might be even harder to do it right in Linux than FreeBSD. It is because Linux's ABIs change so frequently that you have to stick to some distributions to follow even if you want broader support :-)

2trill2spill 8y ago

The biggest thing I'm waiting for with FreeBSD is the TLS sendfile work that Netflix has done. They have said a few times they are open to open sourcing it, but the code needs to be cleaned up. Also I'm interested in whats been going on with concurrencykit[1]? I saw it got imported into the kernel a couple years ago[2]. What's the progress on incorporating concurrencykit? [1]: http://concurrencykit.org/ http://concurrencykit.org/ [2]: https://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/src/309260 https://www.freshbsd.org/commit/freebsd/src/309260

loeg 8y ago
Netflix's TLS sendfile probably won't ever be imported. It isn't full TLS, just single-key output. It works for Netflix because they control the client software and if the client requests a re-key or other session change, they can just drop the connection and let the client reconnect. It isn't really obvious how it would be cleaned up to be general enough to import, and it would be a ton of work with little payoff. ConcurrencyKit is imported and used for efficient read-mostly datastructures in FreeBSD 12, mostly in networking applications such as IP routing and link-level address caching (i.e., ARP in IPv4 Ethernet). It's also used in network interface drivers, HWPMC, TCP, and the linuxkpi emulation layer (to emulate RCU). You might be interested in this blog post: http://scalebsd.org/blog/2018/06/16/UDP-and-epoch-for-liveness-guarantees http://scalebsd.org/blog/2018/06/16/UDP-and-epoch-for-livene... and https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.0R/relnotes.html .
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- toast0 8y ago
  I don't think it would be desirable for the kernel to handle rekeying, the socket should get sent back to userspace for that. That would probably require some wrangling, and it's certainly easier to do it in a good enough fashion rather than try to clean it up and get it upstreamed, but it's not impossible. I'm certainly guilty of not getting enough energy around upstreaming patches too, though.

toddnni 8y ago

"pNFS server support" Very welcome suprise! I was excited about pNFS four years ago, but couldn't find any open source system to play with. Finally it is time for some mirrored pNFS testing.

favadi 8y ago

Any practical advantage of using *BSD on workstation over Linux at this moment? I heard that most of BSD developers use macOS, so the hardware compatibility is terrible.

bubblethink 8y ago
Better zfs support out of the box would be big one for freebsd
umanwizard 8y ago
If 1) Your workstation is a desktop as opposed to a laptop, 2) You have an NVidia graphics card (or use your motherboard default graphics card), and 3) You do not need CUDA then FreeBSD is pretty likely to work out of the box with your hardware. The biggest practical advantage for me is that the source code to the entire OS is installed in /usr/src and is very easy to read, modify, learn from, and build/install. So if you need to know how some obscure OS tool works, instead of browsing weird forums all day you can just read the source.
alxlaz 8y ago
The hardware support isn't all that bad, but FreeBSD is indeed pickier than Linux or Windows :-). Reasons why I like it include excellent documentation (light years ahead of anything in Linux land), ports & friends (things like Poudriere), and ZFS. I also like Capsicum but I don't use it much. If that's relevant to you, it also doesn't use systemd (I don't mind it because I learned how to use it properly, but I'd certainly love a break from troubleshooting it...)
AnIdiotOnTheNet 8y ago
BSDs have significantly better documentation and are far more consistent because the base system is developed with the kernel as part of a complete whole. Administering FreeBSD is quite refreshing by comparison to administering GNU/Linux.

msiyer 8y ago

My 10 year old Dell XPS M1330 with Intel Core 2 Duo T8100 and 4 GB RAM with original HDD still running strong, had 11.2 installed on it. I just finished updating it to 12.0 release without any issues. I have only good things to say. I use Xfce. The filesystem is ZFS. A while back, I took a snapshot of /root and installed Gnome 3. It was too big for my laptop. I rolled back. The snapshot and rollback were amazingly fast. I find FreeBSD more cohesive. I have not tried it on modern devices, but my experience with it on my decade old laptop and VMs is extremely positive. A similar cohesiveness is achieved only when I handcraft my Arch. Maybe, it is just the feeling.

kieranph 8y ago

I was so close (about a nanometer!) to adopting FreeBSD as my desktop OS due to it's plethora of software, amazing package management, great usage of RAM, and roots in true Unix, but one sad day, I installed WINE. It was working with all the applications I expected it to, except for one... Steam. The WINE version was too old. I tried and tried again, even compiling it straight from the staging git branch, but it didn't compile. Alas, FreeBSD is my server OS. It keeps my at least a bit sane knowing I have FreeBSD somewhere in my home.