8 ms·

FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1

70 points by vermaden 6y ago

nimbius 6y ago
heres hoping we get ASLR in this release? :)
- nix23 6y ago
  Well they have ASR, if you want ASLR and much more you probably want to use https://hardenedbsd.org/content/easy-feature-comparison https://hardenedbsd.org/content/easy-feature-comparison
i_miss_unix 6y ago
Really looking forward to tinkering with this. Is it me, or does it seem that the BSDs are really losing more and more mind share as time marches on? I have very few issues with FreeBSD or OpenBSD beyond the occasional incompatibility, and it's always something minor like suspend or sound that can fixed with a few queries.
- nix23 6y ago
  >Is it me, or does it seem that the BSDs are really losing more and more mind share as time marches on Well BSD is dying was said already 15 years ago, BUT the project should be more responsive, an example: You send in a patch with a updated port, and you wait 3 month until it's in the tree, in the meantime already a new version is out. I think if the users make the work and send in patches (just with a changed version-number and zero or nearly zero dependencies) some porters @ freebsd should act much quicker (some are super fast and helpfull but not as many), otherwise they will change the os or make there own fork of the package tree like i do.
  - i_miss_unix 6y ago
    I do agree that the BSD ports maintainers are a fair bit slower than their Linux counterparts. Having said this, though, I do admire the way the port maintainers train up their replacements and/or add others with commit access. They mentor them. This does lead to higher code quality in the end. I fully agree with the notion that BSD is engineered whilst Linux is "grown". Good and bad to both approaches.
    - nix23 6y ago
      >I do admire the way the port maintainers train up their replacements and/or add others with commit access Yes absolutely, and it's no question that packaging is really hard work, i wanna thank everyone that works on my most beloved system, ESPECIALLY the packagers.
- remexre 6y ago
  I started using FreeBSD on a VPS a couple months ago, and I've moved my home router to be FreeBSD -- PF is /so much better/ than anything else wrt understandability, and putting miscellaneous services the router runs in jails is pretty nice, and feels simpler to set up "right" than the same with Docker (e.g. no messing around with Docker volumes, only to discover you've accidentally deleted years of family photos).
  - i_miss_unix 6y ago
    It's good stuff, but I would also suggest tinkering with OpenBSD and its offerings. A bit simpler, but still fun. It's all good stuff and fun to play with.
  - mceachen 6y ago
    > you've accidentally deleted years of family photos Oof, that hurts. I'm going to add a check right now to PhotoStructure to assert that people's library is not stored within the container to prevent this from happening to my users.
- Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
  It unfortunately does. And it's a vicious circle. Linux has the most mindshare, so most things are built for Linux and don't run (or don't run as well) on FreeBSD. As a result, more people use Linux resulting in increased mindshare, and the process repeats. It makes me sad because I really like FreeBSD.
- oscargrouch 6y ago
  I love FreeBSD much more than Linux, and i wish i could use it instead of Linux on my desktop/notebook machines. But the graphics have to play a catch up game with Linux, and in my experience a couple of drivers were missing or not working properly (like wireless stuff, acpi, etc..) The performance of the network stack is the best of any OS, and the interface with the OS in general is much more well designed than Linux, giving Linux is more of a Bazar effort with things stitched here and there to make some things works. It's sad that the amount of man-hours on Linux, make it almost unavoidable and i bet this will be more and more true with time even with Windows and OS X.
- chaosharmonic 6y ago
  As a Linux user, the existence of open-spec boards that I know are supported by it (and a variety of other OSes) actually puts the BSDs more on my radar than they would be otherwise.
codetrotter 6y ago
As someone who has been using FreeBSD for a long time on various machines of mine, both physical machines in my home and VMs in the cloud, I'm wondering how many people (both in absolute numbers and in percentages) run the beta releases on their hardware. My general impression, which stems mostly from the description I once read on the FreeBSD downloads page and from elsewhere is that if you want to help find bugs in upcoming releases you run the CURRENT branch and else you run RELEASE. But I expect that there are people running the beta releases as well who make meaningful bug reports that result in fixes prior to release versions being minted – otherwise I think they would not be making beta releases still. I did used to run CURRENT for a while, but eventually found out that personally I wasn't making any particularly helpful bug reports based on it anyways so I went back to RELEASE. For the VM server that I have been using for many years now for sending and receiving mail, as well as to host some websites of mine, running FreeBSD RELEASE has been working great for years. Meanwhile, my desktop computer which is currently running FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE is having issues where it freezes and requires a hard reboot. But I had this same kind of issue when I was running various Linux distros on this same desktop computer over the past years. I am suspecting that either it is a cause of hardware malfunction or possibly of the Nvidia driver for the graphics card, but I don't really have any way of finding out what the actual problem is. Not the least because of the fact that it will often run for a week of being powered on perfectly fine (both with FreeBSD and Linux distros) until suddenly it just completely freezes. Doesn't react to mouse, doesn't react to keyboard, doesn't respond to ping. The fact that my desktop computer can run fine for about a week at a time makes it hard to figure out what the actual problem is. Say that I were to pull the graphics card out for example, and it ran fine for two weeks. How do I know at that point that I can really blame the graphics card and it wasn't just random chance that made it run for longer than usual this time around? I think in order to isolate the problem I would have to build like 8 different physical machines all with the same hardware, and then say ok four of the machines I will initially run like I do with my current desktop, and four of them I will pull the graphics card out of and then have them running 24x7 for a month or until at least two of the machines with Nvidia graphics cards crashed if sooner. At that point I might conclusively say there is strong evidence of problems with the Nvidia graphics cards or with the drivers for said cards. But if the machines without the Nvidia graphics cards were also crashing then I'd need to swap out for example all of the motherboards and I'd run the experiment for another week. An so on. On the flip-side, if all of them ran fine for a month with the initial configuration I would conclude that probably some of the hardware in my current machine is just broken, and that there is no bigger issue at play. But all of that would cost not just a lot of time but also a lot of money. And as-is the next thing I can afford to buy is certainly not such an amount of hardware – the next thing I am going to buy when I can afford it is rather a couple of new hard-drives, as the spinning disks that hold most of my data are getting a few years old and I am getting quite nervous about them suddenly going to fail me. I've had hard-disks fail on me in the past. In particular I used to have a machine with 4x 2TB hard-drives in it to provide me with ZFS storage, and then I moved houses and I accidentally dropped my computer from about 1 meter height and last time I tried to see if the drives were working none of them showed up neither after boot nor in BIOS, neither in the original computer that I had dropped nor in the desktop computer that I have now. Well anyways it don't matter too much, none of the data was that important really. And I think said drives were making unusual noises also but I don't quite remember as it was a while ago now. But that kind of experience, along with having had some external hard-drives fail me in the past, does feed into the worry that I have for my current hard-drive as it is getting a few years old now. But back to what I was saying about trying to debug the issue with my desktop. In theory I could disconnect basically all but the RAM and the CPU from the motherboard (well, and but the fans of course :P) and boot a minimal kernel from a USB stick and have it run in RAM and let it stay powered on for four weeks and see if it crashed, and then if it doesn't to connect the SSD and the HDD to it and run it for another four weeks and see if it crashes, and then to run the regular RELEASE kernel on it for four weeks and see what happens, and after that with the graphics card connected and see what happens for the next four weeks. But all of those weeks man. I just want my desktop to work, I don't want to spend weeks with it running on its own without being available for my use. Anyways, that brings me to something else related to the testing that people do and that is the fact that I find it kind of hard to know what hardware to pick for a FreeBSD desktop. There's things like https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/hardware.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/hardware.html and https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics and https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix but they all seem kind of out of date. If I had the money to buy the hardware for it and to pay the electric bills for it I would gladly be running a bunch of machines in different configurations of current consumer hardware and making notes and filing bug reports and hardware compatibility reports to help other users of FreeBSD and Linux. Maybe someday. Until that day I'll just have to accept that every week or so I might have to hit that hard reset button on my desktop, inconvenient as it might be.
erk__ 6y ago
You can see the schedule for the release on this page: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/schedule.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/schedule.html
wazoox 6y ago
Does mount_smbfs support SMB2 at last?
- nix23 6y ago
  Yes with the latest Sambaserver you have everything Linux has.
Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
I really like FreeBSD, and I run it on my home server, but the whole update process really needs a lot of work. The process described in this announcement is accurate in my experience: Run freebsd-update twice, reboot, run freebsd-update again, reinstall or rebuild applications, reboot again, run freebsd-update yet again. The upgrade process works well, but it's much more manual than it is in the Linux world. When PkgBase[0] becomes a thing, I hope that the process will be closer to the Linux world. The other thing that hurts the upgrade process is the lack of packaged software. My big pain point is currently PostgreSQL 12+PostGIS 3.0. This combination in FreeBSD isn't a thing, the packaged/ported PostGIS 3.0[1] is for PostgreSQL 11. My solution has been to build PostgreSQL 12 from ports (because the packaged version doesn't include XML support, which I also want) then build PostGIS 3.0 from source, after installing all its dependencies from packages. I have to rebuild PostGIS after most FreeBSD upgrades since it links against now-changed libraries. If I were doing this in the OpenSuse world I would just use the Applications:Geo repository[2] and be able to install the right combination of software very easily. Because of these issues, I'm slowly moving towards using FreeBSD to host VMs running whatever OS/distribution is most appropriate for the job. Moving PostgreSQL off of FreeBSD will greatly simplify my upgrade process. [0] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase [1] https://www.freshports.org/databases/postgis30/ https://www.freshports.org/databases/postgis30/ [2] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/Application:Geo https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/Application:Geo
- nix23 6y ago
  Why do you not use poudriere? And build automatically everything from ports then install the build-ed packages on you machine's?
  - Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
    This is something I've been meaning to look into, but it still doesn't change the postgis30/postgresql11-server dependency in the current ports tree. I'm sure I could work around it, but then I start to ask myself whether I'd rather do FreeBSD software administration or create an OpenSuse VM, install the packaged software (which is already the right version and already has the right config options), and work on my GIS project.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

FreeBSD 12.2-BETA1

70 points by vermaden 6y ago

nimbius 6y ago

heres hoping we get ASLR in this release? :)

nix23 6y ago
Well they have ASR, if you want ASLR and much more you probably want to use https://hardenedbsd.org/content/easy-feature-comparison https://hardenedbsd.org/content/easy-feature-comparison

i_miss_unix 6y ago

Really looking forward to tinkering with this. Is it me, or does it seem that the BSDs are really losing more and more mind share as time marches on? I have very few issues with FreeBSD or OpenBSD beyond the occasional incompatibility, and it's always something minor like suspend or sound that can fixed with a few queries.

nix23 6y ago
>Is it me, or does it seem that the BSDs are really losing more and more mind share as time marches on Well BSD is dying was said already 15 years ago, BUT the project should be more responsive, an example: You send in a patch with a updated port, and you wait 3 month until it's in the tree, in the meantime already a new version is out. I think if the users make the work and send in patches (just with a changed version-number and zero or nearly zero dependencies) some porters @ freebsd should act much quicker (some are super fast and helpfull but not as many), otherwise they will change the os or make there own fork of the package tree like i do.
- i_miss_unix 6y ago
  I do agree that the BSD ports maintainers are a fair bit slower than their Linux counterparts. Having said this, though, I do admire the way the port maintainers train up their replacements and/or add others with commit access. They mentor them. This does lead to higher code quality in the end. I fully agree with the notion that BSD is engineered whilst Linux is "grown". Good and bad to both approaches.
  - nix23 6y ago
    >I do admire the way the port maintainers train up their replacements and/or add others with commit access Yes absolutely, and it's no question that packaging is really hard work, i wanna thank everyone that works on my most beloved system, ESPECIALLY the packagers.
remexre 6y ago
I started using FreeBSD on a VPS a couple months ago, and I've moved my home router to be FreeBSD -- PF is /so much better/ than anything else wrt understandability, and putting miscellaneous services the router runs in jails is pretty nice, and feels simpler to set up "right" than the same with Docker (e.g. no messing around with Docker volumes, only to discover you've accidentally deleted years of family photos).
- i_miss_unix 6y ago
  It's good stuff, but I would also suggest tinkering with OpenBSD and its offerings. A bit simpler, but still fun. It's all good stuff and fun to play with.
- mceachen 6y ago
  > you've accidentally deleted years of family photos Oof, that hurts. I'm going to add a check right now to PhotoStructure to assert that people's library is not stored within the container to prevent this from happening to my users.
Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
It unfortunately does. And it's a vicious circle. Linux has the most mindshare, so most things are built for Linux and don't run (or don't run as well) on FreeBSD. As a result, more people use Linux resulting in increased mindshare, and the process repeats. It makes me sad because I really like FreeBSD.
oscargrouch 6y ago
I love FreeBSD much more than Linux, and i wish i could use it instead of Linux on my desktop/notebook machines. But the graphics have to play a catch up game with Linux, and in my experience a couple of drivers were missing or not working properly (like wireless stuff, acpi, etc..) The performance of the network stack is the best of any OS, and the interface with the OS in general is much more well designed than Linux, giving Linux is more of a Bazar effort with things stitched here and there to make some things works. It's sad that the amount of man-hours on Linux, make it almost unavoidable and i bet this will be more and more true with time even with Windows and OS X.
chaosharmonic 6y ago
As a Linux user, the existence of open-spec boards that I know are supported by it (and a variety of other OSes) actually puts the BSDs more on my radar than they would be otherwise.

codetrotter 6y ago

As someone who has been using FreeBSD for a long time on various machines of mine, both physical machines in my home and VMs in the cloud, I'm wondering how many people (both in absolute numbers and in percentages) run the beta releases on their hardware. My general impression, which stems mostly from the description I once read on the FreeBSD downloads page and from elsewhere is that if you want to help find bugs in upcoming releases you run the CURRENT branch and else you run RELEASE. But I expect that there are people running the beta releases as well who make meaningful bug reports that result in fixes prior to release versions being minted – otherwise I think they would not be making beta releases still. I did used to run CURRENT for a while, but eventually found out that personally I wasn't making any particularly helpful bug reports based on it anyways so I went back to RELEASE. For the VM server that I have been using for many years now for sending and receiving mail, as well as to host some websites of mine, running FreeBSD RELEASE has been working great for years. Meanwhile, my desktop computer which is currently running FreeBSD 12.1-RELEASE is having issues where it freezes and requires a hard reboot. But I had this same kind of issue when I was running various Linux distros on this same desktop computer over the past years. I am suspecting that either it is a cause of hardware malfunction or possibly of the Nvidia driver for the graphics card, but I don't really have any way of finding out what the actual problem is. Not the least because of the fact that it will often run for a week of being powered on perfectly fine (both with FreeBSD and Linux distros) until suddenly it just completely freezes. Doesn't react to mouse, doesn't react to keyboard, doesn't respond to ping. The fact that my desktop computer can run fine for about a week at a time makes it hard to figure out what the actual problem is. Say that I were to pull the graphics card out for example, and it ran fine for two weeks. How do I know at that point that I can really blame the graphics card and it wasn't just random chance that made it run for longer than usual this time around? I think in order to isolate the problem I would have to build like 8 different physical machines all with the same hardware, and then say ok four of the machines I will initially run like I do with my current desktop, and four of them I will pull the graphics card out of and then have them running 24x7 for a month or until at least two of the machines with Nvidia graphics cards crashed if sooner. At that point I might conclusively say there is strong evidence of problems with the Nvidia graphics cards or with the drivers for said cards. But if the machines without the Nvidia graphics cards were also crashing then I'd need to swap out for example all of the motherboards and I'd run the experiment for another week. An so on. On the flip-side, if all of them ran fine for a month with the initial configuration I would conclude that probably some of the hardware in my current machine is just broken, and that there is no bigger issue at play. But all of that would cost not just a lot of time but also a lot of money. And as-is the next thing I can afford to buy is certainly not such an amount of hardware – the next thing I am going to buy when I can afford it is rather a couple of new hard-drives, as the spinning disks that hold most of my data are getting a few years old and I am getting quite nervous about them suddenly going to fail me. I've had hard-disks fail on me in the past. In particular I used to have a machine with 4x 2TB hard-drives in it to provide me with ZFS storage, and then I moved houses and I accidentally dropped my computer from about 1 meter height and last time I tried to see if the drives were working none of them showed up neither after boot nor in BIOS, neither in the original computer that I had dropped nor in the desktop computer that I have now. Well anyways it don't matter too much, none of the data was that important really. And I think said drives were making unusual noises also but I don't quite remember as it was a while ago now. But that kind of experience, along with having had some external hard-drives fail me in the past, does feed into the worry that I have for my current hard-drive as it is getting a few years old now. But back to what I was saying about trying to debug the issue with my desktop. In theory I could disconnect basically all but the RAM and the CPU from the motherboard (well, and but the fans of course :P) and boot a minimal kernel from a USB stick and have it run in RAM and let it stay powered on for four weeks and see if it crashed, and then if it doesn't to connect the SSD and the HDD to it and run it for another four weeks and see if it crashes, and then to run the regular RELEASE kernel on it for four weeks and see what happens, and after that with the graphics card connected and see what happens for the next four weeks. But all of those weeks man. I just want my desktop to work, I don't want to spend weeks with it running on its own without being available for my use. Anyways, that brings me to something else related to the testing that people do and that is the fact that I find it kind of hard to know what hardware to pick for a FreeBSD desktop. There's things like https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/hardware.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.1R/hardware.html and https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics and https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix but they all seem kind of out of date. If I had the money to buy the hardware for it and to pay the electric bills for it I would gladly be running a bunch of machines in different configurations of current consumer hardware and making notes and filing bug reports and hardware compatibility reports to help other users of FreeBSD and Linux. Maybe someday. Until that day I'll just have to accept that every week or so I might have to hit that hard reset button on my desktop, inconvenient as it might be.

erk__ 6y ago

You can see the schedule for the release on this page: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/schedule.html https://www.freebsd.org/releases/12.2R/schedule.html

wazoox 6y ago

Does mount_smbfs support SMB2 at last?

nix23 6y ago
Yes with the latest Sambaserver you have everything Linux has.

Mister_Snuggles 6y ago

I really like FreeBSD, and I run it on my home server, but the whole update process really needs a lot of work. The process described in this announcement is accurate in my experience: Run freebsd-update twice, reboot, run freebsd-update again, reinstall or rebuild applications, reboot again, run freebsd-update yet again. The upgrade process works well, but it's much more manual than it is in the Linux world. When PkgBase[0] becomes a thing, I hope that the process will be closer to the Linux world. The other thing that hurts the upgrade process is the lack of packaged software. My big pain point is currently PostgreSQL 12+PostGIS 3.0. This combination in FreeBSD isn't a thing, the packaged/ported PostGIS 3.0[1] is for PostgreSQL 11. My solution has been to build PostgreSQL 12 from ports (because the packaged version doesn't include XML support, which I also want) then build PostGIS 3.0 from source, after installing all its dependencies from packages. I have to rebuild PostGIS after most FreeBSD upgrades since it links against now-changed libraries. If I were doing this in the OpenSuse world I would just use the Applications:Geo repository[2] and be able to install the right combination of software very easily. Because of these issues, I'm slowly moving towards using FreeBSD to host VMs running whatever OS/distribution is most appropriate for the job. Moving PostgreSQL off of FreeBSD will greatly simplify my upgrade process. [0] https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase https://wiki.freebsd.org/PkgBase [1] https://www.freshports.org/databases/postgis30/ https://www.freshports.org/databases/postgis30/ [2] https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/Application:Geo https://build.opensuse.org/project/show/Application:Geo

nix23 6y ago
Why do you not use poudriere? And build automatically everything from ports then install the build-ed packages on you machine's?
- Mister_Snuggles 6y ago
  This is something I've been meaning to look into, but it still doesn't change the postgis30/postgresql11-server dependency in the current ports tree. I'm sure I could work around it, but then I start to ask myself whether I'd rather do FreeBSD software administration or create an OpenSuse VM, install the packaged software (which is already the right version and already has the right config options), and work on my GIS project.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]