9 ms·

FreeBSD 13.0

315 points by 4ad 6y ago

dddddaviddddd 6y ago
Release notes: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/
chungy 6y ago
FreeBSD is such an excellent operating system, I applaud all developers and users that have kept it going all these years. I've been toying around with it in a virtual machine since 13.0-RC2, in many ways it can feel like a foreign system (compared to my Linux background), but there are a lot of nice things that also make it feel "greener" on the FreeBSD side. It's honestly hard to understate the value of boot environments and the boot loader's capability to swap between them or even roll back to a spool checkpoint. It makes almost all upgrades and system changes risk-free.
- throw4738 6y ago
  Maybe have a look at OpenSuse, it has rollback as well and feels like traditional Linux.
  - nix23 6y ago
    Haha no not really, i have tumbleweed installed on my laptop and love it BUT it's NOT traditional.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      Other than btrfs, what's nontraditional? It's GNU/Linux with glibc and a RPM-based package manager.
      - petre 6y ago
        We use openSuSE Leap in production. It's not traditional in the sense of Ubuntu/Debian but somehow the configuration structure is more sane actually. No more /etc/nginx/modules|sites-available and a plethora of symlinks and conf.d directories spread around all over the place for instace.
      - nix23 6y ago
        Yast. Please don't get me wrong i LOVE OpenSuse, but traditional is Slackware/Arch/Gentoo/Debian but NOT Suse.
        pnutjam 6y ago
        You know, you don't have to use yast. It's an option. You can ignore it.
        nix23 6y ago
        Yes thanks i know that.
  - chungy 6y ago
    Last I knew, this requires OpenSUSE on btrfs. It's a pale shadow in functionality compared to ZFS... not to mention stability, too.
    - nix23 6y ago
      True btrfs is BS, i have XFS with tumbleweed and pretty happy (on the laptop), everything else freebsd all the way..if i can.
    - catblast01 6y ago
      It has some features that zfs lacks such as a dedup story that is actually usable, plus more flexibility in reshaping. Other than its native raid 5/6 story what major features is it lacking in comparison to zfs? I agree the tooling is trash compared to zfs (zfs command line is a delight by comparison). Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Not to take anything away from zfs which has proven itself in its particular use cases, but btrfs is alright.
      - ac29 6y ago
        Agreed, btrfs has been stable for a long time, aside from RAID5/6, which are going to be uncommon on a laptop or desktop computer. Unfortunately, 10 years ago this was definitely not the case, and btrfs hasnt been able to shake off that reputation among some people since then.
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        > Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Counter anecdote: I have a laptop (single disk) running opensuse tumbleweed with root on btrfs, and it's managed to completely break its root filesystem twice. One of those times I tried to recover it, but in the end I just reinstalled.
        jhoechtl 6y ago
        I had such issues like 5 years ago. Since then no issue with a btrfs root fs.
- Arelius 6y ago
  Having come into Linux from FreeBSD, I agree, FreeBSD does feel "greener"
  - mnd999 6y ago
    As someone who’s done the same (although I’m still using FreeBSD on my NAS) I missed decent documentation the most. I felt most at home on Arch because the wiki is pretty decent.
    - mvanbaak 6y ago
      The man pages on FreeBSD are a lot better than on Linux. And you can read them without network and/or browser.
      - chungy 6y ago
        The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch, but I definitely prefer well-written and fully up-to-date manpages from the offset. For starters, it doesn't require me to open a web browser first; it also doesn't depend on me having network connectivity at any particular time. My take is definitely different from GP: I find FreeBSD to have a much better documentation story compared to Linux (even Arch).
        yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        > The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch No, it's pretty broadly useful; I've used it on at least Ubuntu, Fedora, and centos. It helps that Arch is pretty close to upstream, so docs are usually pretty generic. I can't disagree about offline docs and the extraordinary quality of BSD manpages, though:)
        jhvkjhk 6y ago
        Yeah I see Arch Wiki as Linux Wiki when I’m using Ubuntu.(and Ask Ubuntu as Ask Linux)
        6y ago
- E39M5S62 6y ago
  Take a look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ . Full boot environment support for Linux, along with the ability to create a new environment from a snapshot in your bootloader, live-diff snapshots to see _when_ something changed, and even chroot into a boot environment to fix things.
- yrgulation 6y ago
  It has been 15 years since i last used freebsd in a commercial setting. Linux since then. In many ways linux feels alien to me. I still default to “pkg add” in my mind before “apt get”. A shame it didnt gain more traction, as i really loved this OS.
dang 6y ago
Recent and related: FreeBSD/arm64 becoming Tier 1 in FreeBSD 13 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755476 - April 2021 (33 comments) FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051254 - Feb 2021 (110 comments)
jbirer 6y ago
My Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 with AMD Ryzen 4500U (Radeon Renoir Graphics) hangs on boot when I enable the amdgpu driver and disable syscon (framebuffer). Hardware support is one of the big things that holds FreeBSD back.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  I once had a very bad idea to create a UEFI application that was basically a RDP client (for the hell of it ofc) Then I had to use a framebuffer driver with a BSD because it lacked GPU support for the machine I was on and dear god, the web was basically unusable. Put that idea in a coffin pretty quickly.
  - toast0 6y ago
    It might not be that bad; there's a BLT api in the boot services that you could use as a UEFI application, but OSes can't use after calling ExitBootServices. UEFI has a network api too (which I've seen people disparage, but might be usable enough). I have other crazy ideas though, so I won't steal yours. :)
- netflixandkill 6y ago
  It's anything but the largest projects really. Even mainstream linux support for a lot of laptops is still iffy. Too much work for too few people and fewer willing to pay to make it happen. It will be interesting to see if further ARM penetration into what was historically Windows-or-Mac only portions of the laptop market helps with that.
- floatboth 6y ago
  Renoir is a bit too new for us since the official drm version is 5.4, you currently have to build the 5.5-wip branch of drm-kmod for it to work. Also, I've fixed the framebuffer thing, you no longer have to disable it!! (Not everybody even had to ever do it. The issue was that we did not disable our simple framebuffer when the driver expected it (our Linux compat layer would only try to kill other Linux framebuffers) so our framebuffer would literally just overwrite device memory that the driver was using to initialize all the GPU firmware. On my Vega card, this would only happen at 1440p/4K. With smaller EFI framebuffer resolution, the memory would luckily not overlap :D)
hyakosm 6y ago
Tier-1 support for ARMv8 is a great thing, I hope using it for Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  I hope that ARM[1] can become a real challenger to the x86-dominated server/desktop/laptop space, maybe even give us a bit of that vibrant environment of multiple competing platforms that existed in the 80s and 90s. Perhaps it's just my nostalgia speaking, but I always found it neat how there were x86 daughterboards for Macs and Amigas, and various other similar setups. A full Ryzen APU-powered PC with good graphics performance can easily fit on a PCIe card, which could slot neatly into a hypothetical ARM-powered PC, with access to the mainboard's resources. Use the ARM main PC for desktop and other less intensive tasks, and fire up the full-fat x86 daughterboard for gaming and number-crunching. Or maybe it would be a lot more elegant to just have good power management on an already powerful ARM CPU and GPU and handle what x86 stuff you need via emulation, but full-computer daughterboards are just so neat! [1] Or even better, RISC-V.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
wyager 6y ago
Just got this up and running. No issues so far except wireguard keepalive is broken for me for some reason. Very exciting to see Linux and FreeBSD pulling ZFS from the same upstream - I needed this to properly deal with encryption etc.
- zx2c4 6y ago
  Keepalive fixed in the wireguard-kmod released yesterday and put into ports today: https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-April/006612.html https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-April/00661... https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=2ef23d42cbce1ed168e6f540e6d751a8deb57de0 https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=2ef23d42cbce1ed168...
  - wyager 6y ago
    Thank you Jason!
rwaksmunski 6y ago
I applaud the removal of all the obsolete drivers and utilities. Let's keep it lean and mean!
olavgg 6y ago
This release includes ZFS 2.0, + draid. I've already upgraded and is very happy with how things work.
BlackLotus89 6y ago
Since Linux became unstable on one oft my Intel Laptops (only this one system) (crashes, multi monitor problems,...) I wanted to try FreeBSD in it (Linux compatibility, zfs, ...) but the recent wireguard nearly merge and the following reaction [0] made me pause in actually trying it. I hope the developer and merge polcies aren't as headless as they seem. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-license-violations-and-bad-code-freebsd-13s-close-call/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- edoceo 6y ago
  They (policies) are not; the wireguard issue was an anomaly. Policy was debated and revised shortly (inside of 2wk IIRC) after.
cashsterling 6y ago
For what it is worth... you can buy industrial PC/PLC from Beckhoff with FreeBSD installed. PLC= programmable logic controller. Run control system logic on the PLC hard-realtime runtime and run your sophisticated logic and numerical stuff on the FreeBSD OS... soft-realtime communication between FreeBSD and the PLC runtime is pretty straight forward. https://www.beckhoff.com https://www.beckhoff.com https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/products/ipc/software-and-tools/operating-systems/c9900-s60x-cxxxxx-0185.html https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/products/ipc/software-and-too...
- Tomte 6y ago
  Industrial PC, not PLC. FreeBSD is replacing WinCE there. I was looking forward to such a PLC, but it's still interesting.
  - cpach 6y ago
    Cool!
  - cashsterling 6y ago
    Maybe we are arguing semantics here... but read up about the Beckhoff TwinCAT system and how it works. I would say Beckhoff systems are both an IPC and a PLC in one. Beckhoff system run two OS'es... the PLC runtime is hard real-time and runs at the chipset level (so even if the windows or freeBSD crashes the PLC still runs). You program the PLC using IEC-61131 languages (structured text which sort of between BASIC and Pascal, ladder logic, sequential function chart, cyclical function chart, etc.) and also have the option to run C/C++ code (with no dynamic memory allocation). For what it is worth, newer Omron PLC's run PLC code on top of QNX, B&R automation uses a very similar approach to Beckhoff. Overall, the B&R and Beckhoff PLC's are, I think, under-appreciated.
    - Tomte 6y ago
      Thank you, that's very interesting (and it wasn't obvious to me from the web site). Especially that Omron uses QNX, that's even cooler.

315 points by 4ad 6y ago

Release notes: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/relnotes/

FreeBSD is such an excellent operating system, I applaud all developers and users that have kept it going all these years. I've been toying around with it in a virtual machine since 13.0-RC2, in many ways it can feel like a foreign system (compared to my Linux background), but there are a lot of nice things that also make it feel "greener" on the FreeBSD side. It's honestly hard to understate the value of boot environments and the boot loader's capability to swap between them or even roll back to a spool checkpoint. It makes almost all upgrades and system changes risk-free.

throw4738 6y ago
Maybe have a look at OpenSuse, it has rollback as well and feels like traditional Linux.
- nix23 6y ago
  Haha no not really, i have tumbleweed installed on my laptop and love it BUT it's NOT traditional.
  - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
    Other than btrfs, what's nontraditional? It's GNU/Linux with glibc and a RPM-based package manager.
    - petre 6y ago
      We use openSuSE Leap in production. It's not traditional in the sense of Ubuntu/Debian but somehow the configuration structure is more sane actually. No more /etc/nginx/modules|sites-available and a plethora of symlinks and conf.d directories spread around all over the place for instace.
    - nix23 6y ago
      Yast. Please don't get me wrong i LOVE OpenSuse, but traditional is Slackware/Arch/Gentoo/Debian but NOT Suse.
      - pnutjam 6y ago
        You know, you don't have to use yast. It's an option. You can ignore it.
        nix23 6y ago
        Yes thanks i know that.
- chungy 6y ago
  Last I knew, this requires OpenSUSE on btrfs. It's a pale shadow in functionality compared to ZFS... not to mention stability, too.
  - nix23 6y ago
    True btrfs is BS, i have XFS with tumbleweed and pretty happy (on the laptop), everything else freebsd all the way..if i can.
  - catblast01 6y ago
    It has some features that zfs lacks such as a dedup story that is actually usable, plus more flexibility in reshaping. Other than its native raid 5/6 story what major features is it lacking in comparison to zfs? I agree the tooling is trash compared to zfs (zfs command line is a delight by comparison). Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Not to take anything away from zfs which has proven itself in its particular use cases, but btrfs is alright.
    - ac29 6y ago
      Agreed, btrfs has been stable for a long time, aside from RAID5/6, which are going to be uncommon on a laptop or desktop computer. Unfortunately, 10 years ago this was definitely not the case, and btrfs hasnt been able to shake off that reputation among some people since then.
    - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
      > Also stability wise i haven’t noted problems in years. Counter anecdote: I have a laptop (single disk) running opensuse tumbleweed with root on btrfs, and it's managed to completely break its root filesystem twice. One of those times I tried to recover it, but in the end I just reinstalled.
      - jhoechtl 6y ago
        I had such issues like 5 years ago. Since then no issue with a btrfs root fs.
Arelius 6y ago
Having come into Linux from FreeBSD, I agree, FreeBSD does feel "greener"
- mnd999 6y ago
  As someone who’s done the same (although I’m still using FreeBSD on my NAS) I missed decent documentation the most. I felt most at home on Arch because the wiki is pretty decent.
  - mvanbaak 6y ago
    The man pages on FreeBSD are a lot better than on Linux. And you can read them without network and/or browser.
    - chungy 6y ago
      The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch, but I definitely prefer well-written and fully up-to-date manpages from the offset. For starters, it doesn't require me to open a web browser first; it also doesn't depend on me having network connectivity at any particular time. My take is definitely different from GP: I find FreeBSD to have a much better documentation story compared to Linux (even Arch).
      - yjftsjthsd-h 6y ago
        > The Arch Wiki is alright if you run Arch No, it's pretty broadly useful; I've used it on at least Ubuntu, Fedora, and centos. It helps that Arch is pretty close to upstream, so docs are usually pretty generic. I can't disagree about offline docs and the extraordinary quality of BSD manpages, though:)
        jhvkjhk 6y ago
        Yeah I see Arch Wiki as Linux Wiki when I’m using Ubuntu.(and Ask Ubuntu as Ask Linux)
        6y ago
E39M5S62 6y ago
Take a look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ . Full boot environment support for Linux, along with the ability to create a new environment from a snapshot in your bootloader, live-diff snapshots to see _when_ something changed, and even chroot into a boot environment to fix things.
yrgulation 6y ago
It has been 15 years since i last used freebsd in a commercial setting. Linux since then. In many ways linux feels alien to me. I still default to “pkg add” in my mind before “apt get”. A shame it didnt gain more traction, as i really loved this OS.

dang 6y ago

Recent and related: FreeBSD/arm64 becoming Tier 1 in FreeBSD 13 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755476 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26755476 - April 2021 (33 comments) FreeBSD 13.0 Beta1 Now Available - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26051254 - Feb 2021 (110 comments)

jbirer 6y ago

My Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 with AMD Ryzen 4500U (Radeon Renoir Graphics) hangs on boot when I enable the amdgpu driver and disable syscon (framebuffer). Hardware support is one of the big things that holds FreeBSD back.

the_only_law 6y ago
I once had a very bad idea to create a UEFI application that was basically a RDP client (for the hell of it ofc) Then I had to use a framebuffer driver with a BSD because it lacked GPU support for the machine I was on and dear god, the web was basically unusable. Put that idea in a coffin pretty quickly.
- toast0 6y ago
  It might not be that bad; there's a BLT api in the boot services that you could use as a UEFI application, but OSes can't use after calling ExitBootServices. UEFI has a network api too (which I've seen people disparage, but might be usable enough). I have other crazy ideas though, so I won't steal yours. :)
netflixandkill 6y ago
It's anything but the largest projects really. Even mainstream linux support for a lot of laptops is still iffy. Too much work for too few people and fewer willing to pay to make it happen. It will be interesting to see if further ARM penetration into what was historically Windows-or-Mac only portions of the laptop market helps with that.
floatboth 6y ago
Renoir is a bit too new for us since the official drm version is 5.4, you currently have to build the 5.5-wip branch of drm-kmod for it to work. Also, I've fixed the framebuffer thing, you no longer have to disable it!! (Not everybody even had to ever do it. The issue was that we did not disable our simple framebuffer when the driver expected it (our Linux compat layer would only try to kill other Linux framebuffers) so our framebuffer would literally just overwrite device memory that the driver was using to initialize all the GPU firmware. On my Vega card, this would only happen at 1440p/4K. With smaller EFI framebuffer resolution, the memory would luckily not overlap :D)

hyakosm 6y ago

Tier-1 support for ARMv8 is a great thing, I hope using it for Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer.

KozmoNau7 6y ago
I hope that ARM[1] can become a real challenger to the x86-dominated server/desktop/laptop space, maybe even give us a bit of that vibrant environment of multiple competing platforms that existed in the 80s and 90s. Perhaps it's just my nostalgia speaking, but I always found it neat how there were x86 daughterboards for Macs and Amigas, and various other similar setups. A full Ryzen APU-powered PC with good graphics performance can easily fit on a PCIe card, which could slot neatly into a hypothetical ARM-powered PC, with access to the mainboard's resources. Use the ARM main PC for desktop and other less intensive tasks, and fire up the full-fat x86 daughterboard for gaming and number-crunching. Or maybe it would be a lot more elegant to just have good power management on an already powerful ARM CPU and GPU and handle what x86 stuff you need via emulation, but full-computer daughterboards are just so neat! [1] Or even better, RISC-V.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]

wyager 6y ago

Just got this up and running. No issues so far except wireguard keepalive is broken for me for some reason. Very exciting to see Linux and FreeBSD pulling ZFS from the same upstream - I needed this to properly deal with encryption etc.

zx2c4 6y ago
Keepalive fixed in the wireguard-kmod released yesterday and put into ports today: https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-April/006612.html https://lists.zx2c4.com/pipermail/wireguard/2021-April/00661... https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=2ef23d42cbce1ed168e6f540e6d751a8deb57de0 https://cgit.freebsd.org/ports/commit/?id=2ef23d42cbce1ed168...
- wyager 6y ago
  Thank you Jason!

rwaksmunski 6y ago

I applaud the removal of all the obsolete drivers and utilities. Let's keep it lean and mean!

olavgg 6y ago

This release includes ZFS 2.0, + draid. I've already upgraded and is very happy with how things work.

BlackLotus89 6y ago

Since Linux became unstable on one oft my Intel Laptops (only this one system) (crashes, multi monitor problems,...) I wanted to try FreeBSD in it (Linux compatibility, zfs, ...) but the recent wireguard nearly merge and the following reaction [0] made me pause in actually trying it. I hope the developer and merge polcies aren't as headless as they seem. [0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-license-violations-and-bad-code-freebsd-13s-close-call/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
edoceo 6y ago
They (policies) are not; the wireguard issue was an anomaly. Policy was debated and revised shortly (inside of 2wk IIRC) after.

cashsterling 6y ago

For what it is worth... you can buy industrial PC/PLC from Beckhoff with FreeBSD installed. PLC= programmable logic controller. Run control system logic on the PLC hard-realtime runtime and run your sophisticated logic and numerical stuff on the FreeBSD OS... soft-realtime communication between FreeBSD and the PLC runtime is pretty straight forward. https://www.beckhoff.com https://www.beckhoff.com https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/products/ipc/software-and-tools/operating-systems/c9900-s60x-cxxxxx-0185.html https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/products/ipc/software-and-too...

Tomte 6y ago
Industrial PC, not PLC. FreeBSD is replacing WinCE there. I was looking forward to such a PLC, but it's still interesting.
- cpach 6y ago
  Cool!
- cashsterling 6y ago
  Maybe we are arguing semantics here... but read up about the Beckhoff TwinCAT system and how it works. I would say Beckhoff systems are both an IPC and a PLC in one. Beckhoff system run two OS'es... the PLC runtime is hard real-time and runs at the chipset level (so even if the windows or freeBSD crashes the PLC still runs). You program the PLC using IEC-61131 languages (structured text which sort of between BASIC and Pascal, ladder logic, sequential function chart, cyclical function chart, etc.) and also have the option to run C/C++ code (with no dynamic memory allocation). For what it is worth, newer Omron PLC's run PLC code on top of QNX, B&R automation uses a very similar approach to Beckhoff. Overall, the B&R and Beckhoff PLC's are, I think, under-appreciated.
  - Tomte 6y ago
    Thank you, that's very interesting (and it wasn't obvious to me from the web site). Especially that Omron uses QNX, that's even cooler.