6 ms·

FreeBSD 8.4 is now available

124 points by joshbaptiste 13y ago

emaste 13y ago
The release announcement, with links to the mirrors: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2013-June/001479.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2013-Jun... And AWS ami IDs are in the usual spot on cperciva's page: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2 http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2
alberich 13y ago
Does someone knows why FreeBSD doesn't offer any virtualization platform based on Intel VT or AMD-v? Is there any architectural incompatibility or is it just a case of virtualization not being a high priority?
- alyandon 13y ago
  For FreeBSD, I think your choices for virtualization are limited to jails or Virtualbox. Virtualbox on FreeBSD does support Intel/AMD processor virtualization extensions I believe.
  - alberich 13y ago
    Cool, I thought it could not use the extensions and thus would be slower than other options like Xen or KVM.
- microcolonel 13y ago
  They're still working on BHyVe, but it'll probably be a few releases. They do however have fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though), and I think you can run VirtualBox... Or maybe not.
  - usaopp 13y ago
    >not as powerful as LXC though I think many would completely disagree with this.
  - bifrost 13y ago
    > fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though) IMHO LXC wishes it were jails with vimage, and if you really wanted some hillarity you could actually run a linux container-like system under a jail using the linuxulator.
    - nwmcsween 13y ago
      Linux namespaces allows namespacing almost any subsystem, although I don't know what FreeBSD offers w.r.t that.
      - GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
        > Linux namespaces allows namespacing almost any subsystem Namespacing has nothing to do with it. Not even a decent try.
  - tachion 13y ago
    > They do however have fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though) To be honest, I grew up on BSD's, FreeBSD especially, and only later turned to Linux due high marked demand. In my projects, I've tried using LXC as the light (kernel) virtualization of choice, but I've found it extremely buggy, with a lot of security issues, implementation different in almost every flavor of Linux, documentation lacking... Not even close to maturity of Jails, to which I eventually turned back to. Dont get me wrong, I am still big fan of LXC and I can see it working in future, and having features I would like to see in Jails (they're getting there, especially recently) like fine grained resources control and restriction and so on, but as of today, it needs a lot of work in polishing and maturing the code.
- emaste 13y ago
  Virtualization is a priority, both as a host and a guest, but especially on the host side there's a fair amount of work to be done. BHyVe is FreeBSD's own hypervisor, and can run FreeBSD and Linux guests, but is not yet available in a release. VirtualBox works well for end-user applications on current FreeBSD releases, and is being used by kernel developers in their workflow.
- bifrost 13y ago
  There are not a lot of options but VirtualBox works pretty excellently. There's also BHyVe and you can always use Qemu :) The lack of hypervisor support is really more due to people not keeping up with the porting work. I would love to see Xen actively supported but I think BHyVe is going to be where the most work gets done.
antonios 13y ago
There are notable improvements in this version for ZFS, including the LZ4 compression algorithm that is both faster and better than the previous one. (Benchmark: http://code.google.com/p/lz4/ http://code.google.com/p/lz4/)
- javanix 13y ago
  What zpool version is it at?
  - dmpk2k 13y ago
    If it has LZ4, I don't think it has a zpool version. Versions were deprecated, and now ZFS uses feature flags instead.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
  - emaste 13y ago
    Note that FreeBSD 8.4 is from the older stable release branch, and 9.2 will release from the more recent stable branch with a lot of additional functionality and enhancements. The topic of the zpool version for 8.4 is covered directly in the release notes: FreeBSD ZFS subsystem has been updated to support feature flags for ZFS pools (the SPA version is 5000). Asynchronous destroy of ZFS dataset, LZ4 compression, ZIO NOP-write optimization have been implemented as new features. loader(8) tunables vfs.zfs.sync_pass_deferred_free, vfs.zfs.sync_pass_dont_compress, vfs.zfs.sync_pass_rewrite, and vfs.zfs.nopwrite_enabled have been added.[r243717, r244088, r247310] Note that this upgrade can cause interoperability issues when upgrading a FreeBSD 8.4 system to 9.0 or 9.1. This is because FreeBSD 9.0 and 9.1 support SPA version 28 and do not recognize version 5000. To mitigate this issue, the default SPA version for a newly created ZFS pool on FreeBSD 8.4 is set to version 28. To create a ZFS pool with version 5000, use zpool(8) upgrade command after the creation.
GuiA 13y ago
Does anyone have a good recommendation for a lightweight laptop (ideally 11", but 13" is OK I guess) that would run a BSD system out of the box (as much as possible)? Trying to slowly start a switch from OS X for basic stuff (internet, writing LaTeX, writing some elementary code, etc.), something to replace my Macbook Air would be awesome.
- microcolonel 13y ago
  Not sure if FreeBSD has power management worth a rectal excretion, you probably wouldn't want to run it on a laptop. Try GNU/Linux, really.
  - i_are_crd 13y ago
    Or OpenBSD. That runs really well on most laptops.
    - wolf550e 13y ago
      As long as they're connected to a wall socket. Otherwise, citation needed. Power Management in hard. Who does the myriad of hardware quirks for OpenBSD?
      - adamrt 13y ago
        If you are referring to suspend/resume, then OpenBSD has great support[1]. Its one of the very few ACPI stacks not derived from Intel's ACPICA reference code. [1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/zzz.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/zzz.pdf (older, 2011)
        microcolonel 13y ago
        Suspend and resume are basic features, by power management I mean idle and active power management, optimizing the race to zero, reclocking...
rsync 13y ago
Thank you to everyone at FreeBSD (and some folks behind the scenes at IXSystems) that made this happen. A lot of people really appreciate seeing the 8 branch extended in its lifecycle like this, and it marks a subtle, but important culture change in FreeBSD development.
- gonzo 13y ago
  What, specifically, did iX Systems do?

124 points by joshbaptiste 13y ago

The release announcement, with links to the mirrors: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2013-June/001479.html http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2013-Jun... And AWS ami IDs are in the usual spot on cperciva's page: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2 http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2

alberich 13y ago

Does someone knows why FreeBSD doesn't offer any virtualization platform based on Intel VT or AMD-v? Is there any architectural incompatibility or is it just a case of virtualization not being a high priority?

alyandon 13y ago
For FreeBSD, I think your choices for virtualization are limited to jails or Virtualbox. Virtualbox on FreeBSD does support Intel/AMD processor virtualization extensions I believe.
- alberich 13y ago
  Cool, I thought it could not use the extensions and thus would be slower than other options like Xen or KVM.
microcolonel 13y ago
They're still working on BHyVe, but it'll probably be a few releases. They do however have fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though), and I think you can run VirtualBox... Or maybe not.
- usaopp 13y ago
  >not as powerful as LXC though I think many would completely disagree with this.
- bifrost 13y ago
  > fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though) IMHO LXC wishes it were jails with vimage, and if you really wanted some hillarity you could actually run a linux container-like system under a jail using the linuxulator.
  - nwmcsween 13y ago
    Linux namespaces allows namespacing almost any subsystem, although I don't know what FreeBSD offers w.r.t that.
    - GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
      > Linux namespaces allows namespacing almost any subsystem Namespacing has nothing to do with it. Not even a decent try.
- tachion 13y ago
  > They do however have fairly-powerful jails(not as powerful as LXC though) To be honest, I grew up on BSD's, FreeBSD especially, and only later turned to Linux due high marked demand. In my projects, I've tried using LXC as the light (kernel) virtualization of choice, but I've found it extremely buggy, with a lot of security issues, implementation different in almost every flavor of Linux, documentation lacking... Not even close to maturity of Jails, to which I eventually turned back to. Dont get me wrong, I am still big fan of LXC and I can see it working in future, and having features I would like to see in Jails (they're getting there, especially recently) like fine grained resources control and restriction and so on, but as of today, it needs a lot of work in polishing and maturing the code.
emaste 13y ago
Virtualization is a priority, both as a host and a guest, but especially on the host side there's a fair amount of work to be done. BHyVe is FreeBSD's own hypervisor, and can run FreeBSD and Linux guests, but is not yet available in a release. VirtualBox works well for end-user applications on current FreeBSD releases, and is being used by kernel developers in their workflow.
bifrost 13y ago
There are not a lot of options but VirtualBox works pretty excellently. There's also BHyVe and you can always use Qemu :) The lack of hypervisor support is really more due to people not keeping up with the porting work. I would love to see Xen actively supported but I think BHyVe is going to be where the most work gets done.

antonios 13y ago

There are notable improvements in this version for ZFS, including the LZ4 compression algorithm that is both faster and better than the previous one. (Benchmark: http://code.google.com/p/lz4/ http://code.google.com/p/lz4/)

javanix 13y ago
What zpool version is it at?
- dmpk2k 13y ago
  If it has LZ4, I don't think it has a zpool version. Versions were deprecated, and now ZFS uses feature flags instead.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- emaste 13y ago
  Note that FreeBSD 8.4 is from the older stable release branch, and 9.2 will release from the more recent stable branch with a lot of additional functionality and enhancements. The topic of the zpool version for 8.4 is covered directly in the release notes: FreeBSD ZFS subsystem has been updated to support feature flags for ZFS pools (the SPA version is 5000). Asynchronous destroy of ZFS dataset, LZ4 compression, ZIO NOP-write optimization have been implemented as new features. loader(8) tunables vfs.zfs.sync_pass_deferred_free, vfs.zfs.sync_pass_dont_compress, vfs.zfs.sync_pass_rewrite, and vfs.zfs.nopwrite_enabled have been added.[r243717, r244088, r247310] Note that this upgrade can cause interoperability issues when upgrading a FreeBSD 8.4 system to 9.0 or 9.1. This is because FreeBSD 9.0 and 9.1 support SPA version 28 and do not recognize version 5000. To mitigate this issue, the default SPA version for a newly created ZFS pool on FreeBSD 8.4 is set to version 28. To create a ZFS pool with version 5000, use zpool(8) upgrade command after the creation.

GuiA 13y ago

Does anyone have a good recommendation for a lightweight laptop (ideally 11", but 13" is OK I guess) that would run a BSD system out of the box (as much as possible)? Trying to slowly start a switch from OS X for basic stuff (internet, writing LaTeX, writing some elementary code, etc.), something to replace my Macbook Air would be awesome.

microcolonel 13y ago
Not sure if FreeBSD has power management worth a rectal excretion, you probably wouldn't want to run it on a laptop. Try GNU/Linux, really.
- i_are_crd 13y ago
  Or OpenBSD. That runs really well on most laptops.
  - wolf550e 13y ago
    As long as they're connected to a wall socket. Otherwise, citation needed. Power Management in hard. Who does the myriad of hardware quirks for OpenBSD?
    - adamrt 13y ago
      If you are referring to suspend/resume, then OpenBSD has great support[1]. Its one of the very few ACPI stacks not derived from Intel's ACPICA reference code. [1] http://www.openbsd.org/papers/zzz.pdf http://www.openbsd.org/papers/zzz.pdf (older, 2011)
      - microcolonel 13y ago
        Suspend and resume are basic features, by power management I mean idle and active power management, optimizing the race to zero, reclocking...

rsync 13y ago

Thank you to everyone at FreeBSD (and some folks behind the scenes at IXSystems) that made this happen. A lot of people really appreciate seeing the 8 branch extended in its lifecycle like this, and it marks a subtle, but important culture change in FreeBSD development.

gonzo 13y ago
What, specifically, did iX Systems do?