23 ms·

FreeBSD 10′s New Technologies and Features

247 points by radimm 13y ago

harrytuttle 13y ago
Wonderful! I may actually consider dumping Debian for FreeBSD 10. I've never been totally happy with Linux after moving off "proper" UNIX machines. I had a FreeBSD 4.4 machine floating around for years which I was rather happy with but drifted off to Linux-land primarily due to convenience when it came to Flash and audio. So many compelling reasons to switch back to FreeBSD now.
- maheart 13y ago
  What exactly is attracting you to FreeBSD? I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port". That is, it offers the Debian userland on top of the FreeBSD kernel. So, depending on what you're looking for, you might be able to gain access to the best of both worlds. If you're after the FreeBSD experience (i.e. the community, the BSD command line utils, ports, and the preference for permissive licenses), then I guess Debian/kFreeBSD really isn't of any interest to you.
  - mavhc 13y ago
    I use debian/kfreebsd on my server so I can use zfs. Had Freebsd previously, but the lack of a Stable ports tree meant updating broke things often. Although many things don't work on debian/kfreebsd, and searching for help is tricky, do I go the debian way or the freebsd way, it's always updated with few problems.
    - Freaky 13y ago
      Port updates are a lot nicer now we have poudriere and pkgng - I haven't had a "pkg upgrade" break anything in months, and that was prior to automatic shared library tracking and just needed a "pkg install -Rf lang/perl" to fix. e.g. the latest entry in UPDATING is for any port depending on converters/libiconv. Using portmaster or portupgrade requires querying the package database for the list of depending ports, force-deleting libiconv and then force-rebuilding from the previously saved list. With pkgng it's a case of "pkg upgrade && pkg autoremove".
    - dcreemer 13y ago
      I have been using ZFS on Linux[1] for about six months now, on both Debian and Ubuntu. Installation is trivial and it seems to work quite well, though I do not stress it very much. [1] http://zfsonlinux.org/ http://zfsonlinux.org/
  - harrytuttle 13y ago
    Well the main things for me are 1. feels closer to "old fashioned non-Canonical'ed UNIX" which I was brought up on. 2. Way less politics due to license. 3. Less crazy forking and wheel reinventing (basically everything Ubuntu isn't). 4. It has orders of magnitude better documentation 5. pkgng is actually really nice 6. separation of core OS vs ports/packages so easy to stage updates compared to catch all Linux distros. 7. pf is miles better than iptables 8. ZFS. 9. I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting in my cupboard which Linux doens't like. 10. Has valgrind that works properly unlike the other BSD's. That's about it but it's enough. My use cases are: personal use, professional use (devops), professional use (production).
    - masklinn 13y ago
      It also has dtrace, including kernel support enabled by default.
      - harrytuttle 13y ago
        Forgot about dtrace - good point! So much goodness!
  - lmm 13y ago
    I've heard Debian/kFreeBSD has poor multithreading support because it's built against glibc/libpthread rather than the native freebsd libc (which has an NPTL-equivalent).
    - emaste 13y ago
      kFreeBSD recently gained native support (called FBTL). See http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html and http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/ http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/
  - jonhohle 13y ago
    > I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port" I've used FreeBSD and before that Gentoo (which has a package manager, portage, influenced by BSDs ports system) for more than a decade, and I've never understood the appeal of apt or the other Debian tools. In my experience, they just don't work as well as ports, constantly require adding additional repositories (because the official repository is missing some relatively popular package for who knows what reason) - which may or may not conflict with others I have -, and in general, are just more work than ports, portage, or MacPorts. Inflicting apt on a system with a superior package management system seems like a sysadmin's bright idea - having no experience with ports or other package managers. I've used apt on several systems - Maemo, Debian, Ubuntu, OS X (as fink), and always found it to be one of the weakest package managers (I've even had better experience with yum/RPM).
    - jhh 13y ago
      So how do you use ports in practice? Do you use sources or binary packages? Which management solution do you use, or do you just use the make files? I am constantly thinking about revisiting BSD, but in contrast to your experience I found the apt package solution to work very well and just be better.
      - Freaky 13y ago
        I use poudriere and pkgng - the former for building my own package repository, the latter for installing and upgrading. The pkgng side is comparable to apt: `pkg install vim`, `pkg upgrade`, `pkg autoremove` etc; the poudriere side isn't much worse: https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_repos.wiki https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_r... I admit I had some level of apt-envy back when I was using portupgrade. pkgng has nicely eliminated that.
      - harrytuttle 13y ago
        From my perspective (I'm not the GP), I will be using a custom configuration management system that I wrote back in 1999. It's. Like puppet but ssh based, written in sh and standard Unix tooling. It doesn't use a DAG so you have to order dependencies carefully. That will pull binary packages from ports builds on another machine and install and configure them.
chris_wot 13y ago
So no qualms about backdoors in RDRAND? Will they be doing the same as Linux with their random number generator and add additional sources of entropy?
- simias 13y ago
  If I understand the source code correctly[1] they use the output of rdrand directly. However they also have an option "hw.ivy_rng_enable"[2] to disable it. The code is actually nicer to read than the Linux counterpart and it seems trivial to implement a new "random_adaptor" that would xor the output of ivy (rdrand) with yarrow (the software one). [1] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/ivy.c http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/ivy.c [2] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/probe.c http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/probe.c
  - GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
    There are indeed plans to post-process the output of rdrand.
parennoob 13y ago
Have never used FreeBSD, and am curious about using it on my laptop -- so an honest and perhaps naive question for people who do use it as their main system: Does it JustWork on the majority of average-user things, like connecting to your Wi-Fi access point, displaying your desktop at its maximum resolution without crying, playing your multimedia files, etc? Ubuntu gets this just right, providing a perfect balance between core technologies for developers, and ease of software installation for common activities like, say, watching a Youtube video. Support for 500 virtualisation technologies and no easy support for, say, playing mp4 files is going to make me not want to use it on my laptop. Then again, the average user might not exactly be who FreeBSD is targeting for their software.
- untothebreach 13y ago
  If you want to use BSD on a laptop, your best bet is PC-BSD[1]. I love using FreeBSD on my laptop, but it definitely didn't "just work," you definitely have to tinker with it. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD but attempts to "just work" in the way you are looking for. 1: http://www.pcbsd.org/ http://www.pcbsd.org/
- lmm 13y ago
  It's not like ubuntu, it's more like 2005-era linux. That is, it will work, and once you've got a working configuration it will keep working - but you do have to manually configure it. I don't know how good the laptop hardware support is - my impression is more people use it on the server. My wifi works fine, but you should probably check yours is supported.
- nolok 13y ago
  For a laptop, if you're looking for a "just work" solution, I would say forget it. Automagic full support for touchpad, energy management and such is not there yet. Not too surprising, even linux still has trouble here and there with laptops, but I think trying it in that context would make you dislike freebsd for the wrong reason. But on a server or even a desktop computer, it's really great
- belorn 13y ago
  If you are looking for a pragmatic operative system, freeBSD is going to be at the bottom of the list thanks to it having the hardest licensing requirement for included software projects. Ubuntu include anything from proprietary freeware blobs, to GPL, to permissive licensed software. So long the inclusion improves the practical use, it is included. The more ideological free software operative systems excludes the proprietary freeware blobs, but keeps the GPL licensed and permissive licensed software. FreeBSD excluded both proprietary freeware blobs and GPL licensed software, and only uses software that is permissive licensed accordantly to the OSI standard. This methodology also cover driver support for hardware, as they won't port a linux driver to BSD if the linux driver is GPL. However, most commonly used GPL software has an permissive alternative, so if you are lucky, using those alternative won't impact you too much. On the server side, I would think that is more true than for the laptop.
TheSwordsman 13y ago
I've really wanted to give FreeBSD a 100% solid shot. With this release I may try uploading my own FreeBSD image to a Xen VPS provider (probably Linode). With that being said, I feel like I may be a spoiled little GNU user. There's plenty of times where I end up on a BSD system, and I try to use some sort of GNU-idiom in a command-line utility and I end up really really confused and unsure of how to bend it to my will. I think GNU sed is one of the first ones to come to mind, but there are definitely other utilities where the flags don't match up or don't even exist.
- untothebreach 13y ago
  The next time that happens, try running the command again, but prepend a 'g' (so gsed, gawk, etc). Most BSD systems have the GNU versions of utilities present in their ports systems, and many come with the gnu coreutils installed, g-prefixed.
  - asdasf 13y ago
    None of them come with the GNU coreutils installed. You have to install them if you want them. I'd recommend learning basic unix commands instead though, it doesn't take very long at all.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
tete 13y ago
We recently switched from a Debian and Cloud hybrid to FreeBSD. Result: We have recent, stable software (Ports rock!), we are overall more stable than we were on the cloud, we have no more need to work around limitations of clouds and we have more resources while only paying a fraction, compared to our cloud service. Because of this we can have way more systems, which means we can use that for HA and are always set up for a sudden increase of users. With FreeBSD's jails we have a perfect cloud-like separation of services. I used to be a huge fan of cloud computing, but what I really dislike these days is that while it makes it easier and way cheaper for companies it actually brings close to zero benefits to users, even being more expensive and connected with more limitations. A lot of the time people seem to use cloud hosting, because everyone else does so and because it is a hype right now.
- jrochkind1 13y ago
  What's the relationship between the switch from 'cloud' hosting to your own boxes; and the switch to FreeBSD? What does one have to do with the other?
  - hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
    I believe he/she explains it ("jails").
    - biot 13y ago
      As one can run FreeBSD "in the cloud" and use jails there, I don't think that explains it.
      - tete 13y ago
        It partly explains it, because for some it might be a reason to go for clouds in first place. I agree, it's not always the case. However as explained I think there are many wrong expectations coming from clouds: - Isolation: Like already mentioned. You can use jails and nowadays LXC - Up to date software: Either managed or with special/official images (again the isolation comes up her). This is a reason for FreeBSD. Their ports system and base system allow for both stability and up to date software. Big plus for startups, because they usually depend more on this than others. - Uptime: I don't know why this is so big. If you are designing (mostly) stateless systems, like for the cloud you usually have the same benefits off the cloud. You have to pay for HA (many instances) on the cloud. It doesn't make it magically more available. However, if you go off the cloud, even reserved Amazon instances you can easily build extremely high availability cause it will cost less for you. One big thing when cloud computing game up was how great it is that resources can be used more efficiently and how it is cheaper for that reason. However, because of all the hype (I guess) it is only cheaper for cloud hosts. - Scale out: Again, this is a question of cost: Do you start out with two or three instances in the cloud or for the same money just get 5-10 real systems (no joke, look how cheap professional grade hosting became!) so you don't need to bother in first place? So you end up with less resources and higher costs and potentially cannot (or have a harder time to) run certain services that simply are not optimized for the cloud. Again, if you design your software to run in the cloud you usually have software that on real hardware is close to zero maintenance (well, at least less than what you have to do for clouds anyway). I am sure there are good reasons for running FreeBSD on the cloud instead of just buying your own machines and connect them (over multiple data centers if you worry a lot). And we actually also use the cloud for backups. However I really think that often the term cloud is used as just another buzzword and the benefits are mostly imagined, caused by a huge hype, not always, but way too often. Don't get me wrong, I am not against cloud computing at all. I just came across way to many people/startups paying for expensive cloud infrastructure seemingly not having any reason for it, other than it being hyped. When I ask why they do it then they either don't know or have really wrong expectations.
emaste 13y ago
A few corrections: LLVM/CLANG: GCC is still in the base FreeBSD source tree, and is still used for CPU architectures where Clang support is not sufficiently mature. In addition, the article claims that GCC will remain "for a time" in the ports tree. GCC isn't going to be removed from the ports tree. Tickless kernel: There's a spurious reference to "atomic close-on-exec" here. PF: PF itself was ported from OpenBSD, while the SMP improvements were developed in FreeBSD. Netmap: Netmap is a very high performance _Layer 2_ Ethernet packet interface; the reference to "65536 routing tables" is not applicable. There are also a few items on here which are either works in progress or brainstorming ideas, and are not likely to be available in FreeBSD 10.0 (but may arrive in a later 10 point release): Variable symlinks, full UEFI, PCI hot-plug, Thunderbolt.
- twic 13y ago
  Variable symlinks stood out as a bit of a surprise on that list. Everything else is understandable as either an improvement in the implementation of an established feature, or an improvement of a feature in FreeBSD's core areas of excellence (eg networking and storage), or a sop to the fashion for virtualisation. But variable symlinks seem, to my ignorant eyes, like a new feature that is not aimed at any particular strategic goal, just some cool thing. What is the rationale behind adding variable symlinks? Are they necessary to support some other feature? Are they being adopted for parity with some other form of UNIX? Is there a considered opinion that they will be found widely useful? Is there any discussion about them we can read?
  - jzwinck 13y ago
    Linux has namespaces which seem a little bit similar to variable symlinks (in that both allow different processes on one system to see different filesystem contents).
  - noelwelsh 13y ago
    I think they are to support lightweight virtualisation like that used by Docker.io. This allows multiple processes to act as though they own a particular filesystem, which in fact in shared.
Ixiaus 13y ago
I love this operating system.
- knob 13y ago
  Heck yeah! And the communities in (forums.freebsd.org) and #freebsd (and #44BSD)...
windexh8er 13y ago
I loved FreeBSD all through the late 90s / early 2000s in high school and college. I was working for a small ISP that ran 100% FreeBSD and cut my teeth on *nix in general on the platform. My first foray into Linux (Debian) felt sloppy and discombobulated comparatively. Why? FreeBSD is an entire OS, not a menagerie of tools wrapped around a common kernel. FreeBSD always felt much more polished, complete and predictable. Unfortunately our team made the choice to migrate to Debian for ease of upgrades and security patches (no more building world). Back in the day the limited resources from a processing perspective made those upgrades much longer than an apt-get upgrade. I love Linux (Arch / Debian), but I still have a soft spot for FreeBSD. I have flashbacks to the network install via a floppy that remind me of the simpler time of the Internet. I need to re-engage with 10. Lots of great platforms I use are still based on it - FreeNAS and PFSense. If you've never tried it, I encourage you to learn the system.
- emaste 13y ago
  The need for binary updates is certainly understandable, and was a reasonably common complaint. Binary updates have now largely become a "solved problem" on FreeBSD, through freebsd-update (ca. 2007, for the base system) and pkgng (ca. today, for third party software).
  - dman 13y ago
    I dont think theyre a solved problem yet. Strangely enough the ports system appears to be too flexible. Which one should I be using in 2013 to install packages - pkg_add, pkgng, portmaster, portupgrade, running make install from within the ports source tree? Could someone who knows more about FreeBSD than I do comment on whats state of the art in terms of installing / upgrading packages?
    - oscargrouch 13y ago
      for binary packages; pkgng: "$ pkg add ..." for source code install; ports pkg_add and pkg_delete are becoming obsolete by pkgng
    - 13y ago
checker659 13y ago
Anyone know what happened to Capsicum? Can't find any mention of it anywhere.
- oscargrouch 13y ago
  thats because it was already merged in freebsd 9 .. for freebsd 10, they are polishing it.. but it works since 9.. For me this is another thing that are very appealing! if you mix capsicum with jails, zfs, geli, pf.. you can have the most secure box in the world.. all of this amazing technology directly integrated with the kernel, and being maintained in the mainstream freebsd. no thirdy-parties involved also projects like netmap are sweet..
- enjolras 13y ago
  Capsicum is still work in progress and worked on. Since FreeBSD 9, it has undergone a lot of internal design changes (capabilities are now embedded in the filedescriptors instead of being standalone structures), and API changes. Yet another API change is undergoing to make the code more future proof (currently, you can have only 64 different capability rights, which is not enough), but it's happening out of tree. There are also new libraries to ease applications developpement. Capsicum is not yet in a real production state. It's a big project and it needs a lot of thoughs to get it right. I don't know if it will get in FreeBSD 10, I'm not a freeBSD guy, but you can be sure there are still a lot of work dedicated to capsicum ! After the basic kernel API and libs has been stabilized, it will still need work to convert applications to capsicum before you can consider capsicum as a deployed security mechanism in FreeBSD.
mcfist 13y ago
Just right now happen to help old $work with their 4.11-STABLE FreeBSD station, not touched since 2005 .. amazing technology, love it!. Still working, and while compiling ancient stuff from ports tree, am writing this comment from Konqueror 3.3.2 from 2004 . Thank you FreeBSD people!
jff 13y ago
Does pkgng actually have any packages on it these days? The last few times I've checked, nothing's been available because of a security breach a year ago or whatever.
- kryptiskt 13y ago
  PC-BSD has pkgng packages, you just have to change the URL. http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Convert_a_FreeBSD_System_to_PC-BSD%C2%AE#Switching_to_the_PC-BSD.C2.AE_pkgng_Repository http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Convert_a_FreeBSD_System_to_...
- alyandon 13y ago
  Just tried it out. Still no packages.
MichaelMoser123 13y ago
Does anybody know how RDRAND is being used in FreeBSD 10 ? is RDRAND somehow mandated so that it must be used, I mean why are both Linux and BSD both thinking that this is such a swell feature that must be implemented ? Theodore Tso - the author of Linux /dev/random thinks that using it is a bad idea https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/SDcoemc9V3J https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/SDcoemc9...
- bcoates 13y ago
  A lack of entropy sources on some kinds of hardware is a real problem, and buggy attempts to work around it have resulted in defective, easily factorable keys being used in the wild on equipment like Juniper SRX gateways: https://factorable.net/weakkeys12.extended.pdf https://factorable.net/weakkeys12.extended.pdf
Nux 13y ago
I guess this is not the year FreeBSD gets a decent package manager (for binaries).. :( Maybe next year.
- GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
  I guess you're wrong. http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html
  - Nux 13y ago
    No I am not. I said "decent", this implies at least "usable". It'd be nice to get that done by the time it hits stable, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
    - GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
      > No I am not. Yes you are. > I said "decent", this implies at least "usable". Agreed. > It'd be nice to get that done by the time it hits stable, but I wouldn't hold my breath. pkgng has been usable for over a year. Read the page I linked too.
      - Nux 13y ago
        I'm still not wrong. :) Pkgng itself seems like it's working, but bootstrapped fresh on a FreeBSD 9.1 it provided a non-existing repo: [root@freebsd91 ~]# cat /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf packagesite: http://pkgbeta.FreeBSD.org/freebsd:9:x86:64/latest http://pkgbeta.FreeBSD.org/freebsd:9:x86:64/latest And that URL is actually a 404 page. Additionally the existing binary repos (the one pkg_add uses) cannot be used with pkgng. So essentially - unless you want to start building packages and maintaining repos - pkgng is at this moment _useless_. I do wonder if they'll manage to come up with decent[1] repos in time for the final release. [1] - providing many packages and updates like in the linux distros world, not just "set it and leave it" as they do with the current repos.
        13y ago
AsymetricCom 13y ago
11. backdoor in sshd, compliments of NSA
Apocryphon 13y ago
Will *BSD projects eventually try appealing to the mainstream the same way Ubuntu and Mint have been over the last decade?
jacobwcarlson 13y ago
The replacement of BIND is quite the landmark.
lawnchair_larry 13y ago
Unfortunately FreeBSD is still in the 90s with security technology, making it completely unsuitable for hosting anything important.
- jpeterson 13y ago
  What are you talking about?
- profquail 13y ago
  Can you provide any citations to back that up? FreeBSD's new security framework -- Capsicum -- has been backed by Google: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/
tsahyt 13y ago
Is there any reason for switching to LLVM/CLANG from GCC other than the licensing?

247 points by radimm 13y ago

Wonderful! I may actually consider dumping Debian for FreeBSD 10. I've never been totally happy with Linux after moving off "proper" UNIX machines. I had a FreeBSD 4.4 machine floating around for years which I was rather happy with but drifted off to Linux-land primarily due to convenience when it came to Flash and audio. So many compelling reasons to switch back to FreeBSD now.

maheart 13y ago
What exactly is attracting you to FreeBSD? I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port". That is, it offers the Debian userland on top of the FreeBSD kernel. So, depending on what you're looking for, you might be able to gain access to the best of both worlds. If you're after the FreeBSD experience (i.e. the community, the BSD command line utils, ports, and the preference for permissive licenses), then I guess Debian/kFreeBSD really isn't of any interest to you.
- mavhc 13y ago
  I use debian/kfreebsd on my server so I can use zfs. Had Freebsd previously, but the lack of a Stable ports tree meant updating broke things often. Although many things don't work on debian/kfreebsd, and searching for help is tricky, do I go the debian way or the freebsd way, it's always updated with few problems.
  - Freaky 13y ago
    Port updates are a lot nicer now we have poudriere and pkgng - I haven't had a "pkg upgrade" break anything in months, and that was prior to automatic shared library tracking and just needed a "pkg install -Rf lang/perl" to fix. e.g. the latest entry in UPDATING is for any port depending on converters/libiconv. Using portmaster or portupgrade requires querying the package database for the list of depending ports, force-deleting libiconv and then force-rebuilding from the previously saved list. With pkgng it's a case of "pkg upgrade && pkg autoremove".
  - dcreemer 13y ago
    I have been using ZFS on Linux[1] for about six months now, on both Debian and Ubuntu. Installation is trivial and it seems to work quite well, though I do not stress it very much. [1] http://zfsonlinux.org/ http://zfsonlinux.org/
- harrytuttle 13y ago
  Well the main things for me are 1. feels closer to "old fashioned non-Canonical'ed UNIX" which I was brought up on. 2. Way less politics due to license. 3. Less crazy forking and wheel reinventing (basically everything Ubuntu isn't). 4. It has orders of magnitude better documentation 5. pkgng is actually really nice 6. separation of core OS vs ports/packages so easy to stage updates compared to catch all Linux distros. 7. pf is miles better than iptables 8. ZFS. 9. I have a Sun Ultra 30 sitting in my cupboard which Linux doens't like. 10. Has valgrind that works properly unlike the other BSD's. That's about it but it's enough. My use cases are: personal use, professional use (devops), professional use (production).
  - masklinn 13y ago
    It also has dtrace, including kernel support enabled by default.
    - harrytuttle 13y ago
      Forgot about dtrace - good point! So much goodness!
- lmm 13y ago
  I've heard Debian/kFreeBSD has poor multithreading support because it's built against glibc/libpthread rather than the native freebsd libc (which has an NPTL-equivalent).
  - emaste 13y ago
    kFreeBSD recently gained native support (called FBTL). See http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/2013/07/msg00060.html and http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/ http://asdfasdf.debian.net/~salinger/eglibc.fbtl/
- jonhohle 13y ago
  > I ask because Debian has a FreeBSD "port" I've used FreeBSD and before that Gentoo (which has a package manager, portage, influenced by BSDs ports system) for more than a decade, and I've never understood the appeal of apt or the other Debian tools. In my experience, they just don't work as well as ports, constantly require adding additional repositories (because the official repository is missing some relatively popular package for who knows what reason) - which may or may not conflict with others I have -, and in general, are just more work than ports, portage, or MacPorts. Inflicting apt on a system with a superior package management system seems like a sysadmin's bright idea - having no experience with ports or other package managers. I've used apt on several systems - Maemo, Debian, Ubuntu, OS X (as fink), and always found it to be one of the weakest package managers (I've even had better experience with yum/RPM).
  - jhh 13y ago
    So how do you use ports in practice? Do you use sources or binary packages? Which management solution do you use, or do you just use the make files? I am constantly thinking about revisiting BSD, but in contrast to your experience I found the apt package solution to work very well and just be better.
    - Freaky 13y ago
      I use poudriere and pkgng - the former for building my own package repository, the latter for installing and upgrading. The pkgng side is comparable to apt: `pkg install vim`, `pkg upgrade`, `pkg autoremove` etc; the poudriere side isn't much worse: https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_repos.wiki https://fossil.etoilebsd.net/poudriere/doc/trunk/doc/pkgng_r... I admit I had some level of apt-envy back when I was using portupgrade. pkgng has nicely eliminated that.
    - harrytuttle 13y ago
      From my perspective (I'm not the GP), I will be using a custom configuration management system that I wrote back in 1999. It's. Like puppet but ssh based, written in sh and standard Unix tooling. It doesn't use a DAG so you have to order dependencies carefully. That will pull binary packages from ports builds on another machine and install and configure them.

chris_wot 13y ago

So no qualms about backdoors in RDRAND? Will they be doing the same as Linux with their random number generator and add additional sources of entropy?

simias 13y ago
If I understand the source code correctly[1] they use the output of rdrand directly. However they also have an option "hw.ivy_rng_enable"[2] to disable it. The code is actually nicer to read than the Linux counterpart and it seems trivial to implement a new "random_adaptor" that would xor the output of ivy (rdrand) with yarrow (the software one). [1] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/ivy.c http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/ivy.c [2] http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/probe.c http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/dev/random/probe.c
- GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
  There are indeed plans to post-process the output of rdrand.

parennoob 13y ago

Have never used FreeBSD, and am curious about using it on my laptop -- so an honest and perhaps naive question for people who do use it as their main system: Does it JustWork on the majority of average-user things, like connecting to your Wi-Fi access point, displaying your desktop at its maximum resolution without crying, playing your multimedia files, etc? Ubuntu gets this just right, providing a perfect balance between core technologies for developers, and ease of software installation for common activities like, say, watching a Youtube video. Support for 500 virtualisation technologies and no easy support for, say, playing mp4 files is going to make me not want to use it on my laptop. Then again, the average user might not exactly be who FreeBSD is targeting for their software.

untothebreach 13y ago
If you want to use BSD on a laptop, your best bet is PC-BSD[1]. I love using FreeBSD on my laptop, but it definitely didn't "just work," you definitely have to tinker with it. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD but attempts to "just work" in the way you are looking for. 1: http://www.pcbsd.org/ http://www.pcbsd.org/
lmm 13y ago
It's not like ubuntu, it's more like 2005-era linux. That is, it will work, and once you've got a working configuration it will keep working - but you do have to manually configure it. I don't know how good the laptop hardware support is - my impression is more people use it on the server. My wifi works fine, but you should probably check yours is supported.
nolok 13y ago
For a laptop, if you're looking for a "just work" solution, I would say forget it. Automagic full support for touchpad, energy management and such is not there yet. Not too surprising, even linux still has trouble here and there with laptops, but I think trying it in that context would make you dislike freebsd for the wrong reason. But on a server or even a desktop computer, it's really great
belorn 13y ago
If you are looking for a pragmatic operative system, freeBSD is going to be at the bottom of the list thanks to it having the hardest licensing requirement for included software projects. Ubuntu include anything from proprietary freeware blobs, to GPL, to permissive licensed software. So long the inclusion improves the practical use, it is included. The more ideological free software operative systems excludes the proprietary freeware blobs, but keeps the GPL licensed and permissive licensed software. FreeBSD excluded both proprietary freeware blobs and GPL licensed software, and only uses software that is permissive licensed accordantly to the OSI standard. This methodology also cover driver support for hardware, as they won't port a linux driver to BSD if the linux driver is GPL. However, most commonly used GPL software has an permissive alternative, so if you are lucky, using those alternative won't impact you too much. On the server side, I would think that is more true than for the laptop.

TheSwordsman 13y ago

I've really wanted to give FreeBSD a 100% solid shot. With this release I may try uploading my own FreeBSD image to a Xen VPS provider (probably Linode). With that being said, I feel like I may be a spoiled little GNU user. There's plenty of times where I end up on a BSD system, and I try to use some sort of GNU-idiom in a command-line utility and I end up really really confused and unsure of how to bend it to my will. I think GNU sed is one of the first ones to come to mind, but there are definitely other utilities where the flags don't match up or don't even exist.

untothebreach 13y ago
The next time that happens, try running the command again, but prepend a 'g' (so gsed, gawk, etc). Most BSD systems have the GNU versions of utilities present in their ports systems, and many come with the gnu coreutils installed, g-prefixed.
- asdasf 13y ago
  None of them come with the GNU coreutils installed. You have to install them if you want them. I'd recommend learning basic unix commands instead though, it doesn't take very long at all.
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]

tete 13y ago

We recently switched from a Debian and Cloud hybrid to FreeBSD. Result: We have recent, stable software (Ports rock!), we are overall more stable than we were on the cloud, we have no more need to work around limitations of clouds and we have more resources while only paying a fraction, compared to our cloud service. Because of this we can have way more systems, which means we can use that for HA and are always set up for a sudden increase of users. With FreeBSD's jails we have a perfect cloud-like separation of services. I used to be a huge fan of cloud computing, but what I really dislike these days is that while it makes it easier and way cheaper for companies it actually brings close to zero benefits to users, even being more expensive and connected with more limitations. A lot of the time people seem to use cloud hosting, because everyone else does so and because it is a hype right now.

jrochkind1 13y ago
What's the relationship between the switch from 'cloud' hosting to your own boxes; and the switch to FreeBSD? What does one have to do with the other?
- hcarvalhoalves 13y ago
  I believe he/she explains it ("jails").
  - biot 13y ago
    As one can run FreeBSD "in the cloud" and use jails there, I don't think that explains it.
    - tete 13y ago
      It partly explains it, because for some it might be a reason to go for clouds in first place. I agree, it's not always the case. However as explained I think there are many wrong expectations coming from clouds: - Isolation: Like already mentioned. You can use jails and nowadays LXC - Up to date software: Either managed or with special/official images (again the isolation comes up her). This is a reason for FreeBSD. Their ports system and base system allow for both stability and up to date software. Big plus for startups, because they usually depend more on this than others. - Uptime: I don't know why this is so big. If you are designing (mostly) stateless systems, like for the cloud you usually have the same benefits off the cloud. You have to pay for HA (many instances) on the cloud. It doesn't make it magically more available. However, if you go off the cloud, even reserved Amazon instances you can easily build extremely high availability cause it will cost less for you. One big thing when cloud computing game up was how great it is that resources can be used more efficiently and how it is cheaper for that reason. However, because of all the hype (I guess) it is only cheaper for cloud hosts. - Scale out: Again, this is a question of cost: Do you start out with two or three instances in the cloud or for the same money just get 5-10 real systems (no joke, look how cheap professional grade hosting became!) so you don't need to bother in first place? So you end up with less resources and higher costs and potentially cannot (or have a harder time to) run certain services that simply are not optimized for the cloud. Again, if you design your software to run in the cloud you usually have software that on real hardware is close to zero maintenance (well, at least less than what you have to do for clouds anyway). I am sure there are good reasons for running FreeBSD on the cloud instead of just buying your own machines and connect them (over multiple data centers if you worry a lot). And we actually also use the cloud for backups. However I really think that often the term cloud is used as just another buzzword and the benefits are mostly imagined, caused by a huge hype, not always, but way too often. Don't get me wrong, I am not against cloud computing at all. I just came across way to many people/startups paying for expensive cloud infrastructure seemingly not having any reason for it, other than it being hyped. When I ask why they do it then they either don't know or have really wrong expectations.

emaste 13y ago

A few corrections: LLVM/CLANG: GCC is still in the base FreeBSD source tree, and is still used for CPU architectures where Clang support is not sufficiently mature. In addition, the article claims that GCC will remain "for a time" in the ports tree. GCC isn't going to be removed from the ports tree. Tickless kernel: There's a spurious reference to "atomic close-on-exec" here. PF: PF itself was ported from OpenBSD, while the SMP improvements were developed in FreeBSD. Netmap: Netmap is a very high performance _Layer 2_ Ethernet packet interface; the reference to "65536 routing tables" is not applicable. There are also a few items on here which are either works in progress or brainstorming ideas, and are not likely to be available in FreeBSD 10.0 (but may arrive in a later 10 point release): Variable symlinks, full UEFI, PCI hot-plug, Thunderbolt.

twic 13y ago
Variable symlinks stood out as a bit of a surprise on that list. Everything else is understandable as either an improvement in the implementation of an established feature, or an improvement of a feature in FreeBSD's core areas of excellence (eg networking and storage), or a sop to the fashion for virtualisation. But variable symlinks seem, to my ignorant eyes, like a new feature that is not aimed at any particular strategic goal, just some cool thing. What is the rationale behind adding variable symlinks? Are they necessary to support some other feature? Are they being adopted for parity with some other form of UNIX? Is there a considered opinion that they will be found widely useful? Is there any discussion about them we can read?
- jzwinck 13y ago
  Linux has namespaces which seem a little bit similar to variable symlinks (in that both allow different processes on one system to see different filesystem contents).
- noelwelsh 13y ago
  I think they are to support lightweight virtualisation like that used by Docker.io. This allows multiple processes to act as though they own a particular filesystem, which in fact in shared.

Ixiaus 13y ago

I love this operating system.

knob 13y ago
Heck yeah! And the communities in (forums.freebsd.org) and #freebsd (and #44BSD)...

windexh8er 13y ago

I loved FreeBSD all through the late 90s / early 2000s in high school and college. I was working for a small ISP that ran 100% FreeBSD and cut my teeth on *nix in general on the platform. My first foray into Linux (Debian) felt sloppy and discombobulated comparatively. Why? FreeBSD is an entire OS, not a menagerie of tools wrapped around a common kernel. FreeBSD always felt much more polished, complete and predictable. Unfortunately our team made the choice to migrate to Debian for ease of upgrades and security patches (no more building world). Back in the day the limited resources from a processing perspective made those upgrades much longer than an apt-get upgrade. I love Linux (Arch / Debian), but I still have a soft spot for FreeBSD. I have flashbacks to the network install via a floppy that remind me of the simpler time of the Internet. I need to re-engage with 10. Lots of great platforms I use are still based on it - FreeNAS and PFSense. If you've never tried it, I encourage you to learn the system.

emaste 13y ago
The need for binary updates is certainly understandable, and was a reasonably common complaint. Binary updates have now largely become a "solved problem" on FreeBSD, through freebsd-update (ca. 2007, for the base system) and pkgng (ca. today, for third party software).
- dman 13y ago
  I dont think theyre a solved problem yet. Strangely enough the ports system appears to be too flexible. Which one should I be using in 2013 to install packages - pkg_add, pkgng, portmaster, portupgrade, running make install from within the ports source tree? Could someone who knows more about FreeBSD than I do comment on whats state of the art in terms of installing / upgrading packages?
  - oscargrouch 13y ago
    for binary packages; pkgng: "$ pkg add ..." for source code install; ports pkg_add and pkg_delete are becoming obsolete by pkgng
  - 13y ago

checker659 13y ago

Anyone know what happened to Capsicum? Can't find any mention of it anywhere.

oscargrouch 13y ago
thats because it was already merged in freebsd 9 .. for freebsd 10, they are polishing it.. but it works since 9.. For me this is another thing that are very appealing! if you mix capsicum with jails, zfs, geli, pf.. you can have the most secure box in the world.. all of this amazing technology directly integrated with the kernel, and being maintained in the mainstream freebsd. no thirdy-parties involved also projects like netmap are sweet..
enjolras 13y ago
Capsicum is still work in progress and worked on. Since FreeBSD 9, it has undergone a lot of internal design changes (capabilities are now embedded in the filedescriptors instead of being standalone structures), and API changes. Yet another API change is undergoing to make the code more future proof (currently, you can have only 64 different capability rights, which is not enough), but it's happening out of tree. There are also new libraries to ease applications developpement. Capsicum is not yet in a real production state. It's a big project and it needs a lot of thoughs to get it right. I don't know if it will get in FreeBSD 10, I'm not a freeBSD guy, but you can be sure there are still a lot of work dedicated to capsicum ! After the basic kernel API and libs has been stabilized, it will still need work to convert applications to capsicum before you can consider capsicum as a deployed security mechanism in FreeBSD.

mcfist 13y ago

Just right now happen to help old $work with their 4.11-STABLE FreeBSD station, not touched since 2005 .. amazing technology, love it!. Still working, and while compiling ancient stuff from ports tree, am writing this comment from Konqueror 3.3.2 from 2004 . Thank you FreeBSD people!

jff 13y ago

Does pkgng actually have any packages on it these days? The last few times I've checked, nothing's been available because of a security breach a year ago or whatever.

kryptiskt 13y ago
PC-BSD has pkgng packages, you just have to change the URL. http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Convert_a_FreeBSD_System_to_PC-BSD%C2%AE#Switching_to_the_PC-BSD.C2.AE_pkgng_Repository http://wiki.pcbsd.org/index.php/Convert_a_FreeBSD_System_to_...
alyandon 13y ago
Just tried it out. Still no packages.

MichaelMoser123 13y ago

Does anybody know how RDRAND is being used in FreeBSD 10 ? is RDRAND somehow mandated so that it must be used, I mean why are both Linux and BSD both thinking that this is such a swell feature that must be implemented ? Theodore Tso - the author of Linux /dev/random thinks that using it is a bad idea https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/SDcoemc9V3J https://plus.google.com/117091380454742934025/posts/SDcoemc9...

bcoates 13y ago
A lack of entropy sources on some kinds of hardware is a real problem, and buggy attempts to work around it have resulted in defective, easily factorable keys being used in the wild on equipment like Juniper SRX gateways: https://factorable.net/weakkeys12.extended.pdf https://factorable.net/weakkeys12.extended.pdf

Nux 13y ago

I guess this is not the year FreeBSD gets a decent package manager (for binaries).. :( Maybe next year.

GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
I guess you're wrong. http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html http://www5.us.freebsd.org/doc/handbook/pkgng-intro.html
- Nux 13y ago
  No I am not. I said "decent", this implies at least "usable". It'd be nice to get that done by the time it hits stable, but I wouldn't hold my breath.
  - GalacticDomin8r 13y ago
    > No I am not. Yes you are. > I said "decent", this implies at least "usable". Agreed. > It'd be nice to get that done by the time it hits stable, but I wouldn't hold my breath. pkgng has been usable for over a year. Read the page I linked too.
    - Nux 13y ago
      I'm still not wrong. :) Pkgng itself seems like it's working, but bootstrapped fresh on a FreeBSD 9.1 it provided a non-existing repo: [root@freebsd91 ~]# cat /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf packagesite: http://pkgbeta.FreeBSD.org/freebsd:9:x86:64/latest http://pkgbeta.FreeBSD.org/freebsd:9:x86:64/latest And that URL is actually a 404 page. Additionally the existing binary repos (the one pkg_add uses) cannot be used with pkgng. So essentially - unless you want to start building packages and maintaining repos - pkgng is at this moment _useless_. I do wonder if they'll manage to come up with decent[1] repos in time for the final release. [1] - providing many packages and updates like in the linux distros world, not just "set it and leave it" as they do with the current repos.
      - 13y ago

AsymetricCom 13y ago

11. backdoor in sshd, compliments of NSA

Apocryphon 13y ago

Will *BSD projects eventually try appealing to the mainstream the same way Ubuntu and Mint have been over the last decade?

jacobwcarlson 13y ago

The replacement of BIND is quite the landmark.

lawnchair_larry 13y ago

Unfortunately FreeBSD is still in the 90s with security technology, making it completely unsuitable for hosting anything important.

jpeterson 13y ago
What are you talking about?
profquail 13y ago
Can you provide any citations to back that up? FreeBSD's new security framework -- Capsicum -- has been backed by Google: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/ http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/research/security/capsicum/

tsahyt 13y ago

Is there any reason for switching to LLVM/CLANG from GCC other than the licensing?