Story 2014-11-21 2V56 FreeBSD 10.1 Released!

FreeBSD 10.1 Released!

by
in bsd on (#2V56)
The FreeBSD team has released FreeBSD 10.1!

You can read more about some of the highlights at the FreeBSD announcement, but in brief, they include: updated network drivers, updates to ZFS, sendmail, the use ofunbound in place of bind as default resolver, the bhyve hypervisor, and lots of userland updates.

Important to this FreeBSD user is the new vt virtual console driver, as 10.0 introduced a bug that disabled virtual consoles for anyone with an Intel video chip (imagine a FreeBSD install that requires a GUI!). Lots of work is being put into this new driver, to bring FreeBSD's virtual consoles up to speed with Linux.

As always, the new version comes in ISO and USB formats, netboot, and more; and for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, sparc64, and armv6 architectures.
Reply 11 comments

But does it run (Score: 2, Funny)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-11-22 13:34 (#2V5M)

systemd? *ducks*

too soon?

Re: But does it run (Score: -1, Troll)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-11-22 13:38 (#2V5N)

Fuck systemd.

FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: 1, Interesting)

by engblom@pipedot.org on 2014-11-22 17:08 (#2V5W)

FreeBSD was once solid and good. 4.x series was really stable and I never experienced any problems. Then they begun with way too big changes and there was not even one version I would not see problems and panics with.

Already from this summery you can see the quality of FreeBSD. I bet they knew the Intel framebuffer did not work for 10.0. Still they shipped it. It is good they got that one working for 10.1, but I wonder what more they did break with this 10.1.

Yes, feel free to mark me as a troll, but I am very disappointed at FreeBSD and this is my experience. Since then I have moved over to OpenBSD. C is an easy language to begin coding in but a super difficult language if you want good quality product. Very few OS has the discipline for that.

Re: FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: -1, Troll)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-11-23 00:58 (#2V62)

OpenBSD has that discipline, SJW's would call him a bastard troll and say OpenBSD doesn't exist and theo has never contributed to opensource.

Re: FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: 2, Insightful)

by zafiro17@pipedot.org on 2014-11-23 21:20 (#2V72)

I'm just glad they're putting any work into the console at all. syscons is really dated, sadly and this will set up FreeBSD for bigger and better. I'm seeing a HUGE surge in interest in the BSDs suddenly, and not just because of systemd (watch out, because the FreeBSD team isn't necessarily averse to something like systemd, although probably not systemd itself). I think all the recent cruftiness has led to some Linux fatigue: pulseaudio, btrfs, Gnome3, Wayland, Unity, endlessly-shifting APIs, etc. FreeBSD might be buggy in this edition but it's still pretty darned conservative by any Linux distro's standards, and that's not a bad thing at a time when suddenly many people are taking a renewed interest in alternatives to their favorite Linux distro. Who knows, maybe there will be some converts. Lord knows FreeBSD is a lot more approachable than the other BSDs.

Re: FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2014-11-23 21:40 (#2V73)

Actually I am mildly interested. Mildly = not enough to get my lazy *** up and actually install it, but follow with interest BSD articles.

Re: FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: 1)

by billshooterofbul@pipedot.org on 2014-11-25 16:22 (#2V9A)

I was into FreeBSD before Linux. I'm still interested in its development, as its an alternative development to LInux. I think we're all better for having different operating systems exploring their own paths. I really only switched off FreeBSD, due to some performance issues it had running common FOSS applications due to its threading library.

I think Linux is still very much ahead in os design. All of the "problems" that you listed, I think are actually quite good developments ( except Unity ). But I trust FreeBSD to come up with something cool, none-the-less. BSD's always do great stuff. Just not as fast to keep up with Linux.

Re: FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: 1)

by tanuki64@pipedot.org on 2014-11-25 16:45 (#2V9C)

All of the "problems" that you listed, I think are actually quite good developments
I am not 100% sure of that. It could introduce "bottlenecks" into Linux. At the moment if I don't like Gnome3 or pulseaudio I just don't use them. I don't know if the current development leads in a direction, which might limit this choice in the future.

Re: FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: 0)

by Anonymous Coward on 2014-11-28 12:16 (#2VAF)

All of the "problems" that you listed, I think are actually quite good developments ( except Unity ).
I disagree. Pulseaudio tries to solve a problem which is much better done in BSD using OSS. JACK is another superior alternative. pulseaudio started as a lame attempt at making a userland mixer and got bloated including "network" sound cards and shit. Still doesn't work properly even on vanilla installations.

I don't know about btrfs.

wayland is just another toy system brought to you by the guys who wrote X11. They are still doing the same stupid stuff, mechanism-but-no-policy shit. Look at how divided and buggy our desktop systems are today. Just effing cut and paste doesn't work too well. Yes, they did make a very nice mechanism for it. You could transfer anything from grocery lists to video sections between applications but they failed to handle the most common cases in a user friendly manner. Same is happening with wayland. Back in the day, GUIs were still something new and a system like X11 made sense for research purposes. Today, we have tons of information about how GUI systems are used, what are the required features etc. wayland, instead of making use of this information and unifying the environment, goes one step further than X11, saying that 'a screen is just a framebuffer, I will let you share it and you will shut up'.

Gnome3 and Unity are desktop environments trying to grow into operating systems. The 'operating system' part of these things are often broken. Virtual file systems, network managers, fucking *thumbnailing* services all work to a degree and are promised to be fixed soon. A couple of years later, they change the whole interface, code structure etc. and all the tools have to be re-written with new but different sets of bugs. Some people do like these environments but there is nothing objectively better about them.

Re: FreeBSD is buggy, sadly (Score: 1)

by falken@pipedot.org on 2014-12-04 19:05 (#2VKC)

FreeBSD was once solid and good. 4.x series was really stable and I never experienced any problems. Then they begun with way too big changes and there was not even one version I would not see problems and panics with.
I guess it matters what you use it for. I switched from Linux to FBSD as my main OS of choice after yet another root vulnerability in Linux 2.2.19. On the desktop, Linux is better: more driver support, more applications etc. As a server though, FreeBSD outruns every other OS I've worked with. I once managed to squeeze a webhoster's server farm of 8 racks full of 1U servers into two racks of FreeBSD boxes, same hardware.

Did they go downhill? Perhaps a bit. I don't like the new pkg tool (every frikkin' time I want a small package I'm first download 4 megs of repository and a mandatory update for pkg itself), and graphical applications are still quite sucky. On the server-side however, I've haven't seen that issue. I haven't had a box go down in years.

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE (GENERIC) #0: Sun Feb 24 19:59:52 UTC 2008

[falken@doos ~]$ uptime
8:03PM up 795 days, 39 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.02, 0.02, 0.01
[falken@doos ~]$

Seriously, try that with Linux.