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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:37PM   Printer-friendly
from the it's-one-louder-innit? dept.

The FreeBSD project has announced a new stable version of the FreeBSD operating system. The announcement says that initial builds were "withdrawn" due to "several last-minute issues" and that

Users that have installed FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE from the images originally available on the mirrors or from freebsd-update(8) prior to the rebuild of the final release are urged to upgrade their systems to FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE-p1 immediately.

Among the changes are a new version of OpenSSH which no longer supports version 1 of the SSH protocol, support for 802.11n Wi-Fi, a port to 64-bit ARM processors, and graphics support in the bhyve hypervisor.

further reading:
errata
release notes
fossbytes


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by NCommander on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:56PM

    by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday October 11 2016, @03:56PM (#412975) Homepage Journal

    We've been debating migrating the SN servers from Ubuntu 14.04 to FreeBSD, and every time I see their release notes, I like it more and more. I may rebuild dev/lithium in the near future to a FreeBSD base so we can experiment with it and change over one of the two production frontends (hydrogen/fluorine) to see how it works in practice.

    --
    Still always moving
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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by dyingtolive on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:02PM

    by dyingtolive (952) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:02PM (#412979)

    Well, not that my opinion alone should matter, but I've come to the point where I prefer it to pretty much any flavor of Linux you stack it up against. And only somewhat because of systemd.

    --
    Don't blame me, I voted for moose wang!
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:25PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @04:25PM (#412986)

    Just my two cents, but I'm a believer in IIABDFI. But I suppose diversifying the servers might actually be a benefit in comparing the relative headaches in a meta post. Goodness knows I trust your opinion more than random people I find on the internet.

    • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:11PM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:11PM (#413006) Homepage Journal

      Its not a change we're making lightly, but none of the sysops staff like where current Linux distros are headed, and we don't want to use a rolling release for our server (which excludes most systemd free Linux distros). As it stands, we have 2.5 years left of security and support for on Ubuntu 14.04, and 7 years on CentOS 6 (which Beryllium uses). I'm actively avoiding us from being an example of an organization that is three or four major versions out of date.

      If it wasn't for the fact that Ubuntu 16.04 has been problematic for me in testing environment already (combined with systemd), we'd already have upgraded; we already did in-place upgrades from Ubuntu 12.04 -> 14.04, and only once have we wiped out a machine and rebuilt it since golive.

      --
      Still always moving
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:11PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:11PM (#413060)

        It isn't a 'rolling release' distro, has stable and unstable branches, eliminated systemd, seems to cross-migrate fine from ubuntu (just make sure it is a clean ubuntu install without launchpad packages.), and generally seems to make a good fill in for other distros, with support on pretty much any platform debian supports, and talk of supporting a few others it doesn't officially anymore.

        • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:25AM

          by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:25AM (#413184) Homepage Journal

          Devuan had quite a few issues with it last time I looked (which admitly was awhile ago) that made me very "eh" on selecting it as a choice of distro. It looks like they migrated away from using Jenkins as a build service and are less on the crack pipe than they were historically so maybe worth a second-look.

          --
          Still always moving
          • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:07AM

            by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 12 2016, @04:07AM (#413269)

            What is wrong with Jenkins? Seems to be the choice for most people not on github or gitlab.

      • (Score: 1) by AlwaysNever on Tuesday October 11 2016, @10:27PM

        by AlwaysNever (5817) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @10:27PM (#413142)

        The sensible thing to do is to go fully Centos6, and just wait for SystemD to be stabilized and the "ecosystem" of tools, scripts and tricks around it to grow.

        I would not touch FreeBSD for anything, unless I already was a FreeBSD expert for some reason. The "ecosystem" for FreeBSD is to narrow.

    • (Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:11PM

      by LoRdTAW (3755) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:11PM (#413007) Journal

      Just my two cents, but I'm a believer in IIABDFI.

      Same here. But there are times when there is an exception to the rule. FreeBSD design is kept simple and clean whereas Linux is getting messy and bloated. Keeping things simple is good for the long run.

  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:02PM

    by Unixnut (5779) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:02PM (#412998)

    I migrated my main servers over to FreeBSD after SystemD entered Debian, and after taking some time to get used to it, I do like it very much. I have moved everything I could over to it, and while it is more finicky and takes some fettling for best performance, once done and set up it just chugs along doing its business with virtually no intervention from me.

    Also ZFS is very nice, especially for storage nodes. Being in the process of building a new server now, am switching over from HP Hardware raid to just a HBA and JBOD setup, which should work even better than having to go through the raid card. Although ZFS is RAM heavy (even without deduplication) so I am doubling the RAM requirements for the new server.

    All in all, I have no intention of going back to Linux on the server side for the time being, only Linux servers we have are legacy ones, or the few that still have Linux only software for them.

    Desktop will still be Linux though, although Devuan (SystemD free) is replacing all other distro's. FreeBSD is behind on some things, for example there does not seem to be any working USB3 storage support (while USB3 support is apparently in FreeBSD since 2010, it core dumps every time I plug in a USB3 device into it, so not quite production ready yet, at least on my hardware).

    Good luck with your tests! Hopefully it will be a success :)

    • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:52PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:52PM (#413025)

      I've been running FreeBSD for a small server (currently 10.2) and a desktop (currently 10.3) on fit-PC 'Mintbox2's for about a year now. They each have two USB3 ports on them and I haven't had any trouble at all with them. I do a weekly ZFS backup to a portable USB3 drive and haven't seen any issues. And yes, ZFS _is_ nice :).

      You might want to check the USB3 support with some other hardware.

      • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:37PM

        by Unixnut (5779) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:37PM (#413075)

        Yes, unfortunately all the hardware I have is identical, as it is usually cheaper to buy hardware in bulk. So identical motherboards, all of which have USB3 from the same chipset. FreeBSD acts the same on all of them, hence why I added the "at least on my hardware" bit. I can imagine that in the last 6 years since USB3 came about in FreeBSD, it worked for most people, otherwise more attention would have been placed on the issue. My hardware is relatively new, so could just be a matter of time before it is supported.

        All I know is USB3 worked perfectly when Linux ran on the same hardware, so there is a ways to go for FreeBSD on the desktop. I can't give a client a desktop where plugging in a USB3 hard drive core dumps the OS. You can get away with that on a server, but not on a desktop.

        Plus a lot of third party packages are Linux only, so I suspect Linux will stay on the desktops for the foreseeable future, thankfully without systemd in my case. We shall revisit the situation in future of course, depending on how things go.

    • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:58PM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:58PM (#413031)

      Although ZFS is RAM heavy

      Generically speaking if you have "typical" configs then if you're spinning rust you'll need some RAM and if you're SSD then unless you're unimaginably rich you won't need an unusual amount of extra RAM.

      Also if you load the box up with memory for faster disk caching and/or virtualizing a bunch of hosts the problem of RAM for ZFS will kinda take care of itself. So I've got 32 gigs at home because I have virtualized hosts to do interesting things, which means ZFS is pretty chill on a machine thats only got a TB of SSD (mirrored thats only 500 gigs and the ratio of 500 of storage to 32 of ram apparently is more than good enough to make ZFS extremely happy. And fast.)

      • (Score: 2) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:31PM

        by Unixnut (5779) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @07:31PM (#413070)

        I can believe it, the old machine had 16 GB for a 6 TB array of dual raidz1's ( 8 x 1TB disks, with 2 SSDs for caching), along with 5 virtualized Linux Hosts on it.

        While the setup was good, it would bog down after 30 odd days of running, and start running out of memory, you can't swap out the VirtualBox VMs, and you can't swap out the ARC cache, so the machine would eventually hang and reset. I believe 32GB will work the magic, hence the new machine will have that much. My client is a small business (3-5 people), so I can't really spec out massive enterprise hardware for their needs.

        On larger machines which I worked on ZFS and FreeBSD works wonders, but we are talking 216 disk behemoths (3 rackmount 72 disk enclosures with FC to the head unit). Some serious money was thrown in that direction.

        I guess I should have stated the RAM sizes in my original post. 16GB is pitifully small by modern standards, but the machine was old and a retrofit from the old Linux + HPArray RAID just to prove the concept and test out BSD/ZFS. Linux with an equivalent hardware raid didn't need as much RAM to function, plus I suspect the overcommit feature/bug in Linux allowed it to be run far closer to full utilisation most of the time.

         

        • (Score: 2) by fnj on Tuesday October 11 2016, @08:27PM

          by fnj (1654) on Tuesday October 11 2016, @08:27PM (#413100)

          I don't have any problem at all running ZFS on CentOS6 with 16 GB for several years so far. Two 6-disk RAID-Z2 storage pools; 36 TB of total storage. I have had no problem with RAM exhaustion after multiple uptimes > 100 days.

  • (Score: 2) by VLM on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:52PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:52PM (#413026)

    Still using linode? I am. Just checked and its possible to run an install of freebsd by supplying your own install stuff, but its not as simple as selecting "freebsd 11.0" in the dropdown instead of Debian 8 like I use. More like you select an ISO file and do an install. Its like my last old time Debian box that hasn't been converted at home or work into freebsd.

    Strangely enough there is a document at linode.com explaining the whole manual install process using freebsd 10.1

    Another thing I noticed is you'd think my ansible config would double in size but its probably more like triple due to PITA of having to support two OS for awhile and stuff I never thought to put in a OS wrapper or never thought I'd need to configure, etc etc.

    Anyway just thought this might be interesting to contemplate.

    Subjectively over a year or two freebsd provides much less hand holding. For example "recently" probably unrelated to the 11.0 release, the non-free nvidia driver changed from being called as "nvidia" by loader.conf to silently failing and you need to call it as "nvidia-modeset" for who knows why reasons or else you have no working non-free nvidia driver. Now on linux someone would put something into the upgrade script to automagically change any /etc/loader.conf to the new line, and if you boot after the upgrade then if you have the new nvidia and the old line in /etc/loader.conf then the init script (for xdm?) would make big screaming noises and announcements so it would be impossible to miss the change. But no, in freebsd you just get some text in the upgrade news file that most people ignore and skip over and then X fails on the next reboot. Wasn't too hard to figure out, but a bit of a WTF. Its not hidden, but not shouted from the roof tops linux style. Much less hand holding than say Ubuntu.

    • (Score: 2) by NCommander on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:22AM

      by NCommander (2) Subscriber Badge <michael@casadevall.pro> on Wednesday October 12 2016, @12:22AM (#413182) Homepage Journal

      Yeah, we're still on Linode, and we'll loose Linode's backup service if we switch it over to FreeBSD. Migrating off Linode is an option if it comes to that though TBH, I rather not do so if it can be avoided. Lots of pain in that scenario.

      --
      Still always moving
  • (Score: 2) by goodie on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:00AM

    by goodie (1877) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:00AM (#413208) Journal

    Used to use Linux, tried FreeBSD maybe 10 years ago or so (so way before systemd came in the picture). I'm by no means an expert in it but I love it for my home servers. The ports system is awesome (haven't really used packages) and the systems are rock solid. I got nothing but praise to give for FreeBSD. And it's small and close enough that the transition is much easier than say from Windows to Linux. I've even done some hadoop v2 test setups with openjdk and it's been pretty good. Honestly, there is nothing that Linux has that I have not been able to use in my setup. screw systemd

    • (Score: 1) by gdwatson on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:51AM

      by gdwatson (6071) on Wednesday October 12 2016, @02:51AM (#413236)

      If you don't need any unusual build options, you should give packages a shot. pkgng is wonderful.

      I like the quarterly package set myself, but that's for a desktop. It means I get updates reasonably frequently, and the bugs are allowed to shake out first. Security updates get pushed out more frequently than that. It's a good system.