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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 The announcement says that initial builds were "withdrawn" due to "several last-minute issues" and that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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Fascinating is a word I use for the unexpected.
-- Spock, "The Squire of Gothos", stardate 2124.5
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Unixnut on Tuesday October 11 2016, @05:02PM
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
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
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
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
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
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.