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FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

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Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#41

Post by pktgen »

erichurkman wrote: post #9

It sounds like some amazing performance boosts around networking. I wonder how much of that will carry over to all of the network-type appliances built on FreeBSD? I know Juno's OS runs a pretty ancient version of FreeBSD (6 or 7 IIRC), but am not sure about any other commercial uses.

Hmm, it might make some difference on some of the Juniper lines (is the SRX line software-based?) but any of the high-end Juniper products are only using JunOS for the control plane. Only control traffic and certain exception cases (e.g. ICMP) ever hit the BSD/JunOS network stack; the rest is all handled in hardware.

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#42

Post by daemon13 »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #27
kunai wrote: post #20

I run BSD on all of my desktop boxes, but I have not found any way to run it on a laptop. It just doesn't seem feasible; there are just so many mobile drivers that are missing. Has anyone else had any luck with getting FreeBSD to work on a laptop, or is Linux still the de-facto?

I have used BSD on all my laptops for the past eight ? years. wifi is my biggest bugbear but I fear I generally ignore anything that is not germane to the basics. seriously want a write up?

Yes, please !!

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#43

Post by 4ad »

rwmj wrote: post #33

Can anyone tell me more about the hypervisor ( http://bhyve.org/ )? The design looks extremely similar to KVM, so I don't understand why they didn't just implement the KVM ioctls, on the basis that they would be able to run all the existing userspace (ie. qemu). The problem with implementing a similar-but-different kernel API is that you've either got to persuade qemu to implement your API as well as KVM, or you have…

They don't have to convince anyone, nor rewrite anything. It's a different architecture. Note that not even KVM doesn't technically need Qemu in particular. Qemu is overkill for most usage of KVM, but they used it because it was available. Some people wrote something much smaller that can be used with KVM: https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/3/31/406

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#44

Post by profquail »

gonzo wrote: post #30
profquail wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD 10 is also going to have much-improved support for Xen [1][2] and newly-added support for Hyper-V [3]. I'd love to see AWS and Azure support first-class FreeBSD instances. (You can currently run FreeBSD instances using cperciva's AMIs [4], but that's not the same as Amazon supporting FreeBSD in the same way they support Linux). [1]: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/2013-June/001... [2]: http://w…

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/aws-marketplace-additiona... edit: we're about to launch pfSense on EC2, too.

Ah, I hadn't seen that -- thanks for the link.

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#45

Post by profquail »

cperciva wrote: post #39
profquail wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD 10 is also going to have much-improved support for Xen [1][2] and newly-added support for Hyper-V [3]. I'd love to see AWS and Azure support first-class FreeBSD instances. (You can currently run FreeBSD instances using cperciva's AMIs [4], but that's not the same as Amazon supporting FreeBSD in the same way they support Linux). [1]: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/2013-June/001... [2]: http://w…

You can currently run FreeBSD instances using cperciva's AMIs, but that's not the same as Amazon supporting FreeBSD in the same way they support Linux. The only "lack of support" which concerns me is the fact that on older EC2 instance types HVM (which FreeBSD uses) is only available by paying for a Windows license. I wouldn't want Amazon to start publishing their own "FreeBSD" images -- those should be provided by t…

That's what I mean -- having to pay for a Windows license you're not using is a strong deterrent to using FreeBSD on AWS; people who might prefer a FreeBSD server end up using Linux instead simply because of the cost difference.

You're far more knowledgeable than I (or pretty much anyone else!) about building FreeBSD AMIs, so if you say they should be provided directly by the project, I'm happy to go with that. I would just like to see 'FreeBSD' appear as a "mainstream" option when choosing the OS for a new EC2 instance. (See gonzo's link -- the dialog shown in the picture has 15 Linux distributions available; it'd be nice for FreeBSD to be on that menu.)

Will the licensing issue for the smaller AMIs go away once the PVHVM drivers are fully implemented? I don't know a whole lot about Xen, so I'm curious to know what needs to be implemented to fix that problem.

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#46

Post by profquail »

hannibal5 wrote: post #37
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #17

quick summary for the impatient: - drop GCC for CLANG. - introduce VPS (more virtualised approach to jails) - introduce bhyve (native hypervisor on common standards) - replace BIND - Can be run on raspberry pi - major speed ups in SMP, and networking FreeBSD Is taking a fairly big leap forward in its sweet spot of the workhorse of the data farm. BSD has always had great jails virtualisation support (it's what LXC or…

What is the status of ZFS? I have been running Solaris for years only because ZFS is so incredibly good as fileserver for mid sized company and for personal use.

I'm no expert, but ZFS support on FreeBSD seems to be pretty solid (more or less on par with Solaris). FreeNAS seems to be quite popular and it's based on FreeBSD and ZFS.

If you have a question about a specific ZFS feature, drop by the FreeBSD forums (http://forums.freebsd.org) and ask; the FreeBSD community is generally quite friendly and I'm sure you'll get a good answer to your question.

For general information about FreeBSD + ZFS, check out these links:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/fi...

https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#47

Post by MichaelStubbs »

kunai wrote: post #20

I run BSD on all of my desktop boxes, but I have not found any way to run it on a laptop. It just doesn't seem feasible; there are just so many mobile drivers that are missing. Has anyone else had any luck with getting FreeBSD to work on a laptop, or is Linux still the de-facto?

I used to run FreeBSD on my Toshiba Satellite C660-180 and encountered no issues. Everything seemed to work out of the box and performance was on par with version 3.2 of the Linux kernel.

I keep meaning to switch back to FreeBSD, actually. This alpha may prompt me to give it a shot.

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#48

Post by drhowarddrfine »

hannibal5 wrote: post #37
lifeisstillgood wrote: post #17

quick summary for the impatient: - drop GCC for CLANG. - introduce VPS (more virtualised approach to jails) - introduce bhyve (native hypervisor on common standards) - replace BIND - Can be run on raspberry pi - major speed ups in SMP, and networking FreeBSD Is taking a fairly big leap forward in its sweet spot of the workhorse of the data farm. BSD has always had great jails virtualisation support (it's what LXC or…

What is the status of ZFS? I have been running Solaris for years only because ZFS is so incredibly good as fileserver for mid sized company and for personal use.

I'm not the one to ask but, on the FreeBSD forum, it's all that's talked about. That is, everyone is using it and there are a multitude of questions from people asking how to use it. From what I gather, it is every bit as good as Solaris or at least approaches it. Again, I'm a FreeBSD user but not the person who would know.

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#49

Post by profquail »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #26
profquail wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD 10 is also going to have much-improved support for Xen [1][2] and newly-added support for Hyper-V [3]. I'd love to see AWS and Azure support first-class FreeBSD instances. (You can currently run FreeBSD instances using cperciva's AMIs [4], but that's not the same as Amazon supporting FreeBSD in the same way they support Linux). [1]: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/2013-June/001... [2]: http://w…

agreed with AWS and freebsd. although there is hardly the demand - each year I have a debate whether to forego BSD entirely (especially on the desktop) but its just that too good to lose. it looks like I'm going to get saltstack working with VpS and keep with Rackspace :-)

> although there is hardly the demand

It's a chicken/egg problem -- Amazon won't be motivated to implement additional support for FreeBSD without more people asking for it, but the additional visibility FreeBSD would gain from better support on AWS (and/or Azure) would definitely increase the number of people using it. It seems like FreeBSD has seen an upswing in interest over the past couple of years, and if interest keeps growing I think it'd eventually hit some threshold where Amazon is willing to implement better support for FreeBSD and then put some marketing behind it.

On FreeBSD + saltstack: I saw an interesting article a few weeks back (on the saltstack website, no less) about them implementing better support for FreeBSD, specifically w.r.t. jails:

http://intothesaltmine.org/blog/html/2013/08/30/bootstrappin...

Re: FreeBSD 10.0 Alpha 1 now available

#50

Post by profquail »

telephonetemp wrote: post #34

Is there information as to whether pkgng will be available in time for the 10.0 release?

AFAIK, pkgng is the default package manager in both FreeBSD 9.2 (due any day now) and 10.0. The table at the bottom of this page says so anyway, and it was updated just a few months back:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng/CharterAndRoadMap

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