In this BSD Now episode, hosts Kris Moore and Allan Jude discuss the upcoming DragonFlyBSD release, including much more news on the BSD world. Hit play below to tune in:
For this week’s roundup of BSD related content from BSD Now – http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2016_08_03-big_int_trouble
Michael Larabel of Phoronix recently compared three BSD systems (DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and PC-BSD) against ten Linux distributions, starting with benchmarks all the way to file compression speeds.
Earlier this week I posted the results of a 10-way Linux distribution battle on the same Intel Xeon system and using all of the popular and latest Linux distribution releases. Taking things further, the article today has those results complemented by results on the Xeon system for several BSD operating systems. For seeing how the BSD performance stacks up to Linux, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, and the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD were benchmarked.
Read his full report here: http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=article&item=3bsd-10linux&num=1
Thanks to DragonFlyDigest for the link.
In this BSD Now episode, hosts Allan Jude and Kris Moore interview DragonFlyBSD developer Sepherosa Ziehau regarding their network stack. In addition, they discuss the various methods of containment and privilege separation. Hit play below to tune in:
Original: http://www.bsdnow.tv/episodes/2015_06_17-stacked_in_our_favor
DragonFly 3.7 (-master) has just been updated to use dynamic binaries in the root filesystem. In order to update to this new feature, “a full buildworld + installworld sequence is required to avoid trouble.”
Check out the full notes from Francois Tigeot here: http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2014-April/128386.html
These are some links to past and upcoming FreeBSD related events:
Central European BSD day 2011 (Slovakia)
Central Europen BSDDay 2011 is taking place in Bratislava, Slovakia, on 5 November.
The purpose of this one-day event is to gather Central European developers of today’s open-source BSD systems, popularize their work, and provide an interface for real-life communication. There are no formalities, no papers, and no registration or participation fee, however the invited developers are encouraged to give a talk on their favorite BSD-related topic, then have a beer with the other folks around. The language of this event is English, and the goal is to motivate potential future developers and users, especially undergraduate university students to work with BSD systems.
For more info and to see the schedule of lectures, visit the Central Europen BSDday 2011 page.
BSDday Argentina 2011
BSDday Argentina is taking place on 5 November 2011 too.
For more info (currently quite sparce) visit the BSDDay Argentina 2011 website.
Google Code-In 2011
DragonFlyBSD is taking part. Would be good to see all major BSD projects getting involved. Google Code-in 2011.
EuroBSDCon 2011
The FreeBSD Foundation has added some trip reports of FreeBSD Foundation funded trips to the EuroBSDCon 2011 earlier this month.
Clang on FreeBSD (mp3)
The mp3 of Adam David Alan Martin’s NYCBUG presentation (“Clang on FreeBSD”) is now available at http://www.fetissov.org/public/nycbug/nycbug-10-05-11.mp3
Below some links to some FreeBSD resourses that you guys may be interested in, and other BSD related items I’ve come across.
FreeBSD
DragonFlyBSD
OpenBSD
As a company we are very dedicated to what we do because we are “forced” to use our operating system of choice and we want our customers to be as happy as we are at using it :-)
So our paid job is hacking on and deploying, maintaining, supporting… OpenBSD installations. We are also required to hack on things that can be merged back into OpenBSD itself and when it’s not possible, then we change what we did so that it can be. Of course some developments are very specific to what we do and have no place in the project’s CVS tree.
So, amongst other services, we set up and maintain several 100% OpenBSD-based infrastructures (going from the entry site firewall to the secretary’s workstation) and this is what I’m going to talk about here. Continues
BSD Certification
The BSD Certification Group (BSDCG) announced today that it has partnered with Schroeder Measurement Technologies (SMT) to increase the geographic availability of BSD certification exams. Through its sister company, Iso-Quality Testing (IQT), SMT maintains a testing center network of carefully selected partners, including college/university testing centers and computer-related businesses to provide testing services in a secure, proctored environment. Testing centers are available in over 300 cities in 19 countries. (full press release)
I. The Perfect Database Server: Firebird 2.5 And FreeBSD 8.1
Here is the guide on installing Firebird 2.5 from FreeBSD 8.1 Ports and creating your first test database; also we show you how to install Flamerobin GUI (administration tool) and the PHP driver for it: The perfect database server: Firebird 2.5 and FreeBSD 8.1
II. Can DragonFlyBSD’s HAMMER Compete With Btrfs, ZFS?
The most common Linux file-systems we talk about at Phoronix are of course Btrfs and EXT4 while the ZFS file-system, which is available on Linux as a FUSE (user-space) module or via a recent kernel module port, gets mentioned a fair amount too. When it comes to the FreeBSD and PC-BSD operating systems, ZFS is looked upon as the superior, next-generation option that is available to BSD users. However, with the DragonFlyBSD operating system there is another option: HAMMER. In this article we are seeing how the performance of this original creation within the DragonFlyBSD project competes with ZFS, UFS, EXT3, EXT4, and Btrfs.
HAMMER is a file-system created by the DragonFlyBSD developers themselves and is the default choice when installing this BSD operating system, but UFS remains a choice too. The one sentence description about this file-system is that “[HAMMER] provides instant crash recovery, multi-volume file systems, integrity checking, fine grained history/undo, networked mirroring, and historical snapshots.” HAMMER uses no fsck, can be sized up to one Exabyte, supports up to 256 volumes of four petabytes in size, coarse-grained history provided by snapshots with up to sixty days history, live snapshot access, and data/meta-data is CRC-checked. Like Btrfs, HAMMER snapshots can be taken at any time, can be accessed live, and boasts a similar set of features. Other HAMMER file-system features include the ability to split it up into multiple pseudo file-systems, there is support for back-up pseudo file-systems, NFS-exportable snapshots, and there is support for slave-to-slave mirroring streams: Can DragonFlyBSD’s HAMMER Compete With Btrfs, ZFS?
Matt Dillon’s, DragonFlyBSD’s project founder, thoughts on the test: HAMMER Benchmark Fun
III. Get Linux and FreeBSD hardware info with guide to commands
Switching between open source OSs can sometimes be confusing, since they may have different ways of doing things. A common task that may confuse some users when switching systems is getting hardware information. In the case of Linux-based OSs and FreeBSD, the following cheat sheet for figuring out how to do the same things on two different systems can ease some of the pain: Linux vs FreeBSD cheat sheet.
IV. Cost Optimization Through Open Source Software (iXsystems)
The lead article in this month’s edition of the Open Source Business Resource was contributed by iXsystems. It describes some of the business reasons behind the company’s choice to use only FreeBSD and PC-BSD systems in its own infrastructure and provides a cost/savings comparison for both software and maintenance costs. It also contains some good references and percentages if you’re looking for something to show your manager (via)
V. Creating an LVM-backed FreeBSD DomU in a Linux Dom0
As the topic suggests we’re going to play with Xen and set up a FreeBSD DomU inside a Linux Dom0.
FreeBSD 6.4 and 8.0 EoLs coming soon
On November 30th, FreeBSD 6.4 and FreeBSD 8.0 will have reached their End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Since FreeBSD 6.4 is the last remaining supported release from the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch, support for the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch will also cease at the same point. Users of either of these FreeBSD releases are strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 7.3 or FreeBSD 8.1 before that date.
The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to remind users that November 30 is also the end of support for the Ports Collection for both FreeBSD 6.4 RELEASE and the FreeBSD 6.x STABLE branch. Neither the infrastructure nor individual ports are guaranteed to work on these FreeBSD versions after that date. A CVS tag will be created for users who cannot upgrade for some reason, at which time these users are advised to stop tracking the latest ports CVS repository and use the RELEASE_6_EOL tag instead. (source)
FreeBSD at GSoC Mentor Summit
As in previous years, Google held a “Mentor Summit” to bring together representatives from the open source organizations that participated in the Google Summer of Code to share experiences of what worked, what didn’t, and generally learn from each other about shepherding students through the program. The mentor summit is always run Unconference-style and it is a great opportunity to meet, learn, and socialize with the many other open source organization… continues (Murray’s FreeBSD Notes)
FreeBSD Will Pay for Some KMS, GEM Love
“The good news, however, is that the FreeBSD Foundation is willing to finance a developer to work on bringing kernel mode-setting and Graphics Execution Manager support over to the FreeBSD kernel.”
Source & full story: FreeBSD Will Pay for Some KMS, GEM Love (phoronix.com)
Why I Love Unix
I love Unix because of all the wonderful things that I can do on the command line. When I first used Unix in 1983, it was love on first sight. With a list of the most basic commands by my side, I quickly discovered how much I could accomplish with several command strings strung together. Unix was nothing like what I’d been using up to that point in my brief data processing career. It was clever, modular and logical. With tools like grep and languages like awk, it was quite a bit of fun to discover how easily I could make the system do my bid. My ability to capture sequences of commands easily into scripts made it possible for me to encapsulate my clever commands, even share them with coworkers. The Unix culture seemed innovative, inviting my participation in creating an environment that really worked for me.
Full blog post: Why I love UNIX (itworld.com)
Other BSD related news
In the last 7 days we’ve seen a new version released by each of the 4 major BSD operating systems: OpenBSD 4.5, NetBSD, FreeBSD 7.2 and a “minor” DragonFlyBSD release (2.2.1).
Who said BSD was dying? Video 1 – “BSD is dying” (2007) – Video 2 – “BSD is still dying” (2009).
NetBSD 5
NetBSD, well-known for its high portability has arrived at version 5, which has been worked on for about 2 year. This release seems pretty interesting from a performance point of view. It’s claimed that NetBSD 5.0 now outruns NetBSD 4, FreeBSD 7.1 and Fedora 10.
In addition to scalability and performance improvements, a significant number of major features have been added. Some highlights are: a preview of metadata journaling for FFS file systems (known as WAPBL, Write Ahead Physical Block Logging), the ‘jemalloc’ memory allocator, the X.Org X11 distribution instead of XFree86 on a number of ports, the Power Management Framework, ACPI suspend/resume support on many laptops, write support for UDF file systems, the Automated Testing Framework, the Runnable Userspace Meta Program framework, Xen 3.3 support for both i386 and amd64, POSIX message queues and asynchronous I/O, and many new hardware device drivers. [source]
Release Notes – NetBSD Website
OpenBSD 4.5
OpenBSD, renowned for its focus on security (incl OpenSSH), has released version 4.5. The latest version comes with improved hardware support, new tools and functionalities and upgraded ports.
Oh yeah, and there’s also a new release song.
Release Notes – OpenBSD website
DragonFlyBSD 2.2.1
The new 2.2 release includes Hammer, a file system that includes instant crash recovery, multi-volume file systems, data integrity checking, fine grained history retention, and the ability to mirror data to other volumes. It has undergone extensive stress-testing and is considered production-ready!
Release Notes – DragonFly website
FreeBSD 7.2
7.2 review: improved virtualisation (nixcraft)
This blog, FreeBSD – the unknown Giant, as the title suggests, covers only FreeBSD related stories and updates. However, over the last few months, I have received emails from my some readers asking why I don’t write about the “other BSDs”, such as OpenBSD, NetBSD and DragonflyBSD.
Well, the answer is quite simple: “There’s no need to!” No, not because they’re not worth writing about, they certainly are, but because there are already some quality blogs dedicated to each of these BSD operating systems. Hence my reason for not, or only occasionally, writing about then. Since these blogs are regularly updated with news, howtos and information on made progress, I’ve decided not to just copy, paste and republish what’s on those blogs.
To find out more about OpenBSD, visit the OpenBSD Journal. The DragonflyBSD digest is updated regularly with news relating to DragonflyBSD, and lately a lot on the progress of the newly created and much promising Hammer File System (HammerFS), whilst Hubert’s NetBSD blog brings the latest and greatest with regards to NetBSD.
Of course there are more many blogs and websites tracking the “big four”, but these are the best as far as I’m aware.