FreeBSD 8.0 is coming soon. Todays SVN Update from Ken Smit: Predict when 8.0-RELEASE will be announced => 2009-11-25 8.0-RELEASE.

Kip Macy has prepared ZFS v13 patches for RELENG_7. It's just a few days away from an official MFC (merge from current). You can download the latest patches from: http://svn.freebsd.org/base/user/kmacy/ZFS_MFC/

Please be careful. This has only been lightly tested. Please do not use it with data you care about at this time.

After a long beta and release candidate cycle FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE is near. Ken Smith, FreeBSD Release manager predicts 2008-11-28 as an official release date. It looks like there might be one more loose end. And what about FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE? Well, at least it has now it's RELENG_7_1 directory. I guess 7.1 is coming soon

Today the Port management team released the FreeBSD Ports Tree. It's now in the "slush" state. This means no sweeping commits until FreeBSD 6.4 and 7.1 releases are announced. Currently the cluster is building the required packages for the upcoming -RELEASES.

crashinfo(8) analyze a core dump of the operating system and it's included in all upcoming FreeBSD releases (6.4 and 7.1).

The crashinfo utility automatic analyzes a core dump saved by savecore(8) in /var/crash/. Once crashinfo has located a core dump and kernel, it uses several utilities to analyze the core including dmesg(8), fstat(1), iostat(8), ipcs(1), kgdb(1), netstat(1), nfsstat(1), ps(1), pstat(8), and vmstat(8). For a given core dump file named vmcore.XX the generated text file will be named core.txt.XX.

A handy tool. I hope this improves kernel panic reports from unexperienced user in the future.

Yesterday Pawel Jakub Dawidek commited ZFS to the FreeBSD base (Current).
As many poeple on the mailing lists I also want to thank you, awesome work Pawel!

Hi.
I'm happy to inform that the ZFS file system is now part of the FreeBSD operating system. ZFS is available in the HEAD branch and will be available in FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE as an experimental feature.

Commit log:
Please welcome ZFS - The last word in file systems.
ZFS file system was ported from OpenSolaris operating system. The code in under CDDL license.
I'd like to thank all SUN developers that created this great piece of software.

Supported by: Wheel LTD (http://www.wheel.pl/)

Supported by: The FreeBSD Foundation (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/)

Supported by: Sentex (http://www.sentex.net/)

Limitations:
Currently ZFS is only compiled as kernel module and is only available for i386 architecture. Amd64 should be available very soon, the other archs will come later, as we implement needed atomic operations.

Missing functionality:

We don't have iSCSI target daemon in the tree, so sharing ZVOLs via iSCSI is also not supported at this point. This should be fixed in the future, we may also add support for sharing ZVOLs over ggate.

There is no support for ACLs and extended attributes.

There is no support for booting off of ZFS file system.

Other than that, ZFS should be fully-functional.
Enjoy!

Many good things have happened in the world of BSD when I was busy with my yearly Swiss military duty.

The FreeBSD project has received approval from Intel to redistribute firmware for several Intel-based PRO/Wireless devices in the base FreeBSD operating system.

San Jose, CA (PRWEB) March 7, 2007 -- The inclusion of firmware for popular Intel wireless devices means that users of FreeBSD will have native wireless support for many Centrino-branded Intel PRO/Wireless devices without downloading additional software. This approval includes firmware for the Intel 2100, 2200BG, 2225BG, 2915ABG, and the 3945ABG devices.
"These changes have already been committed to the development branch of the FreeBSD source code repository except for firmware for the 3945ABG, which is expected to happen fairly soon once that driver is ready for inclusion," said Florent Thoumie, a FreeBSD developer working on this project.
In order to use the firmware provided by Intel, FreeBSD users must first agree with the license. FreeBSD developers have added a simple mechanism to the operating system to agree to the license by defining an easy-to-use
system variable.
“The FreeBSD project frequently works with software and hardware manufacturers that want to provide support for their products on open source platforms while protecting their intellectual property and complying with various government and industry regulations,” said Matt Olander, CTO of iXsystems, a server manufacturer that offers systems pre-installed with FreeBSD.

Source: PRWeb

FreeBSD 6.2 was scheduled for November 2006 but some nasty bugs have delayed the final release.

Maybe Kenn Smith CVS commit yesterday initialised the final release process:

FreeBSD src repository

Modified files: (Branch: RELENG_6_2)
sys/conf newvers.sh
Log:
We think we're ready to go...

Approved by: re (implicit)

Revision Changes Path
1.69.2.13.2.3 +1 -1 src/sys/conf/newvers.sh

6.2 release is on the way, finaly Phew, that was tougher than giving birth to an elephant.

It looks that an jail security bug was one of the reason for the delay between RC2 and RELEASE:

Hello Everyone,

I usually let security advisories speak for themselves, but I want to call special attention to this one: If you use jails, READ THE ADVISORY, in particular the "NOTE WELL" part below; and if you have problems after applying the security patch, LET US KNOW -- we do everything we can to make sure that security updates will never cause problems, but in this case we could not fix the all of the security issues without either making assumptions about how systems are configured or reducing functionality.

In the end we opted to reduce functionality (the jail startup process is no longer logged to /var/log/console.log inside the jail), make an assumption about how systems are configured (filesystems which are mounted via per-jail fstab files should not be mounted on symlinks -- if you do this, adjust your fstab files to give the real, non-symlinked, path to the mount point), and leave a potential security problem unfixed (if you mount any filesystems via per-jail fstab files on mount points which are visible within multiple jails, there are problems -- don't do this).

While this is not ideal, this security issue was extraordinarily messy due to the power and flexibility of the jails and the jail rc.d script. I can't recall any other time when the security team has spent this long trying to find a working patch for a security issue. I'd like to publicly thank Simon Nielsen for the many many hours he spent working on this issue, as well as the release engineering team for being very patient with us and delaying the upcoming release to give us time to fix this.

Sincerely,
Colin Percival
FreeBSD Security Officer

My first FreeBSD related entry in 2007 and a pretty good one .
Recently (December 23, 2006) in the FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter.

Network Stack Virtualization Project

The FreeBSD Foundation has negotiated a joint technology development agreement with NLNet and the University of Zagreb to develop virtualized network stack support for FreeBSD. With the generous sponsorship of NLNet, the FreeBSD Foundation has contracted Marko Zec at the University of Zagreb with the goal of producing a prototype implementation on FreeBSD 7-CURRENT in early 2007. Network stack virtualization allows complete networking independence between jails on a system, including giving each jail their own firewall, virtual network interfaces, rate limiting, routing tables, and IPSEC configurations. This powerful tool extends jails toward full operating system virtualization and addresses many of the known limitations of jails.

Network stack virtualization offers great value to production hosting environments, promising FreeBSD system virtualization at a far lower performance cost than full hardware virtualization, as well as supporting strong isolation for overlay networks and complex virtual network topologies. This will also be a powerful tool in network research environments allowing virtual networks and systems to be created dynamically at low cost and overhead. The FreeBSD Foundation and University of Zagreb are collaborating to produce an early prototype in the FreeBSD Perforce repository; while an initial prototype is now up and running, significant work lies ahead. We hope to bring this work to the larger FreeBSD development community in 2007.

Today Bruce A. Mah announced that RELENG_6 branch is open again. I guess RELEASE 6.2 takes longer as expected and slows down MFC for RELEASES beyond 6.2.

We’re actually in pretty good shape (hah) on 6.2. 6.2-RC1 has been built, uploaded, and announced, and kensmith@ released the code freeze for the RELENG_6 codeline. This means essentially that developers are free to begin merging work that will eventually become FreeBSD 6.3, although we do request that major changes be coordinated with re@ until 6.2-RELEASE is finalized.
On top of that, kensmith@ and I worked off (I think) all of outstanding MFC requests in re’s queue this morning.

kensmith@ mentionied on the -Current mailing list that November HEAD Snapshots are available

From the "better late than never" Department...
Sorry I think I got distracted by 6.2-RELEASE stuff at the wrong time and forgot to announce that November's HEAD snapshots are available. They've been on the FTP sites for quite a while now.
ISOs are available at the "predictable" place:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/snapshots/200611/

You can use your "local" FreeBSD Swiss mirror too. Be aware this is the latest development branch. There is no guarantee that Current is working properly but it gives you the chance to test all new upcoming features for FreeBSD 7.0 (maybe anytime between second and third quarter 2007?).

Yesterday, Ken Smith announced FreeBSD 6.2 RC1.
One of the significant problem mentioned by Ken has to do with intel's em network driver. If you have an intel network card please test RC1 and report any problems back.

We have now reached the Release Candidate stage of the FreeBSD 6.2 release cycle. A few significant problems had been discovered during the initial BETA testing and those issues should now be fixed. RC1 is the first of two planned Release Candidate builds. If no more significant problems are reported 6.2-RELEASE builds will be done after RC2.

This is the first point packages have been included with the test builds and a few minor nits have been noticed already. In particular these are known problems which will be addressed before RC2:

sysinstall tries to install the wrong package for Linux emulation on i386 if you try to install it when prompted but the correct Linux emulation package (linux_base-fc4) is included on the distribution media

if you install gnome2 off the distribution media it will fail to find packages for gmime and gmime-sharp

RC1 distribution media does not include the documentation tree, RC2 will include a separate docs CD. The disc2 image will just contain packages

We appreciate all the testing and feedback people have been providing, it has helped improve what will become 6.2-RELEASE. Your continued testing would be greatly appreciated.

To get RC1 you can download the installation media from the FTP mirror sites as normal. For those of you who would like to update an existing system using cvs or cvsup use RELENG_6_2 as the branch tag when updating your source tree. Any problems can be reported by submitting a PR and/or sending email to the freebsd-stable@freebsd.org mailing list.

Pawel Dawidek has announced his first public patch set to use Sun's ZFS (Zettabyte File System) file system on FreeBSD. Wikipedia has an article about ZFS.

Almost 3 months ago (22nd August 2006) Pawel announced that he started porting ZFS to FreeBSD. I'm impressed how fast he ported most of the ZFS features from Solaris to FreeBSD.

"Awesome work Pawel. Thank you!"

Hi.

This is a first set of patches, which allows to use ZFS file system from
OpenSolaris on FreeBSD.

To apply the patch you need to have recent FreeBSD source (be sure you
have rev. 1.284 of src/sys/kern/kern_synch.c).

To try it out you need i386 machine (this is what I tested) and kernel
without WITNESS compiled in (there are probably some warnings still).

Currently it can only be compiled as a kernel module.

To apply the patch you need the following steps:

# cd /usr/src
# mkdir -p cddl/lib/lib{avl,nvpair,umem,uutil,zfs,zpool}
# mkdir -p cddl/usr.bin/ztest
# mkdir -p cddl/usr.sbin/{zdb,zfs,zpool}
# mkdir -p compat/opensolaris/{include,misc}
# mkdir -p contrib/opensolaris/cmd/{zdb,zfs,zpool,ztest}
# mkdir -p contrib/opensolaris/common/{acl,avl,nvpair,zfs}
# mkdir -p contrib/opensolaris/head
# mkdir -p contrib/opensolaris/lib/libnvpair
# mkdir -p contrib/opensolaris/lib/lib{uutil,zfs}/common
# mkdir -p contrib/opensolaris/lib/libzpool/common/sys
# mkdir -p sys/compat/opensolaris/{kern,machine,rpc,sys}
# mkdir -p sys/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/fs/zfs/sys
# mkdir -p sys/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/{os,rpc}
# mkdir -p sys/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/sys/fm/fs
# mkdir -p sys/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/sys/fs
# mkdir -p sys/modules/zfs
# fetch http://people.freebsd.org/~pjd/patches/zfs_20061117.patch.bz2
# bzip2 -d zfs_20061117.patch.bz2
# patch < zfs_20061117.patch
# make buildworld
# make kernel
# make installworld
# kldload zfs.ko
(zfs and zpool command should work now)

Before reboot:
# zfs export

After reboot:
# kldload zfs.ko
# zfs import

After a panic:
# kldload zfs.ko
# zfs mount -a
# zfs volinit

Most of the functionality should work, but there are exceptions.

zfs share/unshare don't work yet, you also won't be able to export ZFS
files systems via NFS.

ACLs don't work yet.

The ZFS file system is MPSAFE (it operates without the Giant lock), but
performance isn't quite there yet. Please do not report that it is
slower than UFS, etc. I know it is. On the other hand you should report
if there are some huge differences in performance between UFS and ZFS,
for example if ZFS is few times slower in some workloads.

Under very heavy load (or maybe even under not that heavy load, but
after a longer time) it may panic with
"kmem_malloc(X): kmem_map too small: Y total allocated"
message. The back-presure mechanism doesn't work well and SUN guys are
helping me to figure out why. If you see such panic, please do not
report it, just reboot your machine and continue (or not).

Please do report any other strange panics or situations (like various
commands not working as they should, you see strange file system
behaviour, etc.), but before reporting any issue, verify that it
wasn't already reported on freebsd-fs@FreeBSD.org mailing list.

If you have any questions or comments, I'd prefer if you send them to
the mailing list instead of me privately, as it's quite possible others
would like to know too.

Good luck and enjoy!

Big thanks to ZFS developers for great work and to SUN for opening ZFS
source!

-- Pawel Jakub Dawidek http://www.wheel.pl pjd@FreeBSD.org http://www.FreeBSD.org FreeBSD committer Am I Evil? Yes, I Am!

Jason Dixon has given a talk at the NYCBSDCon about "BSD is Dying" a few weeks ago. The talk provides a tongue-in-cheek introspection of the leaders, technologies, and community that forges ahead despite having been left for dead some 15 years past.

It's a good and funny presentation. The presentation style was adopted from Dick Hardt and his famous OSCON talk about Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving.

OpenBSD is an ultra-secure, freely available, multi-platform BSD-based UNIX-like operating system. And is arguably the most secure operating system in the world. But the downside of OpenBSD is the installation process. An OpenBSD installation isn't as easy as it could be for novice users. It's not comparable to a Linux OpenSuse or Fedora gui based installation or an ugly FreeBSD installation with sysinstall.

To get more people attracted to OpenBSD there have to be a smarter, user friendly installation process in the future or more of this good OpenBSD 4.0 installation HOWTO. It explains how to install and configure OpenBSD 4.0 step by step on an i386 machine including X. The documentation includes many screenshots to make your life easier.

The OpenBSD team makes a new release every six months with target release dates in May and November. OpenBSD 4.0 was released on November 1 2006.

What follows is a demonstration of an OpenBSD installation on an i386 computer. Your installation process will vary. That being said I do not have the time or space to cover every area where problems might arise. If you have problems, do a Google search for help, that's what I do and it should work for you also.

This simple demonstration will show a clean install, meaning any operating system or information already on the computer will be erased. You can dual-boot OpenBSD with Linux, Windows or other operating systems but that type of setup will not be discussed here.

Note: This demo assumes you are a first time OpenBSD user and not a first time user of UNIX-like operating systems.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that version 3.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available in both source and binary form. NetBSD is a general-purpose Open Source operating system that provides interfaces for running a wide range of applications on a big number of different hardware platforms, all from one source tree. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bugfixes, security updates, new drivers and new features like support for Xen3 DomU.

Read the full list about the major changes between NetBSD 3.0 and NetBSD 3.1. Get NetBSD 3.1 from here.