> Because this vulnerability exists in bspatch, a component used by freebsd-update, a special procedure must be followed to safely update. First, truncate bspatch to a zero byte file.
> FreeBSD-update will fall back to replacing bspatch, rather than applying a binary patch. Proceed with FreeBSD-update as usual.
I think the highlights don't mention the release's best bits. The full release notes are way larger and it really depends on what you do, what you might consider the most interesting part.
Also I am happy to see a bunch of "Sponsored by..." Netflix, Yandex, NGINX Inc, Netgate, Citrix, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Dell, Multiplay, ScaleEngine, etc. in there.
As a full time developer, you are correct that the relnotes don't capture all the great stuff. It is difficult to keep track of all that is going on. The only way I know how is to continuously read the commit logs. But distilling that down into a useful document for end users is quite hard, especially retroactively.
I will say that the release has non-trivial improvements in TCP performance (Mike Karels, Matt Macy, Netflix crew).
VNET jails also should be safe to tear down, and SysV SHM can be jailed/virtualized which should be interesting to many users.
Also on the networking front, FreeBSD now has modern AQMs like CoDel and FQ-CoDel. This means it can now compete against Linux for use in a (wired-only) home router.
I think the highlights don't mention the release's best bits.
It's always challenging to put together those highlights... different people consider different things important, and the release engineer has to guess what the largest number of people will care about. (And sometimes things don't end up in the release notes at all because developers forget to flag their commits with "Relnotes: yes", but we're getting better at that.)
Reading the release notes indicates they are still working on their EFI/uEFI support. I've also noticed a lot of other free OSes that seem to be struggling with it.
Is EFI really that complicated? I also ask because it doesn't seem to me that EFI hasn't really made the PC better for anyone other than Microsoft and Apple.
11.0 doesn't have support for EFI runtime services, but a lot of that has been added to CURRENT (which will become 12.0 and maybe make it into 11.1 via backport) very recently.
Jetpack is in my (personal and completely biased) opinion the even more interesting project. It's the implementation of the App Container specification (like rkt).
Just pointing it out cause it was only mentioned in brackets.
CloudABI deserves more attention and support. One binary format for multiple unix-like systems. That also enforces sandboxing. Why aren't we using it for everything yet?
There are some features which are so far exclusive to FreeBSD but go under the radar of the wider community of developers. In addition to CloudABI, Capsicum is another one, which, while not perfect, seems largely ignored/unused/reinvented outside FreeBSD. The LLVM-based base system is another one, which is partially matched by Bitrig. FreeBSD needs to market their features better, like pledge(2), libressl or systemd or docker are doing it.
* No SSL CA certificates out of the box. FreeBSD security team has taken the
curious posture of claiming that shipping no CAs is better than just
shipping e.g. Mozilla's CA bundle.[0]
* rc.d is like Linux init from 5 years ago. Dynamic network configuration is
not handled well.
* Intel GPU driver support for anything above Haswell is still waiting to be
merged. But work is ongoing.[1]
* No Xorg or session management out of the box. You get dropped to a terminal
console. Good luck starting a session.
* Some packages conflict with each other needlessly. For example, you cannot
install gitk and git-svn at the same time.
* Finally, the installer has some limited choices. You can't enable full disk
encryption for UFS with the installer (last time I checked, anyway).
Using FreeBSD -CURRENT on my ThinkPad X240. Mostly works great. Can't resume from suspend on that particular laptop, but I can live without the sleep thing.
For development, it's excellent! (Favorite things: non-GPL not-breaking-compatibility-every-day libc that doesn't cause any problems ever. Simple init system. Simple configuration files, moving towards using libucl everywhere. And libxo for output. Good documentation. Jails. ZFS. DTrace. Capsicum.)
I do get annoyed at people who use linuxisms like "/bin/bash" in their code though >_<
I started using it on my X1 carbon. It installed fine. I hadn't used it since 2006, and I was quite impressed with the binary package manager and init/service system (I'm not a big systemd fan).
I'd still be using it, but I got the laptop used and it has had frequent reboot problems (even on Linux) and I get an error when I try to update the bios. I looked up the beep code and it just says the motherboard is bad and to send it in for warranty. :(
I've used it on and off for many years. It makes for a fine development environment. #1 gotcha is what you'd expect: commodity hardware support. Purchase a machine that's known to be good for FreeBSD...
No suspend/hibernate (suspend is available, but fiddly and does not work with X). Apart from that I've been quite happy to this day since last January when I moved to FreeBSD. Though I intend to check-out OpenBSD when I'll have time, as AFAIK it is more laptop-friendly (has working suspend and/or hibernate).
The BSD land is better than any linux distro with its docs and community, and the OSes are really clean and well put-together from the bottom up. Only Arch can come close to them, but then it has no stable releases and breaking changes are often.
BSDs run nearly all the software that GNU/Linux runs, and ports tree is exhaustive. I only have Emacs and Xombrero that I build and install seperately because I'm patching them.
It really depends on what kind of development you do. It's great as long as the tools you need are actually supported. And the tools would presumably work the same on linux so it's more a matter of what kind of system you prefer to administer. I just switched to linux on my main machine after 12 years due to getting hooked on the jetbrains crack. That and the lack of dart-sdk/dartium. I'd switch back if those two things got supported.
I use 11-rc on Thinkpad X220. Compare to Linux I miss a lot native Dropbox client (Currently I use rclone, but it is not convenient: sync dropbox->local, change, sync local->dropbox). Skype probably will work via Linux emulation, but I haven't tried yet.
Update: also almost all closed source products are not available for FreeBSD, e. g. I'd like to try Jetbrains CLion - it has version for Linux, but not for FreeBSD.
I do not think Android dev on freebsd works that well
My understanding was that various android emulator features that are better at supporting on Linux or Windows, and do not work on FreeBSD. Happy to be corrected though.
Also if your development depends (or benefits from) ATI device drivers, freeBSD (or any BSD for that matter) is not the best choice.
EC2(TM) users are urged to read the Errata Notes for FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE regarding an issue discovered very late in the release cycle that may cause the system to hang during the boot process when upgrading from previous FreeBSD versions. New EC2(TM) installations are not affected, but existing installations running earlier releases are advised to wait until the issue is resolved in an Errata Notice before upgrading.
FreeBSD is not 'just another OS out there' but an important piece of technology powering lots of things we often use: from Sony's PlayStation and WhatsApp, through Netflix and Yahoo, to Juniper and PFSense networking gear and EMC storage and FreeNAS appliance - and many, many more!
So, have you donated yet? We need FreeBSD and FreeBSD needs your support!
What really makes me sad is that the BSD license allows corporate leeches like Sony to create incredibly successful and valuable products like the PS4 without ever having to give back to the project that produced the software they rely on. It's obvious that Sony picked FreeBSD over Linux because they don't have to publish their additions to FreeBSD, and can continue to integrate new and improved code from upstream with no obligations whatsoever.
Yes, some corporate users contribute financially back to the project, and we're thankful. But why should we have to be thankful? The GPL already provides a tried and proven legal framework for requiring downstream users to publish their improvements for others to use. Free software is an ecosystem where everyone helps and everyone benefits. When the BSD license allows parasites like Sony to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars without giving a line of code (or a penny) back, that breaks the ecosystem.
I'm calling Sony out particularly because they are not included in the list of corporate sponsors in the article. The Sony games division made $3.2 billion in revenue in quarter 1 2016, this is unacceptable.
> It's obvious that Sony picked FreeBSD over Linux because they don't have to publish their additions to FreeBSD, and can continue to integrate new and improved code from upstream with no obligations whatsoever.
It's obvious that FreeBSD contributors picked FreeBSD over Linux because they wanted to publish their software for people to use with no obligations whatsoever.
If Sony is heavily modifying the FreeBSD code, eventually they'll start contributing back, because maintaining a substantial fork is more effort than upstreaming code. Either that, or they'll end up with a largely frozen code base like Apple's copy of the FreeBSD userland, which is probably OK on a console.
> What really makes me sad is that the BSD license allows corporate leeches like Sony to create incredibly successful and valuable products like the PS4 without ever having to give back to the project that produced the software they rely on.
You should not be, because this is what BSD license is for; otherwise the developers would've chosen GPL.
What could be the reason Sony dont contribute back. Surely it is a tiny amount of money. May be there are problems they have in minds we are not aware of? Just wondering.
Wouldn't it be a good idea if they would change their licensing so that commercial usage allowed them to build a stable income stream and pay more and more developers every year? Also it would be very important to build developer schools and other educational facilities to sustain development in future, what would be much easier with a stable and growing budget.
Let me guess... You have no idea why people chose to use, or contribute to FreeBSD, right? Especially no idea why commercial entities build products based on FreeBSD.
Sometimes there's a cultural disconnect between the hacker news world and some $FOO software thing (FSF, GNU, what have you), but this tops them all.
Developer schools? Was this even a serious comment or was I trolled by Poe's law?
It would be awesome if there were a cookbook for getting this on to the Dragonboard 410c (its my only AArch 64 board ATM). The wiki page points to the 96boards site which has everything you need to put Ubuntu on but not FreeBSD AFAICT. I just may not be reading it closely enough though.
booting on the Dragonboard is unlikely to happen any time soon, I started working on it, but don't have the time to get it into a usable state (and lack hardware to test).
Source: I started & mostly work on the the FreeBSD arm64 port.
Readit News
# : > /usr/bin/bspatch
See https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-SA-16:29...
> Because this vulnerability exists in bspatch, a component used by freebsd-update, a special procedure must be followed to safely update. First, truncate bspatch to a zero byte file.
> FreeBSD-update will fall back to replacing bspatch, rather than applying a binary patch. Proceed with FreeBSD-update as usual.
Also I am happy to see a bunch of "Sponsored by..." Netflix, Yandex, NGINX Inc, Netgate, Citrix, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Dell, Multiplay, ScaleEngine, etc. in there.
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/11.0R/relnotes.html
I will say that the release has non-trivial improvements in TCP performance (Mike Karels, Matt Macy, Netflix crew).
VNET jails also should be safe to tear down, and SysV SHM can be jailed/virtualized which should be interesting to many users.
For your average home / small business user? Or do you need to be at Netflix scale to see the benefits? (that's not a bad thing).
You mean I can run multiple postgresql jails on a machine? YASSS
Unfortunately, VNET is still off by default, no?
It's always challenging to put together those highlights... different people consider different things important, and the release engineer has to guess what the largest number of people will care about. (And sometimes things don't end up in the release notes at all because developers forget to flag their commits with "Relnotes: yes", but we're getting better at that.)
Is EFI really that complicated? I also ask because it doesn't seem to me that EFI hasn't really made the PC better for anyone other than Microsoft and Apple.
11.0 doesn't have support for EFI runtime services, but a lot of that has been added to CURRENT (which will become 12.0 and maybe make it into 11.1 via backport) very recently.
* Docker via ZFS and jails (...running Linux x84-64 binaries): https://wiki.freebsd.org/Docker
--- (See also, https://github.com/3ofcoins/jetpack )
* Add support for trackpads found in Apple MacBook products: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=26126...
* CloudABI executable support: https://nuxi.nl/cloudabi/freebsd/
This is an awesome release.
Graphics support for bhyve is also pretty spiffy.
[1]: https://svnweb.freebsd.org/base?view=revision&revision=30090...
Is this a unique feature or how is this handled on illumos or Solaris?
Just pointing it out cause it was only mentioned in brackets.
There are some features which are so far exclusive to FreeBSD but go under the radar of the wider community of developers. In addition to CloudABI, Capsicum is another one, which, while not perfect, seems largely ignored/unused/reinvented outside FreeBSD. The LLVM-based base system is another one, which is partially matched by Bitrig. FreeBSD needs to market their features better, like pledge(2), libressl or systemd or docker are doing it.
Main gotchas:
Other than all that, it works well.[0]: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=189811
[1]: https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-graphics/wiki
For development, it's excellent! (Favorite things: non-GPL not-breaking-compatibility-every-day libc that doesn't cause any problems ever. Simple init system. Simple configuration files, moving towards using libucl everywhere. And libxo for output. Good documentation. Jails. ZFS. DTrace. Capsicum.)
I do get annoyed at people who use linuxisms like "/bin/bash" in their code though >_<
I'd still be using it, but I got the laptop used and it has had frequent reboot problems (even on Linux) and I get an error when I try to update the bios. I looked up the beep code and it just says the motherboard is bad and to send it in for warranty. :(
The BSD land is better than any linux distro with its docs and community, and the OSes are really clean and well put-together from the bottom up. Only Arch can come close to them, but then it has no stable releases and breaking changes are often.
BSDs run nearly all the software that GNU/Linux runs, and ports tree is exhaustive. I only have Emacs and Xombrero that I build and install seperately because I'm patching them.
Update: also almost all closed source products are not available for FreeBSD, e. g. I'd like to try Jetbrains CLion - it has version for Linux, but not for FreeBSD.
My understanding was that various android emulator features that are better at supporting on Linux or Windows, and do not work on FreeBSD. Happy to be corrected though.
Also if your development depends (or benefits from) ATI device drivers, freeBSD (or any BSD for that matter) is not the best choice.
vagrant init freebsd/FreeBSD-11.0-RELEASE-p1
This is discussed on BSD Now 162 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJ-mgwxhNvo
So, have you donated yet? We need FreeBSD and FreeBSD needs your support!
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/
Yes, some corporate users contribute financially back to the project, and we're thankful. But why should we have to be thankful? The GPL already provides a tried and proven legal framework for requiring downstream users to publish their improvements for others to use. Free software is an ecosystem where everyone helps and everyone benefits. When the BSD license allows parasites like Sony to benefit to the tune of billions of dollars without giving a line of code (or a penny) back, that breaks the ecosystem.
I'm calling Sony out particularly because they are not included in the list of corporate sponsors in the article. The Sony games division made $3.2 billion in revenue in quarter 1 2016, this is unacceptable.
It's obvious that FreeBSD contributors picked FreeBSD over Linux because they wanted to publish their software for people to use with no obligations whatsoever.
If Sony is heavily modifying the FreeBSD code, eventually they'll start contributing back, because maintaining a substantial fork is more effort than upstreaming code. Either that, or they'll end up with a largely frozen code base like Apple's copy of the FreeBSD userland, which is probably OK on a console.
You should not be, because this is what BSD license is for; otherwise the developers would've chosen GPL.
Sometimes there's a cultural disconnect between the hacker news world and some $FOO software thing (FSF, GNU, what have you), but this tops them all.
Developer schools? Was this even a serious comment or was I trolled by Poe's law?
[1] https://wiki.freebsd.org/arm64/DragonBoard410c
Source: I started & mostly work on the the FreeBSD arm64 port.