[olug] Fw: FreeBSD 5.0 Release Available

[Phil Brutsche]

Daniel Pfile wrote:
>>Where's the firewire (aka IEEE 1934) support?
> 
> 
> http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_story.php3?story_id=3295
> "FireWire drivers merged into FreeBSD-stable"

Ok, I didn't see that part...

>>Where's the TokenRing support
> 
> 
> http://www.jurai.net/~winter/tr/tr.html
> "The FreeBSD Token Ring Project"

You mean "the in progress for 4 years FreeBSD Token Ring Project"?  The 
only cards FreeBSD works with are the Olicom cards.  You're SOL if 
you're like me and have access to lots of 3com TokenLink 3c339s and not 
very many Olicoms :(

>>Where's the USB2.0 support?
> 
> 
> I think you can mostly use a USB 2.0 device like it's a USB 1.1 device  
> for now. I know work is being done for 2.0, but I don't think it made  
> it into 5.x yet. Google more than I did, you'll find something.

No need, I have a 5.0-RELEASE system right here, as well as a 1-day old 
-CURRENT source tree.  Exactly 2 lines reference EHCI controllers (aka 
USB2.0 host adapters) in the entire source tree.  The only web pages 
(found via google) referencing FreeBSD and EHCI controllers just happen 
to mention both, usually in conjunction with NetBSD.

Support for USB2.0 host adapters might as well not exist.

>>Where's the journalling filesystem(s)?
> 
> 
> Soft updates, an alternative to journaling
> http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/

It's not the same.  Back in the FreeBSD 4.1 days repeatedly hitting the 
reset button led to an unusable file system :(  Granted, I haven't tried 
it recently, mostly because the reset button is harder to get to on most 
systems I have laying around these days.  I don't even know if I could 
*find* the reset button on some of them...

>>Where's the software RAID mechanism that doesn't crash the system?
> 
> 
> Yahoo thought it was stable years ago... But who are they to say  
> something like that?

My problem isn't with FreeBSD in general - for the most part the only 
way I can make it crash is the same with any other OS - bad hardware. 
It's Vinum that's giving me grief.

>>Where's the software RAID mechanism that doesn't have sucky  
>>performance?
> 
> 
> I've heard freebsd is raid pretty zippy, I know a lot of 'network  
> appliance' or 'filer' vendors use freebsd. Vinum looks neat
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/vinum- 
> vinum.html

Vinum is exactly what I was having trouble with :(

Vinum works OK as long as you don't use it in a way it doesn't like - 
write a file system, and then some data, like a FreeBSD source tree, to 
the volume while the plexes are syncronizing and you get a kernel panic 
and a spontaneous reboot.  Linux and WinNT/2k don't have that issue, and 
neither do the hardware RAID controllers I've used.

Then there's the issue of the *whole system* freezing for 5-second 
periods while it writes data to the volume...

>>Where's the "advanced routing" capabilities? (aka routing any IP
>>   datagram to arbitrary gateways based on host, port number, and/or
>>   layer 3 protocol)
> 
> 
> I hear ipfw is pretty good. There are some links at the end of this  
> article.
> http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2001/04/25/FreeBSD_Basics.html?page=3

Those sites tell me how to use the FreeBSD equivalent of 
/usr/sbin/iptables, not the (so far) non-existent FreeBSD equivalent of 
/sbin/ip.

>>I want my apt-get dammit!
> 
> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.html

The ports collection can't handle binary packages (ie if I compile 
gettext into a .tgz package that can be installed via pkg_add I want it 
to install *that* instead of trying to fetch and compile gettext when I 
install something that depends on it, like PHP or nano), which is the 
whole point of that particular rant.

-- 

Phil Brutsche
phil at brutsche.us