Category Archives: FreeBSD
FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE
Date published: January 7th, 2009
Posted in Announcements, FreeBSD | 2 Comments »
In the last few days, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team finalized 7.1-RELEASE and it is now available for download. We are now also offering the option for 7.1-RELEASE on new VPS setups. It is listed as an option in the signup process (along with 6.3 and 7.0).
- The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
- Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
- A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
- Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
- The cpuset(2) system call and cpuset(1) command have been added, providing an API for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and assignment.
- KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
- DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures
A Sneak Peak at FreeBSD 8
Date published: July 31st, 2008
Posted in FreeBSD | 3 Comments »
Along with the release of FreeBSD 7 last year came the birth of FreeBSD 8 in the development stage. Its planned release is the 2nd quarter of 2009, but here is a quick overview of what we know is in the works for the new version.
(1) A rewrite of the TTY layer (traditional UNIX interface), making it easier to maintain and extend.
(2) An increase in the kernel memory limit to 6GB.
(3) The introduction of “lightweight” kernel threads that consume less low-level resources.
(4) procstat, a process inspection utility useful for debugging.
(5) Text dumps that extract commonly needed information in the event of a kernel panic as well as reduces trash by not storing the actual dump file.
(6) A new version of the ULE scheduler with additional functionality and performance improvements.
(7) The implementation of “superpages” after an analysis of known issues and a plan for effectively using these large-sized memory pages.
(8) DTrace, a tool developed by Sun, to help debug and profile operating systems.
(9) The network stack visualization project intends to maintain multiple independent instance of networking state, allowing for complete independence between network jails.
(10) A substantial increase in bandwidth due to ECMP routing.
(11) Improvement to the Berkeley Packet Filter, allowing increased efficiency in memory copy operations.
(12) An NFS lock manager in the kernel to improve synchronized file access.
(13) Support for booting from GPT partitions.
(14) bsdlabel extended to a limit of 26 partitions.
(15) User-controllable CPU/IRQ binding and CPU-thread binding with support for CPU sets.
So stay tuned! It looks like FreeBSD is only getting better, and by this time next year we may have even more security and better performance.
Firewall your FreeBSD for Safety’s Sake
Date published: July 20th, 2008
Posted in FreeBSD, Networking | 3 Comments »
We all know the Internet can be a dangerous place and in order to be truly safe a computer must not be connected to it. But that puts an immense dent in productivity and the flow of information, so it’s not an option. Of course the flow of information is the important thing and with the proper firewall you can make sure that the data only flows how you want and to whom you want.
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