

FreeBSD 9.0-Release Announcement - udp
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.0R/announce.html

======
cperciva
FreeBSD AMIs are available for m1.large and larger EC2 instances:
<http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/>

~~~
kermitthehermit
That's great, good work!

How about using them on something EC2 compatible, outside of EC2? Are they
available somewhere?

~~~
cperciva
I'm not sure what you mean by "something EC2 compatible, outside of EC2"...

~~~
kermitthehermit
I'm sorry, I should've mentioned.

I was talking about deploying these images on EC2 compatible clouds - like
openstack / Eucalyptus.

Some of us aren't customers of Amazon's EC2 service, so it would be nice if
there was some sort of "how to" build these AMIs.

Other than that, I'm happy to see a new FreeBSD release.

~~~
cperciva
Take a standard FreeBSD disk image. The changes I've had to make are to work
around quirks in EC2, so I suspect most or all of them wouldn't be needed on
other clouds.

~~~
kermitthehermit
Great, thank you!

------
jaryd
It's awesome that they're including High Performance SSH (HPN-SSH) by default.
This is a great project that deserves more attention:
<http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/>

~~~
cookiecaper
This project does sound awesome and the release announcement is the first I'd
heard of it.

However, there are a couple of issues. First, it appears that the patch set is
no longer maintained. For the FreeBSD people out there, does inclusion in
FreeBSD mean that that project has assumed the responsibility of porting the
patches while they're needed, or should we just assume that FreeBSD 10 won't
include the patches if a new SSH server comes out and the patches are not
updated against it?

Also, this thread: <http://lwn.net/Articles/377723> on LWN, containing input
from an OpenSSH contributor (djm), claims that the HPN patches will not help
until you are transferring at ~160Mbit/s @ 100ms lag and encourages normal
users to benchmark the connection speed difference before assuming HPN will be
faster for them. This is much higher than most anyone will get over the public
internet, so should it be assumed that HPN is no longer necessary? Note also
that thread is about OpenSSH 5.4. Have there been further improvements that
have made the patchset even less necessary?

~~~
jaryd
You raise some interesting points. 1) What makes it look like the project is
no longer maintained? The latest patch release on the website is for 5.8p1 --
this is just 1 point beneath current
(<http://openbsd.org.ar/pub/OpenBSD/OpenSSH/portable/>). 2) Great question. I
would be interested in seeing the response this gets from the FBSD mailing
list. 3) It is true that it is challenging (or rare) to get public internet
speeds that will make HPN worthwhile, however I find HPN most useful on a LAN
(typically within the same datacenter). I perform most of my data replication
with rsync over HPN-SSH. It's multi-threaded and generally cuts CPU load over
time. Thanks for linking to that thread over on LWN -- that was an interesting
read.

~~~
cookiecaper
I suppose "unmaintained" was incorrect, I probably should have said "not well
maintained". I was going off of the notice on the HPN-SSH website at PSC:
<http://www.psc.edu/networking/projects/hpn-ssh/>, which has a large bold
header that repeatedly says that updates are "delayed" because all funding for
the project is gone and there are no interested sponsors. So while not
technically abandoned, the project is apparently "on the ropes" and further
updates are questionable.

I usually use SSH on my local network too, but I usually max out the capacity
of my disk in transfer speed anyway (gigabit network, but disk max read/write
is ~30MB/s sustained), and there are definitely some fairly simple
alternatives to local SSH usage if it's not fast enough in a particular
situation (which I haven't encountered personally).

Of course, this doesn't mean HPN-SSH is useless, but its utility may manifest
only in a small number of cases, making continued interest in maintenance or
funding unlikely.

------
octopus
They also have clang which make this an interesting alternative to gcc for C
and C++ developers.

~~~
bazerka
It'll be far more interesting when lldb matures.

~~~
Rusky
It's already extremely interesting with libclang, clang's static analyzer,
clang's auto-completion, clang's error messages, clang's compile times, etc.

I am really looking forward to lldb though.

------
antoncohen
If you're thinking of running FreeBSD on your desktop, checkout PC-BSD 9, it's
a more desktop (dev workstation) friendly version of FreeBSD.

<http://www.pcbsd.org/>

------
kev009
This release is a nice piece of kit for storage systems even if you're married
to other OSes elsewhere.

------
JOnAgain
Double-take >> The powerpc architecture now supports Sony Playstation 3

Is this actually possible now? or is the PS3 still locked to prevent actually
installing this?

~~~
jensnockert
It supports only the old other-OS feature that Sony removed.

------
cinch
ZFS supports deduplication with this release.

------
mkup
Does it support installation to ZFS out of the box?

~~~
troll24601
No. If you want ZFS root out of the box, you need to follow a guide like:

<http://www.aisecure.net/2011/11/28/root-zfs-freebsd9/>

It's roughly the same state as it was during FreeBSD8 except that some of the
details are different due to the new installer.

------
xxiao
hope linux can match up, esp on ZFS

~~~
boyter
I doubt ZFS is ever going to be worth using on Linux unless ZFS has its
licence changed. My guess is that a new or existing file-system will implement
ZFS's ideas and become usable long before that happens.

~~~
Florin_Andrei
btrfs

~~~
axman6
Do the developers of btrfs recommend using it in production yet? last I heard
they didn't feel it wasn't complete or stable enough yet.

~~~
boyter
Wikipedia lists it as being unstable. When it comes to file systems that's one
thing I would not be gambling on.

------
bombless
Wow,hard to understand the FreeBSD installing menu, so ...hope I can become
smarter.Should try some modified distribution

~~~
Ixiaus
There are no "distributions"

~~~
niels_olson
BSD: Berkeley Software Distribution

PC-BSD: based on FreeBSD

~~~
Ixiaus
I'm still going to argue the point, there are no distributions in the sense of
Linux. There's just "FreeBSD".

"BSD: Berkeley Software Distribution"

You're being pedantic here, again, I meant it in the context of linux
distributions (that's what most people coming to FreeBSD are familiar with
when they say things like, "I don't like the installer, I'll try another
distribution!").

"PC-BSD: based on FreeBSD"

Right, this is the only thing I would say comes close to the general "idea" of
linux style distributions - but I still think it is inaccurate to say that
there are "distributions" of FreeBSD. PC-BSD even has its own kernel
modifications in order to make it more desktop friendly - I would classify
this as its own "BSD" IMHO (much as DragonFly was "based" on FreeBSD until
they decided to completely fork it) even though it still relies heavily on the
FreeBSD project.

