
FreeBSD 11.0-RC1 Now Available - vasili111
https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2016-August/085277.html
======
kev009
Matt Macy added support for current Intel and amdgpu graphics out of tree for
now [https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-
graphics/tree...](https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-
graphics/tree/drm-next). It is up to Linux 4.7. The graphics stuff is MIT
licensed and the linuxkpi is re-implemented so it will eventually trickle into
11.x or 12 and/or a loadable module packaged with FreeBSD Ports.

Still lots of rough edges but it's pretty fun to watch and participate.

~~~
byuu
So then, there won't be Haswell graphics support out of the box on FreeBSD
11.0-RELEASE? :(

~~~
notaplumber
Meanwhile OpenBSD has had Haswell support since 5.5, Broadwell/Bay Trail since
5.9.

[http://www.openbsd.org/55.html](http://www.openbsd.org/55.html)

[http://www.openbsd.org/59.html](http://www.openbsd.org/59.html)

~~~
byuu
That they do, and that's quite admirable (and important, since nVidia won't
port their binary blob drivers; and nouveau doesn't run on OpenBSD either.)

Out of the box ZFS boot is still more important to me than getting rid of my
Radeon card, though.

------
kev009
People try to keep the big ticket items in major releases on the wiki:
[https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11](https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD11)

Async sendfile, TCP/IP improvements, RSS are things that stand out for my
workload. bhyve with UEFI and graphics is probably pretty neat to many folks.
VNET (jails closer to Solaris zones with their own network stack) is also
closer to correct.

There's a lot of groundwork that will make 11.1 exciting as a followup too
(for new TCP stacks, memory management scalability)

------
themartorana
_" The Release Engineering build tools have been updated to include support
for producing virtual machine disk images for various cloud hosting providers.
[r277458] (Sponsored by The FreeBSD Foundation)"_

We're running FreeBSD in AWS rather successfully. 11 seems to add a few things
that are aimed directly at first-class support for building and running VMs
and AMIs. Good to know continued support is being focused in this direction.

~~~
ereli1
what's the advantage for running FreeBSD over linux for your application?

~~~
themartorana
Mostly ease of use. It's a rock. I have a special place in my heart for BSD,
but that aside, when the SystemD battles started and I was on Ubuntu, I was
interested in using ZFS for a few things. So the choices were ZFS on Linux, or
go back to BSD. After about an hour of playing around, I ended up back on
FreeBSD.

So, it's partly personal, as all things are. But it's mostly how _easy_ it is
to use, especially for someone that wouldn't describe themselves as a server
admin of any special level of skill. There are a few core tenets of design in
BSD/FreeBSD that are both beautiful and very easy to understand. So I can
ignore the OS a lot of the time and just get to work on the app side.

~~~
atmosx
I use openRC with Gentoo and ZFS in my a file server. The simplicity is close
to FreeBSD's rc system.

------
cfallin
It's good to see the DRM (graphics) stuff more up-to-date in 11.0. FreeBSD is
frustratingly close to natively-just-works on my 2014 Asus Haswell ultrabook
(support for scrolling with the touchpad, of all things, is the main thing
missing; also volume/screen hotkeys). I hope the laptop hardware support keeps
improving!

Anyway, I _really_ appreciate the simplicity of rc.conf and the well-curated
config/boot infrastructure in general; pkg(ng) just works; ZFS is insanely
cool; LLVM-as-system-compiler is nice... I sometimes wonder where we'd be if
the BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago.

~~~
cm3
> BSD lawsuit hadn't held things back 20-ish years ago

Linus said he wouldn't have written Linux if he had 386bsd at that time, which
took longer. What that means is up for speculation, but Linux became wildly
popular as a host for Apache and Samba before anything else. Similarly, if
Oracle hadn't closed off Solaris, maybe FreeBSD wouldn't be the best
compromise between hardware support and ZFS+DTrace availability.

PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally
available next year.

~~~
nisa
> PS: XFS is about to gain COW and data checksum support, probably generally
> available next year.

Do you have link for that? XFS supports metadata checksumming already and cp
--reflink IIRC but I've never heard about data checksums and "real" COW e.g.
snapshots?

~~~
cm3
[http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1608.0/04662.html](http://lkml.iu.edu/hypermail/linux/kernel/1608.0/04662.html)

~~~
nisa
Great news! Thanks!

------
old-gregg
Quick question from a clueless Linux person: are codebases of FreeBSD,
OpenBSD, NetBSD diverging over time, or actively reusing each others code?

~~~
empthought
They port code from one codebase to the other, and often it's the same dev
doing the work for more than one OS, but there isn't any principled
coordination of effort to keep a unitary codebase for anything.

~~~
crudbug
A unified package system for BSD family can reduce some friction.

~~~
groovy2shoes
The three of them already use _basically_ the same package system. The package
management suite (pkg_add, pkg_info, etc.) and the ports collections all
originated from work Jordan Hubbard did for FreeBSD in 1994. OpenBSD re-wrote
all the tools, but they are functionally the same. NetBSD (pkgsrc, really)
added a frontend (pkgin) to offer a more "modern", apt-like experience.
FreeBSD added a similar frontend (pkg) in version 10.

As far as I know, there is no _binary_ compatibility between the three of
them, so sharing package repositories would be a no-go, but if you know the
tools on one system, that knowledge is transferable to the others, for the
most part.

If you want to use the same exact ports collection on each of them, NetBSD's
pkgsrc is quite portable, and will work not only on the other BSDs, but on
Linux, Mac OS X, Minix, Solaris, and a few others as well. I use pkgsrc to
manage packages on my Mac Mini -- Joyent provides binaries for most things,
and the other stuff is usually just a `bmake` away.

~~~
JdeBP
It is rather more rocky than that. (pkgng arrived in FreeBSD 9.1, by the way.
Not 10.)

* pkgng has some stark differences to OpenBSD pkg, most notably the notion of Debian-like "post-install", "pre-remove", et al. scripts.

* The systems compress packages with different tools. OpenBSD pkg uses gzip. FreeBSD pkg uses xz.

* OpenBSD has a notion of "package flavours" that does not really have an analogue in pkgng.

* The introduction of pkgng was distinctly problematic. A lot radically changed in early versions, most critically the configuration file format. It used to be YAML. It's now UCL.

* The documentation is misleading to the point of being downright wrong. The FreeBSD wiki still insists ([https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng#Metadata](https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng#Metadata)) that the configuraton file is YAML. The manual page for pkg-create gives examples such as "name _pkg-name_ " and "file _sha256-hash_ _path_ ", which is syntactically incorrect for either language and the wrong keyword to boot. Following the manual does not produce a working configuration file. Ironically, the wiki provides better information on this, even though it provides that information in the wrong configuration language.

* The documentation is misleading to the point of being downright wrong. The FreeBSD manual page for pkg-repository claims that repositories contain files named packagesite.txz, repo.txz, and filesite.txz. In fact, the pkg repo tool generates files named packagesite.txz, meta.txz, and digests.txz .

* OpenBSD pkg and FreeBSD pkg don't really have a common notion of "package repositories". The ways to organize pulling packages from remote storage locations are quite different, even down to the fundamental file fetching tools. FreeBSD has fetch. OpenBSD has ftp.

All that having been said: the idea that a unified packaging system
necessitates a unified _codebase_ is disproven by Ubuntu and Debian. (An
example is OpenRC: present on Debian 8 at
[https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/openrc](https://packages.debian.org/source/jessie/openrc),
up to version 0.21 in what is to be Debian 9, and gone from Ubuntu 16 at
[http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/openrc](http://packages.ubuntu.com/xenial/openrc))
Conversely, one can have a unified codebase even with multiple packaging
systems.

~~~
groovy2shoes
This is all true, but I was mostly comparing the pkg_* tools (pkg_add,
pkg_info, etc.) that were used before the arrival of (NetBSD's) pkgin or
(FreeBSD's) pkgng (does OpenBSD have something similar? If so, I haven't used
it at this point).

~~~
JdeBP
You used the wrong tense. (-:

It should have read "The three of them some years ago _used_ basically the
same package system." and "they _were_ functionally the same".

OpenBSD 5.9 still has the old packaging toolset.

------
geff82
Quick note: Lenovo x240 and T440 Laptops can still be had new in some places
and they can run FreeBSD 11 quite well.

------
Raizq
Are the multiple root compromise exploits (that've been known since May) fixed
yet in this RC? [https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
security/2016-Ju...](https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-
security/2016-July/009016.html)

~~~
voltagex_
[https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-
SA-16:25...](https://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories/FreeBSD-
SA-16:25.bspatch.asc) for bspatch

There was another announcement about pkg itself, but I can't find it. I
believe it's being rewritten/modified to fix the issue.

------
corv
Is VNET going to be in the kernel by default?

~~~
voltagex_
Doesn't look like it -
[http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC?v...](http://svnweb.freebsd.org/base/head/sys/amd64/conf/GENERIC?view=log)

------
voltagex_
What would the risk be of taking my 10.3-RELEASE box (with VNET enabled
kernel) and upgrading it to RC1?

------
akerro
Maybe someone will be interested, on 11.0 syncnthing doesn't crash system when
quitting.

~~~
voltagex_
Christ. Multiple reports, none have been closed, no link to changesets.

[https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200846](https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=200846).

Userspace should never be able to crash the kernel!

~~~
voltagex_
In case anyone cares, I have chased this up with very helpful people in
#freebsd-bugs on Freenode. I am unable to reproduce this bug myself either on
10.2 or 10.3. Any more info would be appreciated.

