BSD Update: OpenBSD Saved, PC-BSD 10.0 is Coming, and FreeBSD 10.0 is Released
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2014-01-21 10:19:46 UTC
- Modified: 2014-01-21 10:32:23 UTC
Summary: News about the world of BSD, led by a generous donation to OpenBSD and a major new release of FreeBSD
OpenBSD
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OpenBSD is important because it’s widely used in firewalls, other edge servers, email, DNS and intrusion detection servers for its security. It’s also included in a number of popular third-party packages that include SQL Lite, BIND, Sendmail and the Lynx web browser. ®
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OpenBSD supports a wide range of hardware architectures, and for practical and logistical reasons there are few places in the world that have them all in one place except OpenBSD headquarters, see eg this picture, which shows a subset of the machines involved in building OpenBSD releases.
PC-BSD
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PC-BSD 10.0 RC3 for this week pulls in the latest upstream FreeBSD 10 changes. As noted in their weekly digest is also improved detection of AMD Hybrid Graphics systems. With the FreeBSD/PC-BSD open-source graphics drivers being ported from the Linux kernel, their hybrid (dual) GPU graphics support isn't any better than Linux, and these improvements is just better detection if trying to load the X Server off the first GPU fails. Improved NVIDIA Hybrid/Optimus support for PC-BSD/FreeBSD support still needs to be investigated.
FreeBSD
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FreeBSD 10.0 uses Clang as the default compiler in place of GCC, TRIM support is available for SSDs with ZFS as are other ZFS file-system improvements, AMD Radeon KMS driver support, and a wide-range of packages have been updated. I have already written at length about the best FreeBSD 10 features and other interesting features so check out the dozens of FreeBSD 10.0 articles on Phoronix for more information.
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The problem has been corrected within FreeBSD HEAD, which is aligned for FreeBSD 11-CURRENT. The problem was fixed by writing a new VT console driver (the "Newcons" project). However, this won't benefit users of FreeBSD 10.0 and can only hope that it will be back-ported to a FreeBSD 10.x point release rather than waiting some years for FreeBSD 11.0.
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The third and final FreeBSD 10.0 release candidate is out ahead of the hopeful general availability in early January.
FreeBSD 10.0 didn't make it out this year as was originally planned with the first target release date being months ago. Fortunately, the release is progress with a day-after-Christmas update.
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Advancing prudently but quietly within the Debian camp is the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD operating system that pairs Debian's GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel. For Debian 8.0 "Jessie" there are continued improvements on this spin that does away with the Linux kernel. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD Jessie/Sid currently defaults to the FreeBSD 9.2.0 kernel, but a FreeBSD 10.0 development kernel has already landed in Debian and is the focus of today's benchmarks.
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Latest version of the OS brings in Clang/LLVM, Hyper-V support, ARM additions, and compatibility with the Raspberry Pi
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What makes this monster server (code-named MEGACORE) interesting isn’t its scale (it’s a fairly common server we build) but rather its purpose. It was recently built by iXsystems for the FreeBSD Foundation, and will be used to test and push FreeBSD to its limits. The FreeBSD Foundation plans on making it available to FreeBSD’s developers and committers for the purposes of addressing SMP, memory, and general performance scalability. It will be the most powerful machine in the Project’s possession to date.
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Support for secure boot will be available in the FreeBSD 10.1 release which is due to be made later this year, according to Marshall Kirk McKusick, a senior developer of the operating system.
McKusick told iTWire that work on FreeBSD's boot process had been making steady progress. "Implementing UEFI booting is the first step, and last year the (FreeBSD) Foundation sponsored (developer) Benno Rice with a small project to implement a working prototype," he said.
UEFI would be a
bad idea for FreeBSD if FreeBSD
wants to dodge back doors because of
BIOS/EFI-level exploits.
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