Evilcoder.org

You should order yourself a copy of the BSD Magazine _FAST_! You can find it here http://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/bsdmag.05?id=YtVdjmGH&mv_pc=108 make sure you do that as soon as possible to get the magazine in your possession. Why? Because I wrote in it? Because they need it? Because the community needs these kind of things! The magazine only costs a few bucks, it’s worth spending that few bucks!

At the beginning of this year I was asked by the BSD Magazine people to write an article. I asked what the idea was and I was told that I could emphasize on security, or the installation of FreeBSD and things like that. But then in a way to that everyone can understand it. Also I knew that I was going to move out of the house within limited time, so I agreed writing it if I could have some help.

Jeremy Reed, Michael Lucas and Murray Stokely helped where possible and it resulted in a very nice article. The issue should be out soon, so you are invited to order the issue of http://www.bsdmag.org and read the article I wrote. It goes about installing FreeBSD 7.1 (yeah it applies to 7.2 as well for whats it worth ). So stay tuned!

20090612: In addition you can download/order it from here: http://www.freebsdmall.com/cgi-bin/fm/bsdmag.05?id=HtzwqhCU&mv_pc=105.

If you read it, I am ofcourse interested in seeing what you think about it, so do not hesitate to let me know!

Ed Schouten started working on a FreeBSD – clang project. He did this by importing clang into a project repository and making sure that a ‘make buildkernel’ succeeds. (If I followed correctly). I believe this is one of the steps that he will be taking to get the LLVM compiler suitable for FreeBSD, and perhaps eventually replacing the GNU licensed gcc compiler. That (like his TTY work) would be one hell of a job! Please poke ed@FreeBSD.org if you are interested in helping!

The FreeBSD 8.0 code slush had been announced. This means that large projects are no longer allowed to do “drive by commits” to the head branch, but that there is an organisation behind it that checks everything and makes sure there are enough people to cover the project and make sure it’s in the best possible shape before the release. The release will take a little to get going, but the process had been started. From here on the team will have to manouver through a pipe that keeps getting smaller and smaller. If your favorite new feature is not in yet, don’t hold your breath because this might mean that it will take a little longer to get it in a first -RELEASE installation. Stay tuned!

FreeBSD 8.0’s code freeze is upcoming. The last hands are getting layed on importing crucial things that we want to have in FreeBSD 8.0. This is not an announcement that we will start freezing soon, but you might consider this as a pre-headsup. One of the features that I am personally proud of is the new TTY layer which is MPSafe from this release on. My friend Ed Schouten rewrote the code to make this happen and I am very excited to see it being put to it’s widest potentials.

But not only that, if we were to cut a 8.0 release -now- it would have the following features:

- new TTY layer
- hierarchical jails
- updated zic/timezone code
- various 802.11 fixes by Sam Leffler
- MLDv2
- new USB stack
- Network running entirely GIANT free
- IGMPv3

and many many features/stability/code improvements as well!

Be prepared for the actual code freeze

(There were some comments that were lost due to server rebuild problems :-/).

We are closely following the schedule for FreeBSD 7.2, and so far we are on the correct schedule. Some caveats had been resolved lately, especially it seems with if_bce. Please give RC2 a spin and report any regression etc to us so that we can try to fix this.

So i wrote some articles recently for 7.1 and the release-cycle around it to try and provide as much possible information without telling you all things that we as a project cannot make true etc. I see that my “how to upgrade to 7.1″ article is being read a lot, in fact it is one of the most popular items in my entire article-range. Which made me wonder about a few things, which I hope that you (my readers) can answer:

*) Is FreeBSD 7.1 long awaited and popular?
*) Aren’t there enough documents that provide this straight to the point information? (Do this and this and you have 7.1 running)
*) Should I proceed with these kind of articles for the future release-cycle’s?
*) How is 7.1 being received? Do you like it? Do you hate it?

Reasons I want to know this, is whether I should bring in my attention to this area now which I might be doing a ‘difference’ again, and whether it really helps the community or not. And last but not least ofcourse, we tried to work hard to bring you the best release possible, but I personally cannot entirely judge how the community received our work. I think we did great, but I cannot speak for you

If you read this, and are willing to help, please respond to this article

Thanks,
Remko

Yesterday and today I started the process of updating my machines to match the latest stable/7 branch of FreeBSD. That is 7.1 with a few additional MFC’s here and there.

So far that works as expected without much hassle.

One thing I hope to never see again is “throttling interrupt” for my atapci0 controller, which is common on hetzner machines. Funny thing is that only AMD64 machines appear to hit that (my i386 machine there works fine).

A few more machines to go, but so far I like my own dogfood. You can see more information in the ‘my systems’ page.

After writing my little blog on how to upgrade to 7.1 I got several people telling me that the freebsd-update servers were slow, irresponsive etc. From the information that Colin send to FreeBSD-stable it seems that a lot of people were really waiting for 7.1 to come out, and that they all wanted to upgrade. Colin had made improvements to the system so that it can better deal with the load.

The good thing from this is that a lot of people ARE interested in the latest version, as well as that they use the easy to use application “freebsd-update”. If you run a -RELEASE version, you should use this to easily and quickly upgrade to a later revision.

Keep those bits rolling!

So the announcement had been send, the FreeBSD version 7.1 had been released

Please report any bugs and things that you can find on www.freebsd.org/send-pr.html so that we can try our best to iron out the open items.

I need to MFC a few things here and there which is now possible again, so prepare for a lot of fun