back to article FreeBSD 10.0 lands, targets VMs and laptops

The tenth version of the open source operating system FreeBSD has emerged. In true community style the software has emerged before the software's plan called for its announcement to be made public. Alphas of the new release have been available for about six months now and the final release seems not to diverge much form those …

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  1. mike panero

    Nothing about OSX/iOS link?

    Green and black serial terminals emulating oh what was it some DEC 100 thing VT that's it VT100

    Jumpers for goalposts

    When it got stuck you had to thump the keyboard!

    Internet? Nah you had to text search a book with your eyeballs

    Yeah knowing that by time you read the manual it was out of date

    Nah no such thing as XP back then

    Change is so much faster/slower today/then

    Think XP is old? Try UNIX... no hang on is it really 1st Jan 1970?

    Come to think of it NT is even older

    Yeah UNIX is cutting edge, why it even works on MIPS!

    Oh and my phone, and yours

    1. chekri

      Re: Nothing about OSX/iOS link?

      It was only a matter of time til the old Unix beards would get Alzheimer's. It has begun.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Nothing about OSX/iOS link?

        It's despair, not alzheimers. He's been driven to it by finding himself living in a world where an OS install takes an hour, and consumes 20GB of disk space. Where those who are following him can't imagine an OS which doesn't come with graphics 'built in'. It's that moment when you wake up and look around you and discover it wasn't a nightmare, it was... is all real.

  2. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Legacy?

    The ability to virtualize FreeBSD under Hyper-V has absolutely NOTHING to do with it being legacy. The reason NetApp added support was so that they could run their ONTAP-Edge "software defined" filer on Hyper-V like they currently run it on ESX.

    http://www.netapp.com/us/products/platform-os/data-ontap-edge/

    1. MacroRodent
      Linux

      Re: Legacy?

      Besides, Hyper-V support is something Linux already has had for some time, FreeBSD must keep up.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Legacy?

        "Hyper-V support is something Linux already has had for some time"

        Because Microsoft put it in there to help customers virtualise their legacy / UNIX OS stacks, so that they didnt have to migrate to a more modern OS like Windows Server just to gain the resulting consolidation benefits.......

        1. MacroRodent
          Linux

          Re: Legacy?

          An alternate way of saying that is that Microsoft put it there just to have ANY CHANGE AT ALL in the hypervisor market! All competitors supported Linux, and Linux is more or less what most cloud services run on, so only the 100% Windows data centres would have been interested in a Hyper-V that did not work well with Linux.

          1. PJI

            Re: Legacy?

            I love this crowing over Linux installed base size: reminds me of IBM (no one ever got fired for buying IBM), then VAX VMS in the academic, scientific and other worlds; oh, how about Windows systems on every desk top and most email and various other servers (hmm, still true).

            What makes linuxphiles so cocky and boastful? Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Something cleverer, better, easier, better marketed will rise and replace it, probably fairly soon.

            Why do some people get emotionally involved in and committed to something like an operating system, not even an original one but a derivative, copied one? Face it, a well written and ported application makes the underlying system irrelevant to the vast majority of users, including technical ones, whether something like Eclipse or an email interface. Nowadays, even bad operating systems are remarkably stable and reliable.

            1. MacroRodent

              Re: Legacy?

              I wasn't cocky, just stating a fact about this particular IT segment. In some others (like desktops and laptops) Linux is almost nonexistent. Sure, Linux, Windows, Android, iOS etc. will get replaced eventually. So it goes. Personally I always try to write my code to be portable, and it has already paid off during my career.

  3. David Kelly 2

    Minimalization

    I once built a FreeBSD 4.x into a 10 MB footprint to run on a Soekris SBC. Then the software developer bloated my work of beauty with 30 MB of Perl, Apache web server, databases, and XML. :-)

    Built the whole thing from my Makefile into a chroot "virtual" space. After building binaries and ports optimized for the Soekris CPU I cross referenced library dependancies so as to copy only what was needed into the final image.

    But hey! The whole thing ran beautifully on a 64MB CF card.

  4. Charlie Clark Silver badge

    I, for one, welcome our daemon overlords

    because this is, surely, the year of FreeBSD on the desktop. Not.);

    PC-BSD is a pretty good attempt at a user-friendly version. If I didn't have a Mac it's probably what I'd be using.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I use FreeBSD because it is so much nicer to work with than any Linux.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I use it on servers because it's not infested with the GPL.

    2. Ole Juul

      9.2 with KDE here. After years of Linux, it's a nice change.

  6. CAPS LOCK

    Reg, I am disappoint.

    The negative tone for this report is undeserved. Worse, it's not even funny. No doubt Beastfans will be along shortly to chastise you about the 'desktop' comment, so I won't bother. You'll also be hearing about most of the worlds intertube sewage passing through the alimentary canal of The Beast. Also all the other stuff.

    Serves you right.

  7. Stox

    Note that the 1% will be growing very fast now

    The Sony PS4 is FreeBSD based, suddenly, there is going to be a whole much more FreeBSD floating around.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Netflix use FreeBSD for their OpenConnect CDN - https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/software

  9. Robert Grant

    Many a debt?

    OSX owes it its entire life; other than some grey menu bars, grey gradient-based UIs and technicolor cartoon effects in the dock, it's FreeBSD all the way down.

    1. Tom 38

      Re: Many a debt?

      No it isn't. Some parts of FreeBSD's userland are imported, the kernel and most of its interfaces come from MACH.

      There is plenty in FreeBSD that comes from Darwin too - libdispatch comes directly, llvm and clang (FreeBSD 10's default compiler, no more GCC) are heavily worked on by Apple, all of the auditing from TrustedBSD...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Many a debt?

      OS X owes it existence to NeXTStep...

  10. Tom 38
    FAIL

    In true community style the software has emerged before the software's plan called for its announcement to be made public.

    In true journo style, you make this sound bad. What way round would you prefer it, make the announcement and then put the files in to place?

  11. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "...which hints strongly at the OS being considered a legacy environment by some users"

    On the contrary. It is great to have the ability to spin up cheap and cheerful copies of actual physical servers in a VM to test builds and releases.

    Mind you this is not new for FreeBSD by any means - I build temporary copies of my FreeBSD boxes in VMWare Fusion on my Mac desktop for testing purposes, which has been possible for years.

    "(because this is, surely, the year of FreeBSD on the desktop. Not.)"

    My old faithful troubleshooting laptop (a 13-year old Sony Vaio, which sports a PIII 600 CPU) which I take down to the Telehouse datacentre periodically, runs FreeBSD with KDE. Its a great lightweight easy to use 'nix platform.

    Ooh you meant 'consumer' desktop. Snarf. No I don't think the FreeBSD project has even seriously had that use case in mind.

  12. W. Anderson

    shewed perspective on FreeBS and non-Microsoft technologies

    This article on new FreeBSD 10 Operating System (OS) by Simon Sharwood portrays an unflattering image of FreeBSD in this particular case, and the regular downplaying Microsoft shills in TheRegister, ZDNet and TechTarget forums of any great features/advantages of Linux or any software and technology service that is competitive to and possibly superior to offering from Microsoft.

    For whatever ill conceived reason, he refers to FreeBSD as "legacy" here: …. " which hints strongly at the OS being considered a legacy environment by some users." - which is a rather asinine characterization given that FreeBSD is the core OS for “new” Sony Playstation 4 Gaming console, underscores - even today - a good percentage of the Apple Mac OS X OS via Darwin framework, and whose adoption elsewhere, particularly for multimedia and latest networking infrastructure is expanding exponentially.

    For example, Netflex recently chose FeeeBD - over latest Windows 2012 Server -for thousands of Applications Server installs within AT&T, Comcat and other Internet backbone providers to stream millions of movies to subscribers each week, and Verisign upgraded it's network infrastructure with substantial FreeBSD Server deployments - against Windows - for it's superior reliability, stable network foundation and security base in their expanding Certificate Authentication services operation.

    There are many other factual reports of substantial adoption increase in FreeBSD that belie any false notion by Mr. Sharwood and his ilk of any redundancy of demand and use of the BSD UNIX-like OS as well as Linux OS, or any “inevitable” displacement by Microsoft Windows and the company's virtualization, Cloud Computing ventures.

    It has become rather distasteful to read misleading and deceitful technical stories, many of which contain a gross amount of 'factually' incorrect reporting, most times that accrue to the advocacy and promotion of Microsoft technologies and services. (sic) I do hope that TheRegister addresses this malady.

  13. agricola
    Boffin

    Good show, FreeBSD worker bees (or is that 'worker-BSDs'? Sorry; I couldn't resist).

    It's heartening to see FreeBSD alive and well, even if it's not giving Linux distros sleepless nights.

    It's a good, solid operating system which provides a viable option if you would like a different FOSS system with good support--via the FreeBSD community--and good documentation, both on-line and via many good books. And--by the by--a good way to learn 'almost'-UNIX (I personally think of it as UNIX, but I know I'd be flamed by the purists if I had not provided the qualification).

  14. busycoder99

    The 40 or so pfSense boxes on my network

    Look forward to this release

  15. Carpetsmoker
    Thumb Up

    Because only having two or three OS's is a good thing?

    Let's not dismiss FreeBSD, or any other OS for that matter, for having a relatively small install base. Having only 2 or 3 options (Windows, Linux, OSX) is *not* something I look forward too. I'd like to have at least 10 options, just as I can choose between 10 different car brands.

  16. Henry Wertz 1 Gold badge

    Agreed re: Hyper-V

    I've got no plans to switch to FreeBSD, or OSX/iOS for that matter. But I must agree with the various commentors re: Hyper-V... supporting Hyper-V or not is not indicative of any kind of "legacy status." I would think an OS adding additional virtualization support is actually, if anything, an indication that there is still support and development going on for it.

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