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Colin Percival wrote two comprehensive how-tos on keep FreeBSD updated.

The first is for minor upgrades, the second for major version changes.

Very neat thing, this freebsd-update tool, indeed. But beware, it only works for Releases and only with generic kernels, so perhaps you are in for a make && make insallkernel && make installworld routine for one last time.

Years ago, it there was only one way to update the ports tree: by CVS. Then Colin Percival wrote portsnap and greatly reduced the overhead and time it took to make a checkout.

He also wrote the birthday note.

Linux gets the Completely Fair Scheduler of Ingo Molnár merged into its 2.6 branch before the release of 2.6.23.

Meanwhile Jeff Robertson is working on the SCHED_ULE to replace SCHED_4BSD as the standard scheduler of FreeBSD. His thoughts on the CFS can be found here.

Almost a week ago, the status report for FreeBSD related projects has been published. It covers the events from January to March this year.

The highlight is surely the integration of Sun’s ZFS-filesystem, which will be part of FreeBSD 7.0.

Other than that the main reports are:

• Xorg 7.2 — coming soon
• Building Linux Device Drivers on FreeBSD — works only for USB web-cams for the time being
• Import of trunk(4) from OpenBSD — aggregation of network interfaces is such a cool feature!
• SMP Scalability — works pretty good up to 8-CPU systems

The full report can be found here.

Only 8 days into his new job, Ian Murdock gave an interview about his future plans: He wants to close the ‘usability gap’ between Solaris and Linux.

It’s no revelation that there is a gap between Solaris and Linux, but until now I didn’t found it explained in a such simple and clear manner: Solaris has very good technologies, like Containers, ZFS, DTrace but lacks on the side of a simple installation or a powerful package management.

I would like to quote one question he put up and which explains just everything: “So, could we take all that stuff above Linux and put it above Solaris in a way that does not leave behind all of all the differentiating features of Solaris?”

It’s just the way FreeBSD works since 1993…

The laptop database for FreeBSD is back since January 18 and can be found here.

The old database maintained by Lukas Ertl has been offline since the server hosting it was shut down with January 1st.

The FreeBSD status report for the fourth quarter of 2006 has been mailed on January 16.

Fortunately, there has been so much activity that a roundup would take almost as long to read as the original, so I’m not going to waste your time. Nevertheless I want to mention some highlights:

• ZFS is now functional, ACLs are the next item on the ToDO list.
• The Linux Compatibility Environment is being upgraded to Linux kernel version 2.6 while several improvements have been made for kernel version 2.4
• X.org 7.2 is coming to FreeBSD! The team estimates the merge into the ports tree with end of January.
• It is planned to make TrustedBSD Audit a production feature for the FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE

Yesterday, the final release of FreeBSD has been announced.

After considerable time slips due to severe issues that came up after the release process was started (and which have been addressed very professionally from my point of view) the Release Candidates came on time as did the final release.

I’m very impressed by the list of new features even hough there are not that many items on the list. I consider the integration of csup as one of the most useful features and the implementation of the OpenBSM audit subsystem one of the most valuable ones.

As usual, the Release Notes and the Errata are available and should be read before installation.

The scheduler is one of the most important parts of an operating system. It is responsible for managing the run-queue of all active processes and hence is made responsible every time the machine “feels sluggish” under load.

While being such an integral design part, little to no changes have been made to the original 4BSD scheduler used by FreeBSD. This, for one, lies in the effects any change could bring: from unusual behavior to severe performance regressions. Second, the task in rewriting a scheduler (more precisely inventing or implementing a new scheduling algorithm) is technically challenging. Obviously, the piece of code has great powers and must not give up under any circumstances. On the other hand, it has to be very efficient in order to not waste cpu-cycles, since it’s called upon every context switch.

This tremendous task has been attacked in FreeBSD to create a new scheduler, dubbed ULE. But this scheduler newer met its design goals (never both stability and efficiency) and hence never replaced the 4BSD code.
Development would have been more fruitfull if it wasn’t for the advent of SMP machines, where ULE has been historically weak.
After a quarrel about the principle usefulness of ULE under certain circumstances some months ago, nothing new was heard from the scheduler.

But on january 4, Jeff Roberson announced that he had addressed some long standing concerns about ULE and has committed ULE 2.0 into CURRENT.
With this my hopes are again high that a viable alternative to the current scheduler will be available some day in the future.

On december 27, Release Candidate 2 for the 6.2 Release has been announced by Ken Smith.

Since this ought to be the last RC before final release, all open issues have been taken care of, especially the heinous device driver bugs.
Additionally, due to a security issue, a new version of BIND had to be integrated into the operating system.

If testing doesn’t reveal any issues, the final release is predicted to be somewhere round january 10, which would be tomorrow.