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FreeBSD 13.0

315 points| 4ad | 5 years ago |freebsd.org | reply

59 comments

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[+] chungy|5 years ago|reply
FreeBSD is such an excellent operating system, I applaud all developers and users that have kept it going all these years.

I've been toying around with it in a virtual machine since 13.0-RC2, in many ways it can feel like a foreign system (compared to my Linux background), but there are a lot of nice things that also make it feel "greener" on the FreeBSD side. It's honestly hard to understate the value of boot environments and the boot loader's capability to swap between them or even roll back to a spool checkpoint. It makes almost all upgrades and system changes risk-free.

[+] yrgulation|5 years ago|reply
It has been 15 years since i last used freebsd in a commercial setting. Linux since then. In many ways linux feels alien to me. I still default to “pkg add” in my mind before “apt get”. A shame it didnt gain more traction, as i really loved this OS.
[+] E39M5S62|5 years ago|reply
Take a look at https://github.com/zbm-dev/zfsbootmenu/ . Full boot environment support for Linux, along with the ability to create a new environment from a snapshot in your bootloader, live-diff snapshots to see _when_ something changed, and even chroot into a boot environment to fix things.
[+] Arelius|5 years ago|reply
Having come into Linux from FreeBSD, I agree, FreeBSD does feel "greener"
[+] throw4738|5 years ago|reply
Maybe have a look at OpenSuse, it has rollback as well and feels like traditional Linux.
[+] cashsterling|5 years ago|reply
For what it is worth... you can buy industrial PC/PLC from Beckhoff with FreeBSD installed. PLC= programmable logic controller. Run control system logic on the PLC hard-realtime runtime and run your sophisticated logic and numerical stuff on the FreeBSD OS... soft-realtime communication between FreeBSD and the PLC runtime is pretty straight forward. https://www.beckhoff.com https://www.beckhoff.com/en-us/products/ipc/software-and-too...
[+] Tomte|5 years ago|reply
Industrial PC, not PLC. FreeBSD is replacing WinCE there.

I was looking forward to such a PLC, but it's still interesting.

[+] rwaksmunski|5 years ago|reply
I applaud the removal of all the obsolete drivers and utilities. Let's keep it lean and mean!
[+] hyakosm|5 years ago|reply
Tier-1 support for ARMv8 is a great thing, I hope using it for Raspberry Pi or similar single-board computer.
[+] KozmoNau7|5 years ago|reply
I hope that ARM[1] can become a real challenger to the x86-dominated server/desktop/laptop space, maybe even give us a bit of that vibrant environment of multiple competing platforms that existed in the 80s and 90s.

Perhaps it's just my nostalgia speaking, but I always found it neat how there were x86 daughterboards for Macs and Amigas, and various other similar setups. A full Ryzen APU-powered PC with good graphics performance can easily fit on a PCIe card, which could slot neatly into a hypothetical ARM-powered PC, with access to the mainboard's resources.

Use the ARM main PC for desktop and other less intensive tasks, and fire up the full-fat x86 daughterboard for gaming and number-crunching.

Or maybe it would be a lot more elegant to just have good power management on an already powerful ARM CPU and GPU and handle what x86 stuff you need via emulation, but full-computer daughterboards are just so neat!

[1] Or even better, RISC-V.

[+] olavgg|5 years ago|reply
This release includes ZFS 2.0, + draid.

I've already upgraded and is very happy with how things work.

[+] BlackLotus89|5 years ago|reply
Since Linux became unstable on one oft my Intel Laptops (only this one system) (crashes, multi monitor problems,...) I wanted to try FreeBSD in it (Linux compatibility, zfs, ...) but the recent wireguard nearly merge and the following reaction [0] made me pause in actually trying it.

I hope the developer and merge polcies aren't as headless as they seem.

[0] https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overruns-lice...

[+] edoceo|5 years ago|reply
They (policies) are not; the wireguard issue was an anomaly. Policy was debated and revised shortly (inside of 2wk IIRC) after.
[+] jbirer|5 years ago|reply
My Thinkpad E15 Gen 2 with AMD Ryzen 4500U (Radeon Renoir Graphics) hangs on boot when I enable the amdgpu driver and disable syscon (framebuffer). Hardware support is one of the big things that holds FreeBSD back.
[+] floatboth|5 years ago|reply
Renoir is a bit too new for us since the official drm version is 5.4, you currently have to build the 5.5-wip branch of drm-kmod for it to work.

Also, I've fixed the framebuffer thing, you no longer have to disable it!!

(Not everybody even had to ever do it. The issue was that we did not disable our simple framebuffer when the driver expected it (our Linux compat layer would only try to kill other Linux framebuffers) so our framebuffer would literally just overwrite device memory that the driver was using to initialize all the GPU firmware. On my Vega card, this would only happen at 1440p/4K. With smaller EFI framebuffer resolution, the memory would luckily not overlap :D)

[+] netflixandkill|5 years ago|reply
It's anything but the largest projects really. Even mainstream linux support for a lot of laptops is still iffy. Too much work for too few people and fewer willing to pay to make it happen.

It will be interesting to see if further ARM penetration into what was historically Windows-or-Mac only portions of the laptop market helps with that.

[+] the_only_law|5 years ago|reply
I once had a very bad idea to create a UEFI application that was basically a RDP client (for the hell of it ofc)

Then I had to use a framebuffer driver with a BSD because it lacked GPU support for the machine I was on and dear god, the web was basically unusable.

Put that idea in a coffin pretty quickly.

[+] wyager|5 years ago|reply
Just got this up and running. No issues so far except wireguard keepalive is broken for me for some reason. Very exciting to see Linux and FreeBSD pulling ZFS from the same upstream - I needed this to properly deal with encryption etc.