Lotsa FreeBSD

I found myself needing to downgrade a system with 8-CURRENT to 7-STABLE. It was almost painless but I’d like to outline the procedure that worked for me:

• Get the right version of the sources with cvsup
• Build the kernel, boot it with reboot -k
• Make buildworld
• Make kernel
• Edit /usr/src/Makefile to add /rescue in front of the PATH so the utilities requiring FBSD_1.1 (hey! what’s with the “cp” utility requiring FBSD_1.1??) don’t get used
• Make installworld
• Mergemaster, etc. as needed

I didn’t have any ports on the machine; If I had I’d rm everything from /usr/local or rebuilt them.

This will probably work less and less reliably as 8-CURRENT diverges from 7-STABLE.

As I’ve mentioned on the @stable mailing list, there’s a new alpha version of finstall available. The changes in this build are:

• ZFS support
• Included bsdstats
• Several bugs fixed

Unfortunately, the FreeBSD boot loader doesn’t work on fit-pc, though apparently loaders of other BSD’s and Linux’s GRUB work withot problems. Yay for FreeBSD. I tried many things, including using GRUB (which boots the pre-installed Ubuntu), without luck. I agree with the diagnosis proposed by other similar users: something in the loader disables USB in the middle of booting. At the end, I took its drive to another machine, installed FreeBSD there and returned it.

FreeBSD is not exactly a good choice for fit-pc. There are no drivers for its USB 2 (USB1 works) controller, its audio controller and its built-in hardware crypto acceleration (AMD Geode AES). All of these things work on Linux. On the other hand, at least the network ports (Realtek chip) and other basic components (IDE controller, motherboard devices) work.

I got a fit-pc machine the other day The first impressions are not that good:

• While obviously the purchaser was in Europe, I got an American power cable (though the power transformer is luckily universal 110V-220V 50Hz-60Hz)
• There seems to be something loose in the transformer or the cord(s), since apparently it requires jiggling around to make it start. Will probably have to replace it all together.
• Installing Ubuntu with full graphical interface on this machine was a catastrophic waste of resources. The machine a) has only 256 MB of RAM and b) has an extremely slow CPU (500 MHz AMD Geode – this is way slower than what is in EEE PC). It swaps all the time while under GUI.

Suppose you want to use a remote iSCSI device, but you don’t exactly trust either the storage or the network in between. Of course, there’s a way around it

The setup presented here is very simple and will behave like this:

[iSCSI server] -- encrypted data on the server and over the wire -- [iSCSI client]

I’ve got several queries on finstall development, so here’s a few words on the subject. The development has moved to SourceForge.net. The move was made to enable users that don’t have FreeBSD.Org accounts to participate in development. The source code repositories are world-readable. If you’re interested, contact me and I’ll add you to the project as a developer.

One part of the project that will be interesting to many people is the LiveCD ISO-building script, makeimage.py. There’s currently no documentation on it, but its command-line argument are well explained. This script could be useful to people wanting to create their own LiveCD.

I’ve created a new livecd+finstall ISO image containing FreeBSD 7.0-BETA4. This release of finstall fixes most of the bugs present in earlier versions, and introduces only one new feature: file systems are created on glabel devices. You can fetch the alpha2 version of finstall here. It was good to get back to this project, even in the limited time i have for it.

It looks like I can now create a realistic schedule for 7.0-RELEASE. It will probably contain the following new features (i.e. in addition to those already in alpha2):

• ZFS
• Installing on already partitioned drives
• Some kind of rudimentary remote install.

Yes, this means that software RAID and volume management support will not get in there for this release, but there really wasn’t time as I spent most of the time (during and post SoC) chasing bugs in the kernel (and, as it turns out, the compiler). I hope I’ll have support for sw RAID and VM for 7.1-RELEASE.

I’d appreciate bug reports, and also help from interested developers. One field when it definitely needs work are text strings: language proofing, help texts, etc. I18n is not yet supported – only English is used now.

In case you missed it, here’s what’s new in FreeBSD 7.0.

For those not following the mailing lists, here’s some encouraging news about running Windows applications on WINE on FreeBSD 7:

• MS Office 2000
• 3D benchmark

It seems that benchmark results are a bit lower (less than 10%) for FreeBSD, compared to Linux.

As 7.0 is approaching release, a recurring question on the mailing lists is (in its many forms) “how stable is it?”. The answer really depends on what you are planning to do with it, but there are several known errors, bugs and misfeatures which will surely be present in 7.0-RELEASE. If your workload includes some of those, you better wait for the next release before putting a 7.x in production. If not, go ahead: by all means it’s stable enough.

Here’s the list of problems currently known to me, as of 7.0-BETA3. The list is probably not complete (so it may grow over time), and some of the problems listed may not be relevant to your workload, so take it with a grain if salt.

• ZFS is mostly unstable (or at least not as stable as UFS), especially under low memory conditions, on both i386 and amd64
• tmpfs is somtimes unstable in subtle ways (not very repeatable)
• unionfs doesn’t work over cd9660 (this one is obscure and only hurts LiveCD makers)
• removing mounted USB drives still doesn’t work (and USB support in general has most of the old problems)
• gcc program profiling doesn’t work
• java doesn’t work stable with some applications (tomcat sometimes crashes)
  
• while performance was greatly improved for database-like tasks, there are reports that complex tasks like heavy web applications could have performance problems.

In addition to these, there are some “non-bugs” which get reported often, some of which actually are bugs and problems but they have always existed and people have grown accustomed to them:

• BETA ISO images don’t contain packages (though sysintall offers to install them, and fails with weird errors)
• Support for 3D in X.Org is very limited, mostl due to lack of drivers (yes, there’s a NVIDIA driver for i386 but there’s no equivalent AMD64 version).

Of course there are also many good news.