Companies awaiting 5.0 technology
John Baldwin
On 03-Dec-2002 Nik Clayton wrote:
> On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 06:54 PM, Johnson David wrote:
> [ ... list of features in 5.0 elided ... ]
>
>> As an ex-salesman recovered enough to admit it, features are not
>> "cool",
>> benefits are. The above is a list of features. Only a geek would find
>> it
>> sexy. We need a list of benefits. A feature is a "what is it", a
>> benefit is a
>> "what it does for you."
>
> Here's a something I've been knocking around for the past few days.
> I'm more than happy to renounce ownership of this if someone else cares
> to give it the care and polish it needs.
>
> -------- 8< cut here 8< -------- 8< cut here 8< --------
>
> FreeBSD 5.0 Benefits
>
> So, what are the real benefits of FreeBSD 5.0? That's going to depend
> on what sort of a FreeBSD user you are.
>
> Administrator
>
> As an administrator, you'll benefit from the increased security
> features, providing a much finer grain of control over access to the
> system. The use of PAM across all the system utilities for
> authentication makes it much easier to (for example) ensure that
> everything authenticates against your LDAP or RADIUS servers. The
> "jail" subsystem, which allows you to run multiple distinct operating
> system environments on one host has been extended, and can now support
> per-jail secure levels, an important security feature, particularly for
> organisations providing co-hosting and co-location services.
>
> Improvements to the disk system, such as snapshots and background fsck,
> mean that FreeBSD's has a faster start up time, and it's possible to
> take consistent backups of filesystems without ensuring that they're
> quiescent first, improving reliability. FreeBSD's software RAID
> support has been extended with the addition of the RAIDFrame framework,
> allowing you to build more reliable systems.
Except that RAIDFrame is experimental, and we clearly need to mark it
as such to avoid unncessary foot shooting and user complaints as a result.
> The revamped SMP support means that you'll now get more bang per buck
> on multi-CPU systems, giving more power from your existing hardware
> investment. And if your systems do a lot of work with encrypted data
> (e.g., webservers supporting HTTPS) then you'll benefit from the new
> support for hardware crypto cards, which offload most of the encryption
> work to a separate dedicated processor.
Except that we are actually probably slower on SMP systems for kernel
intensive things right now. SMPng is far from complete at this point.
One thing that should be clear is that 5.0 is not going to be as fast
as 4.x, and people need to weigh that against 5.0's new features when
making their decision.
Looks good other than that. Might want to mention that one no longer
has to use MAKEDEV when one installs a new driver, with devfs the new
driver just DTRT and the new devices automagically appear in /dev.
Administrators also will probably like being able to use ACL's on
filesystems now. Also, you can now safely dump live filesystems by
dumping a snapshot of the filesystem.
--
John Baldwin <j...@FreeBSD.org> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/
"Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/
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Sam Pikesley
this, I'm _really_ excited. Esp. about the encryption
card support. The time has come to buy one of these
http://openbrick.org/
--- Nik Clayton <n...@freebsd.org> wrote: > On Friday,
> The revamped SMP support means that you'll now get
> more bang per buck
> on multi-CPU systems, giving more power from your
> existing hardware
> investment. And if your systems do a lot of work
> with encrypted data
> (e.g., webservers supporting HTTPS) then you'll
> benefit from the new
> support for hardware crypto cards, which offload
> most of the encryption
> work to a separate dedicated processor.
>
> The new infrastructure for system start up scripts
> means its even
> easier to integrate your own startup services in to
> the system, and
> ensure that they start in the correct order, even as
> other services are
> added or removed.
>
> There have been numerous improvements to FreeBSD's
> networking stack and
> device drivers, including support for "zero copy",
> which removes a key
> bottleneck in network throughput.
>
> Developer
>
> If you use FreeBSD as your development platform then
> you will benefit
> from a host of new changes.
>
> C and C++ programmers will benefit from the updates
> to the gcc compiler
> and gdb debugger which ship with FreeBSD. These are
> now based on gcc
> 3.2.1 and gdb 5.2.1, incorporating updates and bug
> fixes from the GNU
> project.
>
> Perl programmers will benefit from the removal of
> Perl from the base
> FreeBSD system. Paradoxically this move makes it
> easier to install and
> maintain multiple versions of Perl, or Perl for
> different
> architectures, without being concerned that you
> might be inadvertently
> relying on the version of Perl shipped with FreeBSD.
> Various versions
> of the Perl interpreter are available in the FreeBSD
> ports system.
>
> XXX -- need more developer benefits
>
> User
>
> As an end user the most visible change is probably
> the increased
> hardware support. It's now even more likely that
> your USB devices will
> work with FreeBSD out of the box, including PDAs
> that use USB for data
> synchronisation, such as the Handspring Visor.
> Firewire devices are
> now supported, as are Bluetooth, opening up a range
> of third party
> storage and networking products.
>
> If you're running FreeBSD on a laptop then the
> Cardbus support is going
> to be useful, as are the continued enhancements to
> the ACPI system,
> making it much more likely that FreeBSD will be able
> to respond
> appropriately when the CPU speed drops, or you
> decide to suspend the
> system.
>
> If multimedia is important to you then the work
> that's gone in to
> support Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) will
> doubtless be useful,
> as are the new audio drivers. And companies like
> nVidia are now
> realising the benefits of providing native FreeBSD
> drivers for their
> hardware.
>
> FreeBSD continues to support the KDE and GNOME
> environments, as well as
> a huge range of other window managers and supporting
> tools, so you'll
> benefit from all the work that's carried out by
> those groups.
>
> If you run any applications that depend on the Linux
> compatability
> layer then you'll be pleased to know that the layer
> (and the
> emulators/linux_base port that uses it) have been
> upgraded, and now
> correspond with those included with Red Hat Linux
> 7.1.
>
> XXX -- needs a snappy ending
>
> -------- 8< cut here 8< -------- 8< cut here 8<
> --------
>
>
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