What's happening to FreeBSD?

R

rotor

Is FreeBSD going down the path of MS Windows, i.e., a wall of complexity is a goal?

The new package-oriented updates of the OS are a major step backwards from the prior ease of keeping FreeBSD up to date.

Has there been a major change in the long-term goals of FreeBSD?
 
There is no OS.
- There is KERNEL
- There is BASE
- There are PACKAGES

The 3 together form the OS.

- Me i just build a few ports (20) with poudriere.
- Then for all ports (1500) i do "pkg update -f" , "pkg upgrade".

"freebsd-version -kru"
"pkg prime-origins"
 
rotor said:
Is FreeBSD going down the path of MS Windows, i.e., a wall of complexity is a goal?

The new package-oriented updates of the OS are a major step backwards from the prior ease of keeping FreeBSD up to date.

Has there been a major change in the long-term goals of FreeBSD?
Click to expand...
take a look -
vermaden

Thread 'Brave New PKGBASE World'

Original article here.
Consider this when replying.

FreeBSD, The FreeBSD Foundation, and The FreeBSD Forums are not associated with the content of this article.
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lanin said:
take a look -
vermaden

Thread 'Brave New PKGBASE World'

Original article here.
Consider this when replying.

FreeBSD, The FreeBSD Foundation, and The FreeBSD Forums are not associated with the content of this article.
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How far is this? I made a mfsroot-based system that theoretically can run 1 program after the kernel but that's not really interesting. A solid dependency tree of world components would be nice, though. Trying something with compiler options gets complicated fast.
 
pkgbase is one thing. Whether you like it or not, nobody stepped forward to maintain freebsd-update forever.

rcd is a different matter, is it gets to be pid 1. But the proposal for that makes sense to me and the improved functionality is worth the complexity (for me).
 
cracauer@ said:
pkgbase is one thing. Whether you like it or not, nobody stepped forward to maintain freebsd-update forever.

rcd is a different matter, is it gets to be pid 1. But the proposal for that makes sense to me and the improved functionality is worth the complexity (for me).
Click to expand...
The most easy thing is build kernel and base from source. Works all times. No need for additional stuff.
Same for /usr/src & /usr/ports ; i just use plain simple git clone.
 
drhowarddrfine said:
What's rcd? That new installer someone's working on for pkgbase?
Click to expand...
Beastie7

Thread 'rcd(8) - new service manager daemon'

For those who might've missed the big news on the mailing list - I decided to post it here.

Looks like the creator of pkg and poudriere (Baptiste Daroussin) has been brewing up a new modern service manager daemon for FreeBSD. From what I can tell; it's functionally similar to SMF but relies on FreeBSD features/interfaces instead of mangling the kernel.

From the original post;
Key features:

- Parallel boot via dependency DAG (no more serial rc.d execution)
- Process tracking via pdfork(2) descriptors (no PID file races)
- Subreaper via procctl(2) (no orphaned...
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Alain De Vos said:
There is no OS.
- There is KERNEL
- There is BASE
- There are PACKAGES

The 3 together form the OS.

- Me i just build a few ports (20) with poudriere.
- Then for all ports (1500) i do "pkg update -f" , "pkg upgrade".

"freebsd-version -kru"
"pkg prime-origins"
Click to expand...

Respectfully, I'm going to challenge that. OS is the abstraction from hardware to well defined services that are necessary to run programs, nothing more. This misinterpretation is why I'm very nervous about the uninitiated masses pushing for bundling of the OS with applications programs.
 
There is no packages in FreeBSD Alain De Vos , it is the kernel and the userland, as any other whole OS, which is basically 95% of OSes out there except notably GNU/Linux.

pkgbase is not packages, it's system packages. "Packages" in FreeBSD sense are 3rd party software built from ports.

What made some confusion here is FreeBSD project using the same tool in same fashion for system packages and 3rd party ones.
On Windows there is no such "package update" but in theory, MSI updates are done for both application software and windows updates.

pkgbase is not about any sort of diversification ala Linux. But it makes it easier to test and deploy local changes to a piece of FreeBSD.

Base packages are simply better system than binary updates but here the approach to introduce it through pkg and introduce it prior to sanding off rough corners by making a freebsd-update-pkgbase tool which takes same or highly similar input as the old binary update tool, but does pkgbase stuff instead, may leave impression on some people it is changing some fundamental approaches to structure of FreeBSD. It is not. When I started using FreeBSD, freebsd-update tool did not exist yet at all, and pkg was a distant future (how many of you remember it was called pkgng?)

Things change, and not for worse all the time.
I have put my initial fears about pkgbase in the topic at that time, and proceeded to use it immediately because it is the future.
I don't like the way pkg shows everything together. I think it should be at least in presentation and tool naming, a different thing. pkgbase instead of pkg, a hardlink to pkg which does just the base stuff. But I know 0 of the implementation details...
 
What complexity? Any example? I'd say they should end "meta-ports" and ports with multiple output branches but that's only an opinion and not very significant. It adds complexity in exchange for more universal management and less specific target configiration.
 
When rcd delivers parallel startup & shutdown of the daemons and networks the reboot time would shrink to some seconds.
On Solaris after the System repository was implemented reboot time shrank to less than a minute.
If fast reboot is implemented ( ie: not having to re-execute the UEFI/BIOS firmware code on reboot ) that would cut another 20 seconds.
this is important if a system needs to provide 99.999 % uptime. ( 53 minutes downtime in a Year )
that will give you 4 servicewindows of 13 minutes.

If a machine can be patched online and rebooted in 2 minutes you will have more servicewindows !
 
Windows doesn't have packages. Sigh.

I see both pkgbase and rcd as exciting developments.

The only thing missing in pkg right now is BE integration like in Solaris/Illumos and also Linux distros with openSUSE's zypper.
 
drsnx60 said:
When rcd delivers parallel startup & shutdown of the daemons and networks the reboot time would shrink to some seconds.
On Solaris after the System repository was implemented reboot time shrank to less than a minute.
If fast reboot is implemented ( ie: not having to re-execute the UEFI/BIOS firmware code on reboot ) that would cut another 20 seconds.
this is important if a system needs to provide 99.999 % uptime. ( 53 minutes downtime in a Year )
that will give you 4 servicewindows of 13 minutes.

If a machine can be patched online and rebooted in 2 minutes you will have more servicewindows !
Click to expand...
Is there any contest? I think I'm under 25 seconds to the text login with a menstick but I didn't count it. Most of the kernel barely takes time. Rc.d is worse on it. The USB stack coming takes 5 seconds before read access. That's a liitle long. DHCP takes longer than other devices too.
 
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