FreeBSD is a free, open-source and UNIX-like operating system. Though relatively unknown, it’s a performing and powerful work-horse, capable of coping with massive work-loads whilest remaining fast, ultra-stable and rock-solid. Blogging about FreeBSD and operating systems based on this versatile, safe and secure OS, I want to generate more interest in FreeBSD and its dependants. If you need a reliable, rock-solid and performing system for either your desktop or servers, consider FreeBSD!
The FreeBSD Foundation has not reached its fund raising goal for 2009 yet ($46,000 short of their $300,000 goal). The Foundation is hoping to to double spending on development in 2010 and needs our help:
Why make a donation? Right now we’re putting together our 2010 budget. Our goal for next year is to double our project development spending, continue sponsoring BSD-related conferences, sponsor more developers to travel to these conferences, and spend more on needed equipment for the project.
The Foundation announced earlier this week it’s receiving a cheque for $500 from the Bad Code Offsets project. I’ve never heard of this project:
The project is a way to undo the bad code other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software
Justin Sherill mentions on the DragonFlyBSD Digest that was contacted by a recruiter to see if he knew anybody who might be interested in a BSD hacker job:
My client right now is an established proprietary trading firm. That means that they use only their own capital, and don’t have any investors. They were founded in 2002 and currently have about 50 people. They focus on trading multiple asset classes with extremely high-frequency both in the US and abroad. The unique twist on this firm is that they don’t hire people with finance backgrounds. They are looking for the best talent they can find in both math and technology, and then let them come up with unique solutions of their own.
We’re currently looking for some top-notch systems programmers. People who are really great C++ hacks, and have experience using one of the versions of BSD are ideal for us. In addition, we like people who have experience programming in Perl, and working on network protocols or file systems. This place has a very flat organization, and is pretty casual in dress…jeans are the norm. It’s basically a dot.com that got transported from Silicon Valley to NYC.
People who collect ISO images from more than just the FreeBSD Project have been mentioning it would be nice if “FreeBSD” was part of the filenames for a while now.
Ken Smith has committed a change that will add “FreeBSD-” to the beginning of the filenames.
So for example 9.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso becomes FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso
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The BSD Fund announced that they have generated enough card revenue to be a BSDCan sponsor. BSD Fund is a Bronze sponsor of BSDCan 2010 using funds raised exclusively with the BSD Fund Visa.
The BSD Fund aspires to contribute to every major BSD event around the world as they play such a critical role in the community, but so far it’s been a chicken and egg problem: few cardholders because the card hadn’t supported anything yet. Things seem to be taking off.
About BSD Fund
BSD Fund is a United States 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose mission is to assist and fund BSD-related events, development and initiatives around the world. BSD Fund raises money through direct donations and the BSD Fund Visa that supports BSD with every purchase. BSD or Berkeley Software Distribution is a family of open source licenses and operating systems that emphasize permissive redistribution and high technical standards.
For clarity, the BSD Fund is supporting the BSD family of operating systems, whilest the FreeBSD Foundation only funds FreeBSD related activities and projects.
Thanks, Michael, for contacting me and asking to mention your achievement. If you, my readers, have anything FreeBSD related to announce, why not contact me? We BSD’ers don’t tend to be as vocal as our Penguin brothers…..
The guys over at RootBSD have updated their blog with a post on the differences between Linux and FreeBSD; partly seen from a hoster’s perspective.
We thought it would be a good idea to help educate our current RootBSD users, and potential users, as to some of the differences between FreeBSD and Linux. We have nothing against Linux at all, we actually like it, however there are very noticeable differences in the two. Without turning this into too much of a religious debate, here are a few points we consider
Let’s start off by looking at, what we believe is, the biggest difference in the two.
First off, Linux itself is a kernel, not an OS! Distributions (Red Hat, Debian, Suse and others) provide the installer and bundle lots of other open source software. There are easily well over 300 different Linux distributions. While this gives you a lot of choices, the existence of so many distributions also makes it difficult to use different distros since they are all a little bit different. Distributions don’t just differ in ease-of install and available programs; they also differ in directory layout, configuration practices, default software bundles, and most importantly the tools and prorcedures for software updates and patches.
FreeBSD is a complete operating system (kernel and userland) with a well-respected heritage grounded in the roots of Unix development. Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library incompatibilities. Security vulnerabilities can also be addressed quickly by the security team. When new utilities or kernel features are added, the user simply needs to read one file, the Release Notes, which is publicly available on the main page of the FreeBSD website.
The post carries on with looking at performance, security and software: FreeBSD and Linux
About RootBSD
RootBSD was established with one goal in mind: provide reliable, flexible, and supported BSD-based hosting services to professionals and businesses.
RootBSD gives you the power to innovate and scale on top of the BSD operating systems. Their services are rock solid; in fact, you could call them the BSD hosting solution.
Back in October we mentioned that the FreeBSD Foundation decided the fund the HAST project (new FreeBSD Project: HAST)
Pawel Jakub Dawidek, the sponsored FreeBSD developer, has made quite a bit of progress since and finished the development of stage one:
I want to report that first milestone of the HAST project is complete.
Summary of the work that have been done:
Implementation of hastd daemon.
Implementation of hastctl utility to manage hastd daemons.
GEOM_GATE class was extended so that the caller can specify the name of GEOM provider. Before only /dev/ggateX names were supported. HAST will use /dev/hast/
Implementation of communication protocol. There is abstraction layer on top and below there are three protocols implemented currently:
proto_tcp4 – It is used for communication between primary and secondary nodes.
proto_uds – (UDS – UNIX Domain Socket) It is used for communication between hastctl and hastd.
proto_socketpair – It is used for communication between main hastd daemon and worker processes forked from it.
Implementation of nv (name-value) API, which allows to easy create packets containing name-value pairs. It is used for entire communication through the protocols above. It is also responsible for managing correct byte-order.
Implementation of ebuf (extendable buffer) API, which provides a way to extend given buffer by adding data at the back, but also at the front without reallocating it and copying the data very often (or never).
Implementation of logging API (pjdlog). The API decides if messages should be logged on standard output/error (before going into background) or to syslog (when we daemonize). It also provides some shortcuts for logging a message and exiting, etc. It supports notion of debug level and can skip messages intended for higher debug level than requested.
Implementation of configuration file parser in lex/yacc. Configuration file is designed in a way that it can be kept identical on both nodes.
Checksumming and compression for the data is not one of the project’s goal, but the stubs are there, so this can be added easly.
A lot of care was taken to be able to handle more nodes in the future. This is not implemented and in not project goal, but I wanted to make it ready for future improvements (source)
HAST enables users to use the FreeBSD operating system for highly available configurations where data has to be shared across the cluster nodes. The software will allow for synchronous block-level replication of any storage media (GEOM providers, using FreeBSD nomenclature) over the TCP/IP network and for fast failure recovery. HAST will provide storage using GEOM infrastructure, which means it will be file system and application independent and could be combined with any existing GEOM class. In case of a master node failure, the cluster will be able to switch to the slave node, check and mount UFS file system or import ZFS pool and continue to work without missing a single bit of data.
In order to fund more of these sort of projects, the Foundation is reliable on our donations and support. The Foundation hasn’t reached its 2009 goal yet. You can help by donating.
(BTW, I’m in no way affiliated with the work of the FreeBSD Foundation; I only want to see FreeBSD progress to become even better)
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The 
Deb Goodkin announced the publication of the annual FreeBSD Foundation’s 
The guys over at 
Back in October we mentioned that the FreeBSD Foundation decided the fund the HAST project (
The 
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