Category Archives: FreeBSD

Google Sponsors Improvements to FreeBSD

Posted on by

Google Sponsors Improvements to FreeBSD’s Performance Measurement Toolkit

Google BSD SearchRecently, Google sponsored the development of an oft requested enhancement to FreeBSD’s PmcTools: that of capturing the call chains leading to “hot” locations in the code. Call chains provide additional insight into the behavior of the system; in addition to determining the “hot” locations in the code, developers gain insight into why these locations became “hot” in the first place.

HWPMC and associated userland tools have been invaluable to the FreeBSD community in improving the scalability and performance of the upcoming FreeBSD 7 release. Kris Kennaway of the FreeBSD Project notes that

hwpmc is one of our most powerful tools for measuring and understanding CPU performance on FreeBSD. Support for profiling of call graphs was an important missing piece that will simplify the ability of developers to analyze performance bottlenecks in the kernel and in application code.

More on the Google Code Blog.

FreeBSD Google Summer of Code

Posted on by

A few weeks ago the Google Summer

of Code finished. This is the update from FreeBSD with regards to the FBSD projects:

“The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google

Summer of Code 2007. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the

25 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of

the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program.

We are happy to report that all students made

some progress towards their goals for the summer, and the 22 students listed below completed the program successfully.

Information about the student

projects is available from our Summer of Code wiki and all of the code is checked into Perforce. The

summaries below were submitted by the individual students and their mentors with minor editing for consistency.”

href="http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode-2007.html">These are the FBSD 2007 Summer of Code projects (Project, Student, Mentor, Summary of

project)

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report (Q3/2007)

Posted on by

This report covers FreeBSD related projects between July and October 2007. The sixth EuroBSDCon was held in Denmark in September. The Google Summer of Code project came to a close and lots of participants are working getting their code merged back into FreeBSD. (link to FBSD update on GSoC here).

The bugs in the FreeBSD HEAD branch are being shaked out and it is being prepared for the FreeBSD 7 branching. If your are curious about what’s new in FreeBSD 7.0 we suggest reading Ivan Voras’ excellent summary here .

Thanks to all the reporters for the excellent work! We hope you enjoy reading.

Read the whole report here

Desktop FreeBSD Series

Posted on by

A few years ago, Ed Hurst, an Associate Editor of Open for Business, began what would become an extremely popular series of articles on getting started with desktop BSD (i.e. FreeBSD on the desktop, not DesktopBSD ;-) Because of the continuing popularity of this series, Ed had revised the articles to apply to the latest and greatest versions of FreeBSD.

This series is very useful if you want to lear how FreeBSD works if you want to get your feet wet and set up a Desktop BSD system by installing FreeBSD and configuring it to your (desktop) needs, instead of installing PC-BSD or DesktopBSD.

Previous article in this series are:

He has now written the eighth delivery “Updating the core systems“:

Continue reading →

A basic FreeBSD server install

Posted on by

Yesterday we wrote about Penguin Pete installing FreeBSD from scrach. Today I have a link to Greg’s (Sparks, Nevada) blog who shows step-by-step (with screenshots) how to install FreeBSD:

When it comes to servers, I have always preferred FreeBSD as my operating system of choice. Maybe it’s the cute mascot, maybe it’s the amazing stability it offers, maybe it’s just what I’m used to, but I love it! In this article, I’ll discuss how to set up a very basic, bare-bones FreeBSD server installation.

The first thing you need, obviously, is FreeBSD itself! FreeBSD is free, open-source software licensed under the BSD License. You can obtain a copy at FreeBSD.org. I will be using the version 6-2-RELEASE boot-only ISO. This ISO will boot into the FreeBSD kernel and start the sysinstall utility. A direct link is available here: You can choose to use the full ISOs available in the same directory on the FTP site. Go ahead and burn your ISO(s) using whichever software you prefer and boot the computer with the CD.

Read the post here

SpreadBSD Campaign

Posted on by

ixsystemslogo.jpgiXsystems, the company behind the PC-BSD Project and supporter of the FreeBSD Project is currently developing a community web site to promote FreeBSD and PC-BSD. The site will look pretty much like SpreadFirefox.

We will need banner ads such as the Firefox ones for the BSD community to use on their web sites. If you like to design artwork, feel free to email me your creations and I’ll make sure it gets to the right person at iXsystems. We will use the best submissions. Please respect the standard dimensions. Use png/gif for images, or jpeg for photos (lots of colors). This aside, you’re fairly free to design what you want to promote FreeBSD or PC-BSD.

www.spreadfreebsd.org
Firefox 2

30 Days with PC-BSD and DesktopBSD

Posted on by

Jan Stedehouder used PC-BSD for thirty days to see what living with it is like. On day thirty, he concludes:

Does PC-BSD have the potential to be a serious contender for the open source desktop? I answered that question with a yes, because the potential is there. The solid FreeBSD roots, the very strong and very accessible information, the friendly and mature community and the PBI system provide the foundations for that potential. I don’t think it is ready now and I couldn’t recommend it yet to someone in the early stages of moving away from Windows to an open source desktop. But I do think that the PC-BSD team has the right target audience in mind and is building an system and a support system that addresses it’s needs.

He has now finished that journey and he’s going to do the same with DesktopBSD from Nov 1st.

Check his website for the daily updates.