FreeBSD News

Ivan Voras has created an excellent page listing all the new and exciting features that will find their way into FreeBSD 7.0. Now with 3 betas released of FreeBSD 7.0 there are still some issues and bugs that need to be resolved. Ivan has done a post outlining where issues and problems can be expected, but he assures 7.0 is still perfectly usable:

“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 sometimes 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.

…

I don’t want to sound pessimistic – of course there are also many good news.”

Whole post here: Lotsa FreeBSD (27/11/2007)