As of June 1, 2008 00:00:00 UTC, FreeBSD 5.X support in the ports tree
is End Of Life. This means that a ports tree checked out after this
date is not guaranteed to produce usable packages on 5.X. Additionally,
5.X package builds on the cluster will cease. Users are encouraged to
upgrade to 6.3 or 7.0 if they wish to continue to track the latest ports
tree.

A tag, RELEASE_5_EOL, has been laid down to mark the last point in the
ports tree that officially supported FreeBSD 5.X. Port Manager asks
that you not rush to remove 5.X support right away as we’d like a
settling-down period, and we want secteam to have a chance to make their
EOL announcements as well.

Somehow I made it to the office this morning before the canteen had opened for breakfast. Rumor has it, they were closed last week because they had found rats in the kitchen. Not a bad week to be away
My body, though, seems to be a bit confused as to where in the world it is right now, which isn’t too surprising after being delayed for about 33 hours, so the whole journey back from Ottawa to Århus lasted from Sunday lunchtime to Tuesday 7pm (both local times). Funny though how random strangers meet when hit by an accident like a cancelled flight and being put in an airport hotel instead. I met a couple of poles studying in Stockholm and a canadian girl on her way to southern Sudan for MSF and we quite enjoyed our time just reading books in the hotel lobby. Certainly refreshing after spending several days being locked up in conference rooms with several hundred computer geeks
Anyway, back to the coffee machine and try to stay awake and maybe even do some work.

BSDCan 2008 is over again. As last year, I spent a few days in Montreal doing some siteseeing. Mark Linimon and Adrian Chadd joined me there, and some miles were walked and some beers were consumed. On Wednesday, we drove off to Ottawa. Somehow, Google Maps managed to send us to the wrong university at the exact opposite side of the city, so we had some more siteseeing there.
For the first two days, we held a FreeBSD DevSummit with talks in the mornings and informal meetings during the afternoons. I managed to corner some people about several issues that are much easier resolved in person (or even over a beer), which was one of my primary reasons of being there. The next two days was the conference itself with several interesting talks. Only a few people turned up for the FreeBSD ports BOF I held, but they did go home with some helpful hints.
After that, it was heading back, but that’s a separate post altogether…
Did I mention there are some pictures as well?

With both FreeBSD 6.3 and 7.0 out, the older releases of the 6.x branch, 6.1 and 6.2, and the legacy 5.5 release will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Also, ports infrastructure will no longer be supported on the 5.x branch. Start planning your upgrades rather sooner than later!

On May 31st, FreeBSD 5.5, FreeBSD 6.1, and FreeBSD 6.2 will have reached
their End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security
Team. Since FreeBSD 5.5 is the last remaining supported release from the
FreeBSD 5.x stable branch, support for the FreeBSD 5.x stable branch will
also cease at the same point. Users of any of these FreeBSD releases are
strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 6.3 or FreeBSD 7.0 before
that date.

Please note that the End of Life dates for FreeBSD 5.5 and FreeBSD 6.1
were announced in May 2006; and the End of Life for FreeBSD 6.2, which
was originally announced as January 31, 2008, has been extended by four
months in order to allow time for users to upgrade.

The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to inform users that May 31st (the
security team’s End-Of-Support date for FreeBSD 5.x) will also be the end
of support for the Ports Collection on both 5.5-RELEASE and the 5-STABLE
branch. Neither the infrastructure nor individual ports are guaranteed to
work on these FreeBSD versions after that date. A CVS tag will be created
for users who cannot upgrade for some reason; as of that commit, these users
are advised to stop tracking the latest ports CVS repository and instead
stay with the version as of that tag.

Full announcement.

Portmgr is pleased to announce that Florent Thoumie has accepted the challenge of being a portmgr member. Florent has been with the project for a long time and is one of our most active committers. Amongst other things, he was one of the people that worked on the complete overhaul of the X11 infrastructure with the Xorg 7.2 upgrade.
He will join the other portmgr members on integrating infrastructure patches and quality assurance in addition to other portmgr tasks.

Wish him luck!

It happened again. After sending more than 250 PRs, it was not to be avoided and my former mentee Gabor stepped up, together with araujo as co-mentor, to punish Felippe de Meirelles Motta (AKA lippe) with a ports commit bit. Keep up the good work, all three of you!

After a long and difficult release cycle, FreeBSD 7.0 has finally hit the virtual shelves. Users have clearly been waiting with high expectations for this release as load on the primary download site tripled many hours before the official announcement was sent. It indeed was worth waiting for, with plenty of new features and upgrades, but also some dramatic performance improvements. ONLamp has a large interview with a number of developers about the new features in 7.0. The highlights from the release announcement:

• Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better. Results are from benchmarks used to analyze and improve system performance, results with your specific work load may vary. Some of the changes that contribute to this improvement are:
  • The 1:1 libthr threading model is now the default.
  • Finer-grained IPC, networking, and scheduler locking.
  • A major focus on optimizing the SMP architecture that was put in place during the 5.x and 6.x branches.
• Some benchmarks show linear scaling up to 8 CPUs. Many workloads see a significant performance improvement with multicore systems.
• The ULE scheduler is vastly improved, providing improved performance and interactive response (the 4BSD scheduler is still the default for 7.0 but ULE may become the default for 7.1).
• Experimental support for Sun’s ZFS filesystem.
• gjournal can be used to set up journaled filesystems, gvirstor can be used as a virtualized storage provider.
• Read-only support for the XFS filesystem.
• The unionfs filesystem has been fixed.
• iSCSI initiator.
• TSO and LRO support for some network drivers.
• Experimental SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) support (FreeBSD’s being the reference implementation).
• Much improved wireless (802.11) support.
• Network link aggregation/trunking (lagg(4)) imported from OpenBSD.
• JIT compilation to turn BPF into native code, improving packet capture performance.
• Much improved support for embedded system development for boards based on the ARM architecture.
• jemalloc, a new and highly scalable user-level memory allocator.
• freebsd-update(8) provides officially supported binary upgrades to new releases in addition to security fixes and errata patches.
• X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, GNOME 2.20.2.
• GNU C compiler 4.2.1.
• BIND 9.4.2.

Martin Wilke not only spends a lot of time on fixing ports and closing PRs, but also has time to look for new blood and found some. Pietro Cerutti sent too many PRs and got the appropriate punishment. Welcome!

Philippe sent, amongst others, a large amount of fixes for the new GCC 4.2 version of the compiler, which did not go unnoticed. Thomas Abthorpe and Thierry Thomas have therefore decided to duely punish him for it with a FreeBSD port commit bit. Welcome aboard, Philippe!

At long last, FreeBSD 6.3 has been released. It as the usual set of bugfixes, and stability and performance improvements from its predicessor 6.2 along with some interesting updates. See the release announcement for more details. Now, we can concentrate on the release of 7.0, which have an impressive set of new features.