RootBSD

A customer recently linked us to a blog post (http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html) that gives a really good look at what there is to come in the up-and-coming version 8 of the FreeBSD operating system. It looks like the FreeBSD developers have been busy and there are a number of new features which caught our eye.

First, as a company which provides FreeBSD VPSs running on Xen the support for running FreeBSD as a paravirtualized guest in Xen is of major interest to us. We currently run our VPSs using Xen’s support for full virtualization (known as HVM mode in Xen lingo). This mode allows unmodified guest operating systems to run in Xen and is, most familarly, how Windows is support in Xen. Paravirtualized guests however, are ported to run within the Xen hypervisor, and since the guest is designed to operate in Xen and cooperate with the hypervisor the guest can run much more efficiently and quickly. To our customers the greatest boost in performance will be seen in disk and network throughput so we are eagerly anticipating this support in FreeBSD 8.

By the looks of it there will be other improvements in almost every part of FreeBSD. The ULE scheduler which first appeared in FreeBSD 7.0 and became the default with 7.1 has received a number of improvements which will boost performance particularly for the SMP configurations that ULE was designed to handle. The inclusion of stack-smashing protection also gives FreeBSD an edge in security by protecting the system from a number of common exploits used to attack software vulnerabilities. Light weight kernel threads are also to appear in FreeBSD 8 which will mean that kernel threads will consume less resources and be less resource intensive to create and destroy.

Seems like FreeBSD 8 will be another great release for our favorite operating system. For a look at all the other features planned for FreeBSD 8 see the original post at http://ivoras.sharanet.org/freebsd/freebsd8.html

The FreeBSD release team announced the availability of 7.2-RELEASE on May 4.  We’ve loaded it in our system and its now available for new VPS setups.

Official announcement:

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.2R/announce.html

Highlights:

• support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory
• support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails
• csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository
• Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2
• sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors

Previously, Reverse DNS requests for our customers were checked over and entered manually by our support staff.  In the last few days we’ve made some improvements to RootCP, including automation of DNS requests.  Now, when you request a Reverse DNS update in RootCP, it will be updated to our DNS servers instantly.  You’ll still need to wait 1-2 hours for the change to propagate.

We joined the crowd and got on twitter. You can follow us, if thats your thing.

One of our customers, Sofa, recently released the first easy to use Subversion client for the Mac, named Versions.  Version control is a critical piece to software development projects, and the tools and processes to handle versioning have often been pain points for development teams.  The ability to easily visualize commits, notes and changes that Versions offers is a big step forward for Mac developers.

A time-limited demo is available for free download and a single copy sells for 39 euros. Versions has been in public beta since June of 2008. You can view the press release here or read more at the Unofficial Apple Weblog.

The registration system for Versions is hosted on a FreeBSD Virtual Private Server at RootBSD.  The flexibility that RootBSD’s VPS service offers allowed administrators to upgrade their VPS in a matter of minutes to handle increased server load at the release date.

In the last few days, the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team finalized 7.1-RELEASE and it is now available for donwload.  We are now also offering the option for 7.1-RELEASE on new VPS setups.  It is listed as an option in the signup process (along with 6.3 and 7.0).

Release Announcement

• The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
• Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
• A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
• Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
• The cpuset(2) system call and cpuset(1) command have been added, providing an API for thread to CPU binding and CPU resource grouping and assignment.
• KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
• DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures

Today there was a major disruption in Internet traffic affecting our network and many other sites in the USA such as Amazon S3, Facebook and more.  It looks like the primary cause of the problem was with the Level(3) Internet backbone.

As of 2:45PM EST it seems that things have stabilized.  If you are still having problems, please open a support ticket.

Buildasearch.com is a new website that lets anyone quickly build their own customized search engine.  By signing up for a free account, users can quickly configure and customize their own search engine that can be used to search a predefined list of websites.

Besides just harvesting the power of big search engines, Buildasearch.com lets users easily customize the look and feel of their search engine.  An easy-to-use AJAX web interface allows users to tailor the search engine’s color scheme and logo to blend in with an existing website.  When it comes to integrating the search engine, a webmaster can either link to it on Buildasearch.com’s server or use a sample PHP API to include it on a standalone website.

Buildasearch.com is powered by a FreeBSD VPS provided by RootBSD.  “The RootBSD service has been excellent, and the Xen-powered VPS has handled our site’s load very well,” said Diego Montalvo, creator of Buildasearch.

Along with the release of FreeBSD 7 last year came the birth of FreeBSD 8 in the development stage. Its planned release is the 2nd quarter of 2009, but here is a quick overview of what we know is in the works for the new version.

(1) A rewrite of the TTY layer (traditional UNIX interface), making it easier to maintain and extend.
(2) An increase in the kernel memory limit to 6GB.
(3) The introduction of “lightweight” kernel threads that consume less low-level resources.
(4) procstat, a process inspection utility useful for debugging.
(5) Text dumps that extract commonly needed information in the event of a kernel panic as well as reduces trash by not storing the actual dump file.
(6) A new version of the ULE scheduler with additional functionality and performance improvements.
(7) The implementation of “superpages” after an analysis of known issues and a plan for effectively using these large-sized memory pages.
(8) DTrace, a tool developed by Sun, to help debug and profile operating systems.
(9) The network stack visualization project intends to maintain multiple independent instance of networking state, allowing for complete independence between network jails.
(10) A substantial increase in bandwidth due to ECMP routing.
(11) Improvement to the Berkeley Packet Filter, allowing increased efficiency in memory copy operations.
(12) An NFS lock manager in the kernel to improve synchronized file access.
(13) Support for booting from GPT partitions.
(14) bsdlabel extended to a limit of 26 partitions.
(15) User-controllable CPU/IRQ binding and CPU-thread binding with support for CPU sets.

So stay tuned! It looks like FreeBSD is only getting better, and by this time next year we may have even more security and better performance.

The command line interface for FreeBSD can be intimidating and cause many users excessive consternation. So why not take FreeBSD to the next level and get moving in a more mouse-driven interface. It’s quick and simple and there are several graphic user interfaces (GUI) available for the operating system.

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