Not very known to the general public but widely used by the computer industry, the open source operating system Unix-compatible adhesive to ongoing trends: virtualization, storage and multiprocessor architectures.
In the family of free operating systems, FreeBSD has a special position. This descendant of the first Unix (of AT&T and then BSD of UC Berkeley) mainly used on servers has a reputation for reliability and quality of well-established technique. It is the basis for certain Internet services busiest in the world such as Yahoo, equipment or network security Juniper, IronPort (now part of Cisco), NetASQ, systems clustered storage and Isilon Panasas, and portions of its code are in the form derived in Apple Mac OS X or Linux. Version 8.0, downloadable for free, adds few new features, not in the spirit of the house, but concrete improvements in accordance with the times.
Virtualization in particular has been a series of efforts. A new container Vimage formed. It incorporates the traditional model of jail (imprisonment of a process and its descendants, to have multiple virtual images of the system in user space, in fact animated by a single kernel instance), except that it incorporates a virtualized network stack . In this way, several completely independent network configurations will coexist on the same operating system for the establishment of routers or VPN, or simply to provide isolated virtual private servers. A jail can now be assigned to a specific processor or core. As an experiment, FreeBSD 8.0 becomes compatible Xen DomU: it functions as a host of this virtualization environment.
Various improvements make better use of multicore/multiprocessor resources. The Linux emulation layer, which operates the native Linux applications on FreeBSD, has been updated to ensure binary compatibility with Fedora 10 (based commercial distributions of RedHat). The subsystem of USB management has been rewritten to take into account the evolution of this operator interface devices. FreeBSD 8.0 now supports the most complete version 13 of the ZFS file system, which brings new features: management of a second level cache consisting of electronic SSD drives (L2ARC), overbooking (thin-provisioning named here sparse volumes), etc. The DTrace framework of Sun has been imported to better monitor events in real time at the operating system or application.
The detailed list of new features is here.
Tags: FreeBSD, Open Source, Open Source OS, Open Source Software, OS, Softwares
