Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 14:24:56 -0500 (EST) From: John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> To: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> Cc: advocacy@freebsd.org, Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com>, Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> Subject: Re: Companies awaiting 5.0 technology Message-ID: <XFMail.20021203142456.jhb@FreeBSD.org> In-Reply-To: <424B1D56-06EB-11D7-9371-000393863D48@freebsd.org>
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On 03-Dec-2002 Nik Clayton wrote: > On Friday, November 8, 2002, at 06:54 PM, Johnson David wrote: > [ ... list of features in 5.0 elided ... ] > >> As an ex-salesman recovered enough to admit it, features are not >> "cool", >> benefits are. The above is a list of features. Only a geek would find >> it >> sexy. We need a list of benefits. A feature is a "what is it", a >> benefit is a >> "what it does for you." > > Here's a something I've been knocking around for the past few days. > I'm more than happy to renounce ownership of this if someone else cares > to give it the care and polish it needs. > > -------- 8< cut here 8< -------- 8< cut here 8< -------- > > FreeBSD 5.0 Benefits > > So, what are the real benefits of FreeBSD 5.0? That's going to depend > on what sort of a FreeBSD user you are. > > Administrator > > As an administrator, you'll benefit from the increased security > features, providing a much finer grain of control over access to the > system. The use of PAM across all the system utilities for > authentication makes it much easier to (for example) ensure that > everything authenticates against your LDAP or RADIUS servers. The > "jail" subsystem, which allows you to run multiple distinct operating > system environments on one host has been extended, and can now support > per-jail secure levels, an important security feature, particularly for > organisations providing co-hosting and co-location services. > > Improvements to the disk system, such as snapshots and background fsck, > mean that FreeBSD's has a faster start up time, and it's possible to > take consistent backups of filesystems without ensuring that they're > quiescent first, improving reliability. FreeBSD's software RAID > support has been extended with the addition of the RAIDFrame framework, > allowing you to build more reliable systems. Except that RAIDFrame is experimental, and we clearly need to mark it as such to avoid unncessary foot shooting and user complaints as a result. > The revamped SMP support means that you'll now get more bang per buck > on multi-CPU systems, giving more power from your existing hardware > investment. And if your systems do a lot of work with encrypted data > (e.g., webservers supporting HTTPS) then you'll benefit from the new > support for hardware crypto cards, which offload most of the encryption > work to a separate dedicated processor. Except that we are actually probably slower on SMP systems for kernel intensive things right now. SMPng is far from complete at this point. One thing that should be clear is that 5.0 is not going to be as fast as 4.x, and people need to weigh that against 5.0's new features when making their decision. Looks good other than that. Might want to mention that one no longer has to use MAKEDEV when one installs a new driver, with devfs the new driver just DTRT and the new devices automagically appear in /dev. Administrators also will probably like being able to use ACL's on filesystems now. Also, you can now safely dump live filesystems by dumping a snapshot of the filesystem. -- John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> <>< http://www.FreeBSD.org/~jhb/ "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.FreeBSD.org/ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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