Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 18:15:52 +0000 From: Nik Clayton <nik@freebsd.org> To: Johnson David <DavidJohnson@Siemens.com> Cc: Eric Anderson <anderson@centtech.com>, advocacy@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Companies awaiting 5.0 technology Message-ID: <424B1D56-06EB-11D7-9371-000393863D48@freebsd.org> In-Reply-To: <200211081054.19159.DavidJohnson@Siemens.com>
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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. 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. The new infrastructure for system start up scripts means its even easier to integrate your own startup services in to the system, and ensure that they start in the correct order, even as other services are added or removed. There have been numerous improvements to FreeBSD's networking stack and device drivers, including support for "zero copy", which removes a key bottleneck in network throughput. Developer If you use FreeBSD as your development platform then you will benefit from a host of new changes. C and C++ programmers will benefit from the updates to the gcc compiler and gdb debugger which ship with FreeBSD. These are now based on gcc 3.2.1 and gdb 5.2.1, incorporating updates and bug fixes from the GNU project. Perl programmers will benefit from the removal of Perl from the base FreeBSD system. Paradoxically this move makes it easier to install and maintain multiple versions of Perl, or Perl for different architectures, without being concerned that you might be inadvertently relying on the version of Perl shipped with FreeBSD. Various versions of the Perl interpreter are available in the FreeBSD ports system. XXX -- need more developer benefits User As an end user the most visible change is probably the increased hardware support. It's now even more likely that your USB devices will work with FreeBSD out of the box, including PDAs that use USB for data synchronisation, such as the Handspring Visor. Firewire devices are now supported, as are Bluetooth, opening up a range of third party storage and networking products. If you're running FreeBSD on a laptop then the Cardbus support is going to be useful, as are the continued enhancements to the ACPI system, making it much more likely that FreeBSD will be able to respond appropriately when the CPU speed drops, or you decide to suspend the system. If multimedia is important to you then the work that's gone in to support Direct Rendering Infrastructure (DRI) will doubtless be useful, as are the new audio drivers. And companies like nVidia are now realising the benefits of providing native FreeBSD drivers for their hardware. FreeBSD continues to support the KDE and GNOME environments, as well as a huge range of other window managers and supporting tools, so you'll benefit from all the work that's carried out by those groups. If you run any applications that depend on the Linux compatability layer then you'll be pleased to know that the layer (and the emulators/linux_base port that uses it) have been upgraded, and now correspond with those included with Red Hat Linux 7.1. XXX -- needs a snappy ending -------- 8< cut here 8< -------- 8< cut here 8< -------- To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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