FreeBSD

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Notes

Internal Pointers

FreeBSDUpgrade - FreeBSD upgrade checklist
FreeBSDJail - jail setup and maintenance
FreeBSDPorts - notes for dealing with FreeBSD Ports
FreeBSDCluster - my evolving FreeBSD cluster
GEOM - freebsd disk abstraction layer

UnixGeekTools - other great tools for unix geeks

External Pointers

Resources

Articles

Search

http://www.google.com/bsd

Ports

http://www.freshports.org/

Other BSD projects

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/main/ - logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series
http://www.trustedbsd.org/ - trusted operating system extensions to the FreeBSD operating system
http://www.openbsd.org/ - "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!"
http://www.netbsd.org/ - "Of course it runs NetBSD"

Java

http://www.freebsd.org/java/
Java 1.5 JDK and JRE binaries for FreeBSD 5.5 and 6.1 - i386 and amd64
- http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml

RSS

http://www.freebsd.org/security/advisories.rdf - FreeBSD security advisories
http://www.freebsd.org/news/news.rdf - FreeBSD project news
http://bsdnews.com/ddn.rdf.php3 - BSD news
http://www.oreillynet.com/feeds/columns/?x-col=15 - FreeBSD basics at OReilly onlamp
http://www.oreillynet.com/feeds/columns/?x-col=13 - big scary daemons at OReilly onlamp
http://www.oreillynet.com/meerkat/?_fl=rss10&t=ALL&c=5544 - onlamp bsd
http://www.freebsddiary.org/news.php - FreeBSD diary
http://www.bsdatwork.com/feeds/ - bsdatwork
http://freebsdaddicts.org/backend.php - FreeBSD addicts
http://bsdvault.net/backend.php - bsdvault

Book

The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System

Kirk McKusick <mckusick@freebsd.org>
George Neville-Neil <gnn@neville-neil.com>

The new Book "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System" is the successor of the legendary "The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD" book which has become the de-facto standard for teaching of Operating System internals in universities world-wide.

This new and completely reworked edition is based on FreeBSD 5.2 and the upcoming FreeBSD 5.3 releases and contains in-details looks into all areas (from virtual memory management to interprocess communication and network stack) of the operating system on 700 pages.

Updates

Java - Wed Apr 5, 2006 5:49 pm

Binaries now available for 5.4 and 6.0!
- http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml
Update: Sun Apr 9, 2006 12:04 am - have been running these for a few days now and it's been working very nicely!
Update: Java 1.5 JDK and JRE binaries for FreeBSD 5.5 and 6.1 - i386 and amd64

FreeBSD 6.0

From: http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/New%20Networking%20Features%20in%20FreeBSD%206.pdf
Mbuf Univeral Memory Allocator
tons of SMP locking of network related data structures
"The first go on fine-grained network locking in FreeBSD 5 has been greatly enhanced and refined for excellent SMP scalability. For single processor machines all perfromance regressions due to locking overhead have been eliminated and FreeBSD 6 reaches the same speed in heavy duty network streaming as the FreeBSD 4 series."
new netgraph modules
using OpenBSD DHCP client
ipfw updates - IPv6 rule support and ALTQ tagging of packets.
IPDIVERT module for NAT can be loaded at runtime
IP_MINTTL - minimum TTL a packet must have to be accepted on a socket. Set to 255 to prevent packets from outside directly connected networks from reaching local listeners on sockets.
T/TCP support removed - never used except by FreeBSD.
tcpdrop - admin can drop or disconnect any active TCP connection
CARP - Common Address Redundancy Protocol - ported from OpenBSD - see man carp
if_bridge - ethernet bridge ported from NetBSD to replace previous implementation.
wireless lan enhanced to support WPA
binary compatibility with windows NDIS miniport drivers - works well use as a last resort. FreeBSD native drivers are preferred.

FreeBSD 5.3

http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/FreeBSD-5.3-Networking.pdf
kernel config option is no longer needed for packet filters - any kernel will allow a packet filter to be loaded at run-time.
pf packet filter from OpenBSD and ALTQ is fully functional except for CARP.
ipfw rule sets, jail specifications, verify packet arrived through correct interface, and others.
TCP hostcache caches per remote host observartions for significant speedup on consecutive connections, e.g. HTTP.
Inflight Bandwidth-Delay Limiter - improve speeds by limiting window shrinking/opening for sporadically overloaded connections.
tcp connections in TIME_WAIT2 waiting for 2MSL timeout maintains only minimal necessary information instead of full TCP control block.
initial TCP congestion window increased from one packet to RFC3390 maximum of four packets.
SACK, Selective TCP ACK's - allows sender to resend only missing packets instead of resending all packets from the point of loss.
bluetooth netgraph framework - man ng_bluetooth, man bluetooth

    # renaming interfaces
    ifconfig bge0 name office

    # interface cloning
    ifconfig gre0 create
    ifconfig gre0 destroy

    # ip fastforwarding
    # 40%-60% faster than normal IP forwarding
    sysctl net.inet.ip.fastforwarding=1

    # random IP IDs
    sysctl net.inet.ip.random_id=1

    # disable unneeded IP options processing
    sysctl net.inet.ip.process_options=0

    # shows the status of hostcache
    sysctl net.inet.tcp.hostcache
    # Shows all entries in the hostcache
    sysctl net.inet.tcp.hostcache.list

Updated Sat Oct 7, 2006 12:52 PM