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List some of FreeBSD's excellent new features and what users can expect

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in future.

Submitted by:	rwatson, dcs, adrian
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Alexander Langer 2001-01-06 17:22:01 +00:00
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<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN" [
<!ENTITY date "$FreeBSD: www/en/features.sgml,v 1.12 1999/09/06 07:02:37 peter Exp $">
<!ENTITY date "$FreeBSD: www/en/features.sgml,v 1.13 2000/04/03 10:42:51 kuriyama Exp $">
<!ENTITY title "About FreeBSD's Technological Advances">
<!ENTITY % includes SYSTEM "includes.sgml"> %includes;
]>
<!-- $FreeBSD: www/en/features.sgml,v 1.12 1999/09/06 07:02:37 peter Exp $ -->
<!-- $FreeBSD: www/en/features.sgml,v 1.13 2000/04/03 10:42:51 kuriyama Exp $ -->
<html>
&header;
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operating systems design to give you these advanced features:</p>
<ul>
<li><b>Bounce buffering</b> gets around a limitation in the PC's ISA
architecture that limits direct-memory access to the first 16
megabytes.
<p><i>Result:</i> systems with more than 16 megabytes operate more
efficiently with DMA peripherals on the ISA bus.</p></li>
<li><b>A merged virtual memory and filesystem buffer cache</b>
continuously tunes the amount of memory used for programs and the
disk cache.<p><i>Result:</i> programs receive both excellent memory
disk cache. As a result, programs receive both excellent memory
management and high performance disk access, and the system
administrator is freed from the task of tuning cache sizes.</p></li>
administrator is freed from the task of tuning cache sizes.</li>
<li><b>Compatibility modules</b> enable programs for other operating
systems to run on FreeBSD, including programs for Linux, SCO,
NetBSD, and BSDI.
NetBSD, and BSDI.</li>
<p><i>Result:</i>&nbsp;users will not have to recompile programs
already compiled for one of the compatible OS's, and will have
access to a greater selection of off-the-shelf software, like the
<a href="http://www.microsoft.com/FrontPage/">Microsoft FrontPage
Server</a> extensions for BSDI or <a
href="http://linux.corel.com/linux8/index.htm">WordPerfect</a>
for SCO.</p></li>
<li><b>Kernel Queues</b> allow programs to respond more efficiently
to a variety of asynchronous events including file and socket IO,
improving application and system performance.</li>
<li><b>Dynamically loadable kernel modules</b> allows new filesystem
types, networking protocols or binary emulators to be added to the
kernel at runtime without having to generate a new kernel image.
<li><b>Accept Filters</b> allow connection-intensive applications,
such as web servers, to cleanly push part of their functionality into
the operating system kernel, improving performance.</li>
<p><i>Result:</i> Much time can be saved and 3rd party vendors can
deliver complete subsystems as kernel modules without having to
distribute source or have lengthy installation procedures.</p></li>
<li><b>Soft Updates</b> allow improved file system performance
without sacrificing safety and reliability, by intelligently
analyzing, caching and rewriting or reordering disk meta-data
operations.</li>
<li><b>Support for IPsec and IPv6</b> allows improved security in
networks, and support for the next-generation Internet Protocol,
IPv6.</li>
<li><b>Shared libraries</b> reduce the size of programs, saving disk
space and memory. FreeBSD uses an advanced shared library scheme
which offers many of the advantages of ELF, and the current version
offers ELF compatibility for both Linux and native FreeBSD
programs.</li>
</ul>
<p>Naturally, since FreeBSD is an ongoing effort, you can expect newer
features and higher levels of stability with each release.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Work in-progress includes support for fine-grained SMP locking in
kernel, allowing higher performance on multi-processor machines,
support for Scheduler Activations, allowing parallelism in threaded
programs, file system snapshots, fsck-free booting, network
optimizations such as zero-copy sockets and event-driven socket IO, ACPI support, and advanced security features such as Mandatory
Access Control.</p>
<h2>What experts have to say . . .</h2>
<blockquote>
<p><i>``FreeBSD has an outline-structured visual configuration editor
... you can enter the configuration of every device the OS supports
and can therefore get a successful installation on the first try
almost every time. IBM, Microsoft, and others would do well to
emulate FreeBSD's approach.''</i></p>
<div align="right"><p>---Brett Glass, <i>Infoworld</i>, April 8
1996.</p></div>
</blockquote>
&footer;