On tonight's show Matt Olander, chief technology officer of Offmyserver, and Murray Stokely, vice president of engineering for FreeBSD Mall, answer our questions about this alternate operating system.

What is FreeBSD?

The short answer: FreeBSD is a powerful BSD Unix operating system without a hefty commercial price tag.

The long answer: FreeBSD is a complete, open-source operating system with more than 25 years of continual development. It's designed for x86 compatible, DEC Alpha, IA-64, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures. FreeBSD is derived from BSD Unix, the version of Unix developed at the University of California at Berkeley. Additional platforms are in development.

FreeBSD runs all common open-source applications, as well as commercial software written for Linux and other Unix variants. It offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features that are unavailable in many other operating systems, including some of the best commercial ones. It's the preferred OS of many of the largest Web servers on the Internet due to its renowned reliability, security, and performance.

What does this latest version contain?

Here are some of the highlights of release 5.0. We'll discuss all this and more on the show.

• SMPng: It's the "next generation" support for SMP machines. This version offers partial support for running multiple processors in the kernel.
  
• KSE: Kernel Scheduled Entities lets a single process have multiple kernel-level threads. It's similar to Scheduler Activations.
  
• New architectures: Release 5.0 supports the sparc64 and ia64 architectures, as well as the i386, pc98, and alpha.
  
• GCC: The compiler tool chain is now based on GCC 3.2.1, rather than on GCC 2.95.X.
  
• MAC: Release 5.0 supports extensible, loadable Mandatory Access Control policies.
  
• GEOM: This release has a flexible framework for transformations of disk I/O requests. It also has an experimental disk encryption facility based on GEOM.
  
• FFS: The FFS file system now supports background fsck operations for faster crash recovery and file system snapshots.
  
• UFS2: Release 5.0 has a new UFS2 on-disk format that supports extended per-file attributes and larger file sizes.
  
• Cardbus: This release supports Cardbus devices.

How does it compare to other operating systems?

Take a look at this chart comparing FreeBSD to Windows 2000 and Linux. It could use a few updates, but overall it's an accurate picture of how all three systems perform.



Murray Stokely is a core-team member and release engineer for the FreeBSD Project. He also serve as the vice president of engineering for FreeBSD Mall, the leading vendor of FreeBSD software products.

Matt Olander is the chief technology officer for Offmyserver, a manufacturer of custom FreeBSD rackmount servers, security appliances, and workstations. Offmyserver also offers managed hosting services on FreeBSD.