J
jkh
Guest
Hi Folks,
Well, with the long delay of FreeNAS 10 (which is starting to pick up more steam and the beginnings of the new UI are starting to appear, but it's a few months off yet) we have decided to give 9.3 a bit of a refresh.
FreeNAS-9.10-MASTER-201603041830.iso is a good build to try and use, or you can jump to / follow the 9.10-Nightlies train and update to it. Don't do this in production unless you don't care about your system. This is a very early test phase for 9.10 and we'll be rolling a number of nightly builds (well, every night :D) until we're satisfied enough with it to push to 9.10-STABLE, but if you want a preview of it and/or the chance to make sure it's not going to kill your dog and kick your cat before that day comes, this is a good time!
So, what's so new about 9.10 that deserves special testing? Well, all of the UI / Middleware is exactly the same so you won't notice any obvious differences when you boot it (hopefully - that's kind of the goal!).
What's changed is underneath: The FreeBSD bits its based on are no longer stable/9.3, they're now stable/10. Yes, that's right, this build is based on FreeBSD 10.3-BETA3 (at the time of this posting). Don't let the BETA label fool you though, it's been a long and careful merge process over in FreeBSD-land and the 10.3 full release will be coming soon, so you're not going to see a lot of change in the bits between now and then.
What's new in 10.3? Well, support for USB 3.0, bhyve virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V support, more addressable memory (>512GB configurations are now possible), a lot of updated drivers, etc. It's really hard to enumerate all the changes from FreeBSD 9.3->10 since FreeBSD 9.3 is, well, so old at this point. Anyone wishing to slog through a bit of somewhat painful (but enlightening) reading can look at:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/relnotes.html
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.1R/relnotes.html
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.2R/relnotes.html
This will give you a pretty good idea of what's coming into 9.10 from the FreeBSD side. We also pulled up the ports tree to 2016Q1 which brought in a new Samba (4.3.4) and quite a few other new bits of 3rd party software that FreeNAS relies on.
Otherwise, everything else is completely the same and hopefully you will hardly even notice except for those things that work better / faster than they used to.
FAQ:
Q. Why did you call it 9.10 instead of 10 if you updated all of FreeBSD?
A. Because there is already a FreeNAS 10 which changes everything (middleware, GUI, new CLI, new VMs, new Docker Container support, etc) and we couldn't very well have two FreeNAS 10s, now could we, without really confusing the crap out of everyone. Just think of this as the same old FreeNAS 9.3 you've always known and loved, just with an OS refresh under the covers.
We will also leave the 9.3-STABLE update train alone, after perhaps one or two more updates on it, and create a new 9.10-Nightlies update train (and, a bit later, a 9.10-STABLE train) to track the new update. Those who wish to remain with the "old 9.3" can do so, but be aware that it will go into maintenance mode after 9.10 is released, and folks should jump to the new 9.10-STABLE train if they want to get software that is updated more frequent.
Regarding the release numbers, FreeNAS is its own product at this point and while we used to track the underlying OS version for FreeNAS's own version, we realized the folly of this awhile back since FreeNAS != FreeBSD, it's simply based on FreeBSD and a lot of other 3rd party software besides (some of which is GPL'd and pretty far from what FreeBSD would ever accept as "part" of that OS). As FreeNAS grows more features and more code of its own, it's become increasingly apparent that we need to follow our own path with the version numbers, so we are.
Q. So, isn't changing out the entire OS underneath FreeNAS pretty disruptive?
A. Surprisingly not, it really is mostly an implementation detail at this point and it may surprise some folks to know that we actually first tried the "9.3 + FreeBSD 10" experiment over 16 months ago, as we were getting ready to start FreeNAS 10, and it is almost impossible to tell the difference unless you really look hard and know what to look for (underneath the UI).
Q. So, why upgrade the OS bits at all, if it's such a non-issue?
A. Because FreeBSD 9.3 is, as previously mentioned, increasingly old and ever harder to support, and as we put a lot of our resources into creating FreeNAS 10, we're much more familiar with the FreeBSD 10.3 code base (in fact, the OS code and ports are now shared between 9.10 and 10 so it's just easier for us to maintain a single set of reference bits). There are also, as you'll note if you read the FreeBSD release notes cited above, quite a lot of improvements in FreeBSD 10 so we might as well take advantage of them.
Q. OK, so what about bhyve - are you going to expose it in the FreeNAS 9.3 UI so we can use VMs instead of jails?
A. We don't currently have any plans to do that, simply because the 9.3 UI is really hard (and painful) to hack on and we're already putting all of our effort into making that experience nice for FreeNAS 10, where we have entirely new technologies to use for the UI and CLI experience around VMs and containers. You can always use bhyve from the command-line, however, and we'd be interested to hear how people make use of it.
Q. How long before these Nightlies builds get promoted to Stable, where we'll be using this in production?
A. As previously stated, we've actually been doing this 9.3+10 "mash-up" for many months internally, so it's not quite the unknown quantity for us as it is for everyone else, but we'd like to get some good testing done on it before we go to production, so probably at least a few more weeks or so, depending on how testing goes. Please give us your feedback, since it's key to making this decision!
If you are not currently running the 9.10-Nightlies train (see System->Update UI), just switch over in order to test these builds on a nightly basis.
Thanks,
The FreeNAS Development Team
Well, with the long delay of FreeNAS 10 (which is starting to pick up more steam and the beginnings of the new UI are starting to appear, but it's a few months off yet) we have decided to give 9.3 a bit of a refresh.
FreeNAS-9.10-MASTER-201603041830.iso is a good build to try and use, or you can jump to / follow the 9.10-Nightlies train and update to it. Don't do this in production unless you don't care about your system. This is a very early test phase for 9.10 and we'll be rolling a number of nightly builds (well, every night :D) until we're satisfied enough with it to push to 9.10-STABLE, but if you want a preview of it and/or the chance to make sure it's not going to kill your dog and kick your cat before that day comes, this is a good time!
So, what's so new about 9.10 that deserves special testing? Well, all of the UI / Middleware is exactly the same so you won't notice any obvious differences when you boot it (hopefully - that's kind of the goal!).
What's changed is underneath: The FreeBSD bits its based on are no longer stable/9.3, they're now stable/10. Yes, that's right, this build is based on FreeBSD 10.3-BETA3 (at the time of this posting). Don't let the BETA label fool you though, it's been a long and careful merge process over in FreeBSD-land and the 10.3 full release will be coming soon, so you're not going to see a lot of change in the bits between now and then.
What's new in 10.3? Well, support for USB 3.0, bhyve virtualization, Microsoft Hyper-V support, more addressable memory (>512GB configurations are now possible), a lot of updated drivers, etc. It's really hard to enumerate all the changes from FreeBSD 9.3->10 since FreeBSD 9.3 is, well, so old at this point. Anyone wishing to slog through a bit of somewhat painful (but enlightening) reading can look at:
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.0R/relnotes.html
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.1R/relnotes.html
https://www.freebsd.org/releases/10.2R/relnotes.html
This will give you a pretty good idea of what's coming into 9.10 from the FreeBSD side. We also pulled up the ports tree to 2016Q1 which brought in a new Samba (4.3.4) and quite a few other new bits of 3rd party software that FreeNAS relies on.
Otherwise, everything else is completely the same and hopefully you will hardly even notice except for those things that work better / faster than they used to.
FAQ:
Q. Why did you call it 9.10 instead of 10 if you updated all of FreeBSD?
A. Because there is already a FreeNAS 10 which changes everything (middleware, GUI, new CLI, new VMs, new Docker Container support, etc) and we couldn't very well have two FreeNAS 10s, now could we, without really confusing the crap out of everyone. Just think of this as the same old FreeNAS 9.3 you've always known and loved, just with an OS refresh under the covers.
We will also leave the 9.3-STABLE update train alone, after perhaps one or two more updates on it, and create a new 9.10-Nightlies update train (and, a bit later, a 9.10-STABLE train) to track the new update. Those who wish to remain with the "old 9.3" can do so, but be aware that it will go into maintenance mode after 9.10 is released, and folks should jump to the new 9.10-STABLE train if they want to get software that is updated more frequent.
Regarding the release numbers, FreeNAS is its own product at this point and while we used to track the underlying OS version for FreeNAS's own version, we realized the folly of this awhile back since FreeNAS != FreeBSD, it's simply based on FreeBSD and a lot of other 3rd party software besides (some of which is GPL'd and pretty far from what FreeBSD would ever accept as "part" of that OS). As FreeNAS grows more features and more code of its own, it's become increasingly apparent that we need to follow our own path with the version numbers, so we are.
Q. So, isn't changing out the entire OS underneath FreeNAS pretty disruptive?
A. Surprisingly not, it really is mostly an implementation detail at this point and it may surprise some folks to know that we actually first tried the "9.3 + FreeBSD 10" experiment over 16 months ago, as we were getting ready to start FreeNAS 10, and it is almost impossible to tell the difference unless you really look hard and know what to look for (underneath the UI).
Q. So, why upgrade the OS bits at all, if it's such a non-issue?
A. Because FreeBSD 9.3 is, as previously mentioned, increasingly old and ever harder to support, and as we put a lot of our resources into creating FreeNAS 10, we're much more familiar with the FreeBSD 10.3 code base (in fact, the OS code and ports are now shared between 9.10 and 10 so it's just easier for us to maintain a single set of reference bits). There are also, as you'll note if you read the FreeBSD release notes cited above, quite a lot of improvements in FreeBSD 10 so we might as well take advantage of them.
Q. OK, so what about bhyve - are you going to expose it in the FreeNAS 9.3 UI so we can use VMs instead of jails?
A. We don't currently have any plans to do that, simply because the 9.3 UI is really hard (and painful) to hack on and we're already putting all of our effort into making that experience nice for FreeNAS 10, where we have entirely new technologies to use for the UI and CLI experience around VMs and containers. You can always use bhyve from the command-line, however, and we'd be interested to hear how people make use of it.
Q. How long before these Nightlies builds get promoted to Stable, where we'll be using this in production?
A. As previously stated, we've actually been doing this 9.3+10 "mash-up" for many months internally, so it's not quite the unknown quantity for us as it is for everyone else, but we'd like to get some good testing done on it before we go to production, so probably at least a few more weeks or so, depending on how testing goes. Please give us your feedback, since it's key to making this decision!
If you are not currently running the 9.10-Nightlies train (see System->Update UI), just switch over in order to test these builds on a nightly basis.
Thanks,
The FreeNAS Development Team
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