Briefly, FreeBSD is a UN*X-like operating system for the i386 and Alpha/AXP platforms based on U.C. Berkeley's ``4.4BSD-Lite'' release, with some ``4.4BSD-Lite2'' enhancements. It is also based indirectly on William Jolitz's port of U.C. Berkeley's ``Net/2'' to the i386, known as ``386BSD'', though very little of the 386BSD code remains. A fuller description of what FreeBSD is and how it can work for you may be found on the FreeBSD home page.

FreeBSD is used by companies, Internet Service Providers, researchers, computer professionals, students and home users all over the world in their work, education and recreation. See some of them in the FreeBSD Gallery.

For more detailed information on FreeBSD, please see the FreeBSD Handbook.

The goals of the FreeBSD Project are to provide software that may be used for any purpose and without strings attached. Many of us have a significant investment in the code (and project) and would certainly not mind a little financial compensation now and then, but we are definitely not prepared to insist on it. We believe that our first and foremost ``mission'' is to provide code to any and all comers, and for whatever purpose, so that the code gets the widest possible use and provides the widest possible benefit. This is, we believe, one of the most fundamental goals of Free Software and one that we enthusiastically support.

That code in our source tree which falls under the GNU General Public License (GPL) or GNU Library General Public License (LGPL) comes with slightly more strings attached, though at least on the side of enforced access rather than the usual opposite. Due to the additional complexities that can evolve in the commercial use of GPL software, we do, however, endeavor to replace such software with submissions under the more relaxed FreeBSD copyright whenever possible.

• It may be used free of charge, even by commercial users.

• Full source for the operating system is freely available, and the minimum possible restrictions have been placed upon its use, distribution and incorporation into other work (commercial or non-commercial).

• Anyone who has an improvement and/or bug fix is free to submit their code and have it added to the source tree (subject to one or two obvious provisions).

• For those of our readers whose first language is not English, it may be worth pointing out that the word ``free'' is being used in two ways here, one meaning ``at no cost'', the other meaning ``you can do whatever you like''. Apart from one or two things you cannot do with the FreeBSD code, for example pretending you wrote it, you really can do whatever you like with it.

Version 4.4 is the latest STABLE version; it was released in September, 2001. This is also the latest RELEASE version.

Briefly explained, -STABLE is aimed at the ISP or other corporate user who wants stability and a low change count over the wizzy new features of the latest -CURRENT snapshot. Releases can come from either branch, but you should only use -CURRENT if you are sure that you are prepared for its increased volatility (relative to -STABLE, that is).

Releases are only made every few months. While many people stay more up-to-date with the FreeBSD sources (see the questions on FreeBSD-CURRENT and FreeBSD-STABLE) than that, doing so is more of a commitment, as the sources are a moving target.

FreeBSD-CURRENT is the development version of the operating system, which will in due course become 5.0-RELEASE. As such, it is really only of interest to developers working on the system and die-hard hobbyists. See the relevant section in the handbook for details on running -CURRENT.

If you are not familiar with the operating system or are not capable of identifying the difference between a real problem and a temporary problem, you should not use FreeBSD-CURRENT. This branch sometimes evolves quite quickly and can be un-buildable for a number of days at a time. People that use FreeBSD-CURRENT are expected to be able to analyze any problems and only report them if they are deemed to be mistakes rather than ``glitches''. Questions such as ``make world produces some error about groups'' on the -CURRENT mailing list are sometimes treated with contempt.

Every day, snapshot releases are made based on the current state of the -CURRENT and -STABLE branches. Nowadays, distributions of the occasional snapshot are now being made available. The goals behind each snapshot release are:

• To test the latest version of the installation software.

• To give people who would like to run -CURRENT or -STABLE but who do not have the time and/or bandwidth to follow it on a day-to-day basis an easy way of bootstrapping it onto their systems.

• To preserve a fixed reference point for the code in question, just in case we break something really badly later. (Although CVS normally prevents anything horrible like this happening :)

• To ensure that any new features in need of testing have the greatest possible number of potential testers.

No claims are made that any -CURRENT snapshot can be considered ``production quality'' for any purpose. If you want to run a stable and fully tested system, you will have to stick to full releases, or use the -STABLE snaphosts.

Snapshot releases are directly available from ftp://current.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/ for 5.0-CURRENT and releng4.FreeBSD.org for 4-STABLE snapshots. 3-STABLE snapshots are not being produced at the time of this writing (May 2000).

Snapshots are generated, on the average, once a day for all actively developed branches.

Back when FreeBSD 2.0.5 was released, we decided to branch FreeBSD development into two parts. One branch was named -STABLE, with the intention that only well-tested bug fixes and small incremental enhancements would be made to it (for Internet Service Providers and other commercial enterprises for whom sudden shifts or experimental features are quite undesirable). The other branch was -CURRENT, which essentially has been one unbroken line leading towards 5.0-RELEASE (and beyond) since 2.0 was released. If a little ASCII art would help, this is how it looks:

                     2.0
                      |
                      |
                      |  [2.1-STABLE]
     *BRANCH*       2.0.5 -> 2.1 -> 2.1.5 -> 2.1.6 -> 2.1.7.1  [2.1-STABLE ends]
                      |                            (Mar 1997)
                      |
                      |
                      |  [2.2-STABLE]
     *BRANCH*       2.2.1 -> 2.2.2-RELEASE -> 2.2.5 -> 2.2.6 -> 2.2.7 -> 2.2.8 [end]
                      |       (Mar 1997)    (Oct 97) (Apr 98) (Jul 98) (Dec 98)
                      |
                      |
                   3.0-SNAPs  (started Q1 1997)
                      |
                      |
                   3.0-RELEASE (Oct 1998)
                      |
                      |  [3.0-STABLE]
     *BRANCH*      3.1-RELEASE  (Feb 1999) -> 3.2 -> 3.3 -> 3.4 -> 3.5 -> 3.5.1
                      |                     (May 1999) (Sep 1999) (Dec 1999) (June 2000) (July 2000)
                      |
                      |  [4.0-STABLE]
     *BRANCH*        4.0  (Mar 2000) -> 4.1 -> 4.1.1 -> 4.2 -> 4.3 -> 4.4 -> ... future 4.x releases ...
                      |
                      |              (July 2000)   (Sep 2000)   (Nov 2000)
                     \|/
                      +
              [5.0-CURRENT continues]

The 2.2-STABLE branch was retired with the release of 2.2.8. The 3-STABLE branch has ended with the release of 3.5.1, the final 3.X release. The only changes made to either of these branches will be, for the most part, security-related bug fixes.

4-STABLE is the actively developed -STABLE branch. The latest release on the 4-STABLE is 4.4-RELEASE, which was released in September, 2001.

The 5-CURRENT branch is slowly progressing toward 5.0-RELEASE and beyond. See What is FreeBSD-CURRENT? for more information on this branch.

As a general principle, the FreeBSD core team only release a new version of FreeBSD when they believe that there are sufficient new features and/or bug fixes to justify one, and are satisfied that the changes made have settled down sufficiently to avoid compromising the stability of the release. Many users regard this caution as one of the best things about FreeBSD, although it can be a little frustrating when waiting for all the latest goodies to become available...

Releases are made about every 4 months on average.

For people needing (or wanting) a little more excitement, binary snapshots are made every day... see above.

The key decisions concerning the FreeBSD project, such as the overall direction of the project and who is allowed to add code to the source tree, are made by a core team of 9 people. There is a much larger team of more than 200 committers who are authorized to make changes directly to the FreeBSD source tree.

However, most non-trivial changes are discussed in advance in the mailing lists, and there are no restrictions on who may take part in the discussion.

Every significant release of FreeBSD is available via anonymous FTP from the FreeBSD FTP site:

• For the current 3.X-STABLE release, 3.5.1-RELEASE, see the 3.5.1-RELEASE directory.

• The current 4-STABLE release, 4.4-RELEASE can be found in the 4.4-RELEASE directory.

• 4.X snapshots are usually made once a day.

• 5.0 Snapshot releases are made once a day for the -CURRENT branch, these being of service purely to bleeding-edge testers and developers.

Information about obtaining FreeBSD on CD, DVD, and other media can be found in the Handbook.

You can find full information in the Handbook entry on mailing-lists.

You can find full information in the FreeBSD Y2K page.

You can find full information in the Handbook entry on newsgroups.

Yes, most major IRC networks host a FreeBSD chat channel:

• Channel #FreeBSD on EFNet is a FreeBSD forum, but do not go there for tech support or to try and get folks there to help you avoid the pain of reading man pages or doing your own research. It is a chat channel, first and foremost, and topics there are just as likely to involve sex, sports or nuclear weapons as they are FreeBSD. You Have Been Warned! Available at server irc.chat.org.

• Channel #FreeBSDhelp on EFNet is a channel dedicated to helping FreeBSD users. They are much more sympathetic to questions then #FreeBSD is.

• Channel #FreeBSD on DALNET is available at irc.dal.net in the US and irc.eu.dal.net in Europe.

• Channel #FreeBSD on UNDERNET is available at us.undernet.org in the US and eu.undernet.org in Europe. Since it is a help channel, be prepared to read the documents you are referred to.

• Channel #FreeBSD on HybNet. This channel is a help channel. A list of servers can be found on the HybNet web site.

Each of these channels are distinct and are not connected to each other. Their chat styles also differ, so you may need to try each to find one suited to your chat style. As with all types of IRC traffic, if you are easily offended or cannot deal with lots of young people (and more than a few older ones) doing the verbal equivalent of jello wrestling, do not even bother with it.

The Problem Report database of all user change requests may be queried (or submitted to) by using our web-based PR submission and query interfaces. The send-pr(1) command can also be used to submit problem reports and change requests via electronic mail.

Yes. The documentation is available in a number of different formats and compression schemes on the FreeBSD FTP site, in the /pub/FreeBSD/doc/ directory.

The documentation is categorised in a number of different ways. These include:

• The document's name, such as faq, or handbook.

• The document's language and encoding. These are based on the locale names you will find under /usr/share/locale on your FreeBSD system. The current languages and encodings that we have for documentation are as follows:

  Name	Meaning
  en_US.ISO8859-1	US English
  de_DE.ISO8859-1	German
  es_ES.ISO8859-1	Spanish
  fr_FR.ISO8859-1	French
  ja_JP.eucJP	Japanese (EUC encoding)
  ru_RU.KOI8-R	Russian (KOI8-R encoding)
  zh_TW.Big5	Chinese (Big5 encoding)

  Note: Some documents may not be available in all languages.

• The document's format. We produce the documentation in a number of different output formats to try and make it as flexible as possible. The current formats are;

  Format	Meaning
  html-split	A collection of small, linked, HTML files.
  html	One large HTML file containing the entire document
  pdb	Palm Pilot database format, for use with the iSilo reader.
  pdf	Adobe's Portable Document Format
  ps	Postscript
  rtf	Microsoft's Rich Text Format[a]
  txt	Plain text
  Notes: a. Page numbers are not automatically updated when loading this format in to Word. Press CTRL+A, CTRL+END, F9 after loading the document, to update the page numbers.

• The compression and packaging scheme. There are three of these currently in use.

  1. Where the format is html-split, the files are bundled up using tar(1). The resulting .tar file is then compressed using the compression schemes detailed in the next point.

  2. All the other formats generate one file, called book.format (i.e., book.pdb, book.html, and so on).

     These files are then compressed using three compression schemes.

     Scheme	Description
     zip	The Zip format. If you want to uncompress this on FreeBSD you will need to install the archivers/unzip port first.
     gz	The GNU Zip format. Use gunzip(1) to uncompress these files, which is part of FreeBSD.
     bz2	The BZip2 format. Less widespread than the others, but generally gives smaller files. Install the archivers/bzip2 port to uncompress these files.

     So the Postscript version of the Handbook, compressed using BZip2 will be stored in a file called book.ps.bz2 in the handbook/ directory.

  3. The formatted documentation is also available as a FreeBSD package, of which more later.

After choosing the format and compression mechanism that you want to download, you must then decide whether or not you want to download the document as a FreeBSD package.

The advantage of downloading and installing the package is that the documentation can then be managed using the normal FreeBSD package management comments, such as pkg_add(1) and pkg_delete(1).

If you decide to download and install the package then you must know the filename to download. The documentation-as-packages files are stored in a directory called packages. Each package file looks like document-name.lang.encoding.format.tgz.

For example, the FAQ, in English, formatted as PDF, is in the package called faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf.tgz.

Knowing this, you can use the following command to install the English PDF FAQ package.

    # pkg_add ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/packages/faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf.tgz

Having done that, you can use pkg_info(1) to determine where the file has been installed.

    # pkg_info -f faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf
    Information for faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf:
    
    Packing list:
            Package name: faq.en_US.ISO8859-1.pdf
            CWD to /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq
    File: book.pdf
            CWD to .
    File: +COMMENT (ignored)
    File: +DESC (ignored)

As you can see, book.pdf will have been installed in to /usr/share/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq.

If you do not want to use the packages then you will have to download the compressed files yourself, uncompress them, and then copy the appropriate documents in to place.

For example, the split HTML version of the FAQ, compressed using gzip(1), can be found in the en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.gz file. To download and uncompress that file you would have to do this.

    # fetch ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html-split.tar.gz
    # gzip -d book.html-split.tar.gz
    # tar xvf book.html-split.tar

You will be left with a collection of .html files. The main one is called index.html, which will contain the table of contents, introductory material, and links to the other parts of the document. You can then copy or move these to their final location as necessary.

Certainly! There are multiple ways to mirror the Web pages.

• Using CVSup: You can retrieve the formatted files using CVSup, and connecting to a CVSup server.

  To retrieve the webpages, please look at the example supfile, which can be found in /usr/share/examples/cvsup/www-supfile.

• Using FTP mirror: You can download the FTP server's copy of the web site sources using your favorite ftp mirror tool. Keep in mind that you have to build these sources before publishing them. Simply start at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-current/www.

The following newsgroups contain pertinent discussion for FreeBSD users:

• comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.announce (moderated)

• comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc

• comp.unix.bsd.misc

Web resources:

• The FreeBSD Home Page.

• If you have a laptop, be sure and see Tatsumi Hosokawa's Mobile Computing page in Japan.

• For information on SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessing), please see the SMP support page.

• For information on FreeBSD multimedia applications, please see the multimedia page. If you are interested specifically in the Bt848 video capture chip, then follow that link.

The FreeBSD handbook also has a fairly complete bibliography section which is worth reading if you are looking for actual books to buy.

Prior to release 3.1, you only needed one floppy image to install FreeBSD, namely floppies/boot.flp. However, since release 3.1 the Project has added base support for a wide variety of hardware which needed more space, and thus for 3.x and 4.x we now use two floppy images, namely floppies/kernel.flp and floppies/mfsroot.flp. These images need to be copied onto floppies by tools like fdimage or dd(1).

If you need to download the distributions yourself (for a DOS filesystem install, for instance), below are some recommendations for distributions to grab:

• bin/

• manpages/

• compat*/

• doc/

• src/ssys.*

Full instructions on this procedure and a little bit more about installation issues in general can be found in the Handbook entry on installing FreeBSD.

A 3.5 inch (1.44MB) floppy can accomodate 1474560 bytes of data. The boot image is exactly 1474560 bytes in size.

Common mistakes when preparing the boot floppy are:

• Not downloading the floppy image in binary mode when using FTP.

  Some FTP clients default their transfer mode to ascii and attempt to change any end-of-line characters received to match the conventions used by the client's system. This will almost invariably corrupt the boot image. Check the size of the downloaded boot image: if it is not exactly that on the server, then the download process is suspect.

  To workaround: type binary at the FTP command prompt after getting connected to the server and before starting the download of the image.

• Using the DOS copy command (or equivalent GUI tool) to transfer the boot image to floppy.

  Programs like copy will not work as the boot image has been created to be booted into directly. The image has the complete content of the floppy, track for track, and is not meant to be placed on the floppy as a regular file. You have to transfer it to the floppy ``raw'', using the low-level tools (e.g. fdimage or rawrite) described in the installation guide to FreeBSD.

Installation instructions can be found in the Handbook entry on installing FreeBSD.

You will need a 386 or better PC, with 5 MB or more of RAM and at least 60 MB of hard disk space. It can run with a low end MDA graphics card but to run X11R6, a VGA or better video card is needed.

See also the section on Chapter 3

FreeBSD 2.1.7 was the last version of FreeBSD that could be installed on a 4MB system. Newer versions of FreeBSD, like 2.2, need at least 5MB to install on a new system.

All versions of FreeBSD, including 3.0, will run in 4MB of RAM, they just cannot run the installation program in 4MB. You can add extra memory for the install process, if you like, and then after the system is up and running, go back to 4MB. Or you could always just swap your disk into a system which has >4MB, install onto it and then swap it back.

There are also situations in which FreeBSD 2.1.7 will not install in 4 MB. To be exact: it does not install with 640 kB base + 3 MB extended memory. If your motherboard can remap some of the ``lost'' memory out of the 640kB to 1MB region, then you may still be able to get FreeBSD 2.1.7 up.

Try to go into your BIOS setup and look for a ``remap'' option. Enable it. You may also have to disable ROM shadowing.

It may be easier to get 4 more MB just for the install. Build a custom kernel with only the options you need and then get the 4MB out again.

You may also install 2.0.5 and then upgrade your system to 2.1.7 with the ``upgrade'' option of the 2.1.7 installation program.

After the installation, if you build a custom kernel, it will run in 4 MB. Someone has even succeeded in booting with 2 MB (the system was almost unusable though :-))

Currently there is no way to just make a custom install floppy. You have to cut a whole new release, which will include your install floppy.

To make a custom release, follow the instructions here.

Have a look at The multi-OS page.

Install Windows 95/98 first, after that FreeBSD. FreeBSD's boot manager will then manage to boot Win95/98 and FreeBSD. If you install Windows 95/98 second, it will boorishly overwrite your boot manager without even asking. If that happens, see the next section.

You can reinstall the boot manager FreeBSD comes with in one of three ways:

• Running DOS, go into the tools/ directory of your FreeBSD distribution and look for bootinst.exe. You run it like so:

      ...\TOOLS> bootinst.exe boot.bin
  

  and the boot manager will be reinstalled.

• Boot the FreeBSD boot floppy again and go to the Custom installation menu item. Choose Partition. Select the drive which used to contain your boot manager (likely the first one) and when you come to the partition editor for it, as the very first thing (e.g. do not make any changes) select (W)rite. This will ask for confirmation, say yes, and when you get the Boot Manager selection prompt, be sure to select ``Boot Manager''. This will re-write the boot manager to disk. Now quit out of the installation menu and reboot off the hard disk as normal.

• Boot the FreeBSD boot floppy (or CDROM) and choose the ``Fixit'' menu item. Select either the Fixit floppy or CDROM #2 (the ``live'' file system option) as appropriate and enter the fixit shell. Then execute the following command:

      Fixit# fdisk -B -b /boot/boot0 bootdevice
  

  substituting bootdevice for your real boot device such as ad0 (first IDE disk), ad4 (first IDE disk on auxiliary controller), da0 (first SCSI disk), etc.

A bug in early revisions of IBM's BIOS on these machines mistakenly identifies the FreeBSD partition as a potential FAT suspend-to-disk partition. When the BIOS tries to parse the FreeBSD partition it hangs.

According to IBM[1], the following model/BIOS release numbers incorporate the fix.

It has been reported that later IBM BIOS revisions may have reintroduced the bug. This message from Jacques Vidrine to the FreeBSD laptop computer mailing list <freebsd-mobile@FreeBSD.org> describes a procedure which may work if your newer IBM laptop does not boot FreeBSD properly, and you can upgrade or downgrade the BIOS..

If you have an earlier BIOS, and upgrading is not an option a workaround is to install FreeBSD, change the partition ID FreeBSD uses, and install new boot blocks that can handle the different partition ID.

First, you will need to restore the machine to a state where it can get through its self-test screen. Doing this requires powering up the machine without letting it find a FreeBSD partition on its primary disk. One way is to remove the hard disk and temporarily move it to an older ThinkPad (such as a ThinkPad 600) or a desktop PC with an appropriate conversion cable. Once it is there, you can delete the FreeBSD partition and move the hard disk back. The ThinkPad should now be in a bootable state again.

With the machine functional again, you can use the workaround procedure described here to get a working FreeBSD installation.

Getting this to work in the case where you want to dual boot OpenBSD and FreeBSD on the same laptop is left as an exercise for the reader.

Prior to 3.0, FreeBSD included a utility known as bad144, which automatically remapped bad blocks. Because modern IDE drives perform this function themselves, bad144 has been removed from the FreeBSD source tree. If you wish to install FreeBSD 3.0 or later, we strongly suggest you purchase a newer disk drive. If you do not wish to do this, you must run FreeBSD 2.x.

If you are seeing bad block errors with a modern IDE drive, chances are the drive is going to die very soon (the drive's internal remapping functions are no longer sufficient to fix the bad blocks, which means the disk is heavily corrupted); we suggest you buy a new hard drive.

If you have a SCSI drive with bad blocks, see this answer.

If you are seeing things like the machine grinding to a halt or spontaneously rebooting when you try to boot the install floppy, here are three questions to ask yourself:-

1. Did you use a new, freshly-formatted, error-free floppy (preferably a brand-new one straight out of the box, as opposed to the magazine coverdisk that has been lying under the bed for the last three years)?

2. Did you download the floppy image in binary (or image) mode? (do not be embarrassed, even the best of us have accidentally downloaded a binary file in ASCII mode at least once!)

3. If you are using Windows95 or Win98 did you run fdimage or rawrite in pure DOS mode? These OS's can interfere with programs that write directly to hardware, which the disk creation program does; even running it inside a DOS shell in the GUI can cause this problem.

There have also been reports of Netscape causing problems when downloading the boot floppy, so it is probably best to use a different FTP client if you can.

The usual cause of this problem is a mis-configured CDROM drive. Many PCs now ship with the CDROM as the slave device on the secondary IDE controller, with no master device on that controller. This is illegal according to the ATAPI specification, but Windows plays fast and loose with the specification, and the BIOS ignores it when booting. This is why the BIOS was able to see the CDROM to boot from it, but why FreeBSD cannot see it to complete the install.

Reconfigure your system so that the CDROM is either the master device on the IDE controller it is attached to, or make sure that it is the slave on an IDE controller that also has a master device.

If you are installing 2.1.7R from tape, you must create the tape using a tar blocksize of 10 (5120 bytes). The default tar blocksize is 20 (10240 bytes), and tapes created using this default size cannot be used to install 2.1.7R; with these tapes, you will get an error that complains about the record size being too big.

Connect the two computers using a Laplink parallel cable to use this feature:

See also this note on the Mobile Computing page.

Note: By the ``geometry'' of a disk, we mean the number of cylinders, heads and sectors/track on a disk - I will refer to this as C/H/S for convenience. This is how the PC's BIOS works out which area on a disk to read/write from.

This seems to cause a lot of confusion for some reason. First of all, the physical geometry of a SCSI drive is totally irrelevant, as FreeBSD works in term of disk blocks. In fact, there is no such thing as ``the'' physical geometry, as the sector density varies across the disk - what manufacturers claim is the ``physical geometry'' is usually the geometry that they have worked out results in the least wasted space. For IDE disks, FreeBSD does work in terms of C/H/S, but all modern drives will convert this into block references internally as well.

All that matters is the logical geometry - the answer that the BIOS gets when it asks ``what is your geometry?'' and then uses to access the disk. As FreeBSD uses the BIOS when booting, it is very important to get this right. In particular, if you have more than one operating system on a disk, they must all agree on the geometry, otherwise you will have serious problems booting!

For SCSI disks, the geometry to use depends on whether extended translation support is turned on in your controller (this is often referred to as ``support for DOS disks >1GB'' or something similar). If it is turned off, then use N cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track, where N is the capacity of the disk in MB. For example, a 2GB disk should pretend to have 2048 cylinders, 64 heads and 32 sectors/track.

If it is turned on (it is often supplied this way to get around certain limitations in MSDOS) and the disk capacity is more than 1GB, use M cylinders, 63 sectors per track (not 64), and 255 heads, where 'M' is the disk capacity in MB divided by 7.844238 (!). So our example 2GB drive would have 261 cylinders, 63 sectors per track and 255 heads.

If you are not sure about this, or FreeBSD fails to detect the geometry correctly during installation, the simplest way around this is usually to create a small DOS partition on the disk. The correct geometry should then be detected (and you can always remove the DOS partition in the partition editor if you do not want to keep it, or leave it around for programming network cards and the like).

Alternatively, there is a freely available utility distributed with FreeBSD called pfdisk.exe (located in the tools subdirectory on the FreeBSD CDROM or on the various FreeBSD FTP sites) which can be used to work out what geometry the other operating systems on the disk are using. You can then enter this geometry in the partition editor.

Yes. You must make sure that your root partition is below 1024 cylinders so the BIOS can boot the kernel from it. (Note that this is a limitation in the PC's BIOS, not FreeBSD).

For a SCSI drive, this will normally imply that the root partition will be in the first 1024MB (or in the first 4096MB if extended translation is turned on - see previous question). For IDE, the corresponding figure is 504MB.

FreeBSD recognizes the Ontrack Disk Manager and makes allowances for it. Other disk managers are not supported.

If you just want to use the disk with FreeBSD you do not need a disk manager. Just configure the disk for as much space as the BIOS can deal with (usually 504 megabytes), and FreeBSD should figure out how much space you really have. If you are using an old disk with an MFM controller, you may need to explicitly tell FreeBSD how many cylinders to use.

If you want to use the disk with FreeBSD and another operating system, you may be able to do without a disk manager: just make sure the FreeBSD boot partition and the slice for the other operating system are in the first 1024 cylinders. If you are reasonably careful, a 20 megabyte boot partition should be plenty.

This is classically a case of FreeBSD and DOS or some other OS conflicting over their ideas of disk geometry. You will have to reinstall FreeBSD, but obeying the instructions given above will almost always get you going.

This is another symptom of the problem described in the preceding question. Your BIOS geometry and FreeBSD geometry settings do not agree! If your controller or BIOS supports cylinder translation (often marked as ``>1GB drive support''), try toggling its setting and reinstalling FreeBSD.

In general, no. However, we would strongly recommend that you install, at a minimum, the base source kit, which includes several of the files mentioned here, and the sys (kernel) source kit, which includes sources for the kernel. There is nothing in the system which requires the presence of the sources to operate, however, except for the kernel-configuration program config(8). With the exception of the kernel sources, our build structure is set up so that you can read-only mount the sources from elsewhere via NFS and still be able to make new binaries. (Because of the kernel-source restriction, we recommend that you not mount this on /usr/src directly, but rather in some other location with appropriate symbolic links to duplicate the top-level structure of the source tree.)

Having the sources on-line and knowing how to build a system with them will make it much easier for you to upgrade to future releases of FreeBSD.

To actually select a subset of the sources, use the Custom menu item when you are in the Distributions menu of the system installation tool.

Building a new kernel was originally pretty much a required step in a FreeBSD installation, but more recent releases have benefited from the introduction of a much friendlier kernel configuration tool. When at the FreeBSD boot prompt (boot:), use the -c flag and you will be dropped into a visual configuration screen which allows you to configure the kernel's settings for most common ISA cards.

It is still recommended that you eventually build a new kernel containing just the drivers that you need, just to save a bit of RAM, but it is no longer a strict requirement for most systems.

The default password format on FreeBSD is to use MD5-based passwords. These are believed to be more secure than the traditional Unix password format, which used a scheme based on the DES algorithm. DES passwords are still available if you need to share your password file with legacy operating systems which still use the less secure password format (they are available if you choose to install the ``crypto'' distribution in sysinstall, or by installing the crypto sources if building from source). Which password format to use for new passwords is controlled by the ``passwd_format'' login capability in /etc/login.conf, which takes values of either ``des'' (if available) or ``md5''. See the login.conf(5) manpage for more information about login capabilities.

If you have a IDE Zip or Jaz drive installed, remove it and try again. The boot floppy can get confused by the drives. After the system is installed you can reconnect the drive. Hopefully this will be fixed in a later release.

This error comes from confusion between the boot block's and the kernel's understanding of the disk devices. The error usually manifests on two-disk IDE systems, with the hard disks arranged as the master or single device on separate IDE controllers, with FreeBSD installed on the secondary IDE controller. The boot blocks think the system is installed on wd1 (the second BIOS disk) while the kernel assigns the first disk on the secondary controller device wd2. After the device probing, the kernel tries to mount what the boot blocks think is the boot disk, wd1, while it is really wd2, and fails.

To fix the problem, do one of the following:

1. For FreeBSD 3.3 and later, reboot the system and hit Enter at the Booting kernel in 10 seconds; hit [Enter] to interrupt prompt. This will drop you into the boot loader.

   Then type set root_disk_unit="disk_number" . disk_number will be 0 if FreeBSD is installed on the master drive on the first IDE controller, 1 if it is installed on the slave on the first IDE controller, 2 if it is installed on the master of the second IDE controller, and 3 if it is installed on the slave of the second IDE controller.

   Then type boot, and your system should boot correctly.

   To make this change permanent (ie so you do not have to do this every time you reboot or turn on your FreeBSD machine), put the line root_disk_unit="disk_number" in /boot/loader.conf.local .

2. If using FreeBSD 3.2 or earlier, at the Boot: prompt, enter 1:wd(2,a)kernel and press Enter. If the system starts, then run the command echo "1:wd(2,a)kernel" > /boot.config to make it the default boot string.

3. Move the FreeBSD disk onto the primary IDE controller, so the hard disks are consecutive.

4. Rebuild your kernel, modify the wd configuration lines to read:

       controller      wdc0    at isa? port "IO_WD1" bio irq 14 vector wdintr
       disk            wd0     at wdc0 drive 0
       # disk            wd1     at wdc0 drive 1 # comment out this line
       
       controller      wdc1    at isa? port "IO_WD2" bio irq 15 vector wdintr
       disk            wd1     at wdc1 drive 0 # change from wd2 to wd1
       disk            wd2     at wdc1 drive 1 # change from wd3 to wd2
   

   Install the new kernel. If you moved your disks and wish to restore the previous configuration, replace the disks in the desired configuration and reboot. Your system should boot successfully.

For memory, the limit is 4 gigabytes. This configuration has been tested, see wcarchive's configuration for more details. If you plan to install this much memory into a machine, you need to be careful. You will probably want to use ECC memory and to reduce capacitive loading use 9 chip memory modules versus 18 chip memory modules.

For ffs filesystems, the maximum theoretical limit is 8 terabytes (2G blocks), or 16TB for the default block size of 8K. In practice, there is a soft limit of 1 terabyte, but with modifications filesystems with 4 terabytes are possible (and exist).

The maximum size of a single ffs file is approximately 1G blocks (4TB) if the block size is 4K.

When the fs block size is 4K, triple indirect blocks work and everything should be limited by the maximum fs block number that can be represented using triple indirect blocks (approx. 1K^3 + 1K^2 + 1K), but everything is limited by a (wrong) limit of 1G-1 on fs block numbers. The limit on fs block numbers should be 2G-1. There are some bugs for fs block numbers near 2G-1, but such block numbers are unreachable when the fs block size is 4K.

For block sizes of 8K and larger, everything should be limited by the 2G-1 limit on fs block numbers, but is actually limited by the 1G-1 limit on fs block numbers, except under -STABLE triple indirect blocks are unreachable, so the limit is the maximum fs block number that can be represented using double indirect blocks (approx. (blocksize/4)^2 + (blocksize/4)), and under -CURRENT exceeding this limit may cause problems. Using the correct limit of 2G-1 blocks does cause problems.

I keep several virtual ones on floppies :-). The maximum file size is not closely related to the maximum disk size. The maximum disk size is 1TB. It is a feature that the file size can be larger than the disk size.

The following example creates a file of size 8T-1 using a whole 32K of disk space (3 indirect blocks and 1 data block) on a small root partition. The dd command requires a dd that works with large files.

    % cat foo
    df .
    dd if=/dev/zero of=z bs=1 seek=`echo 2^43 - 2 | bc` count=1
    ls -l z
    du z
    df .
    % sh foo
    Filesystem  1024-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
    /dev/da0a         64479    27702    31619    47%    /
    1+0 records in
    1+0 records out
    1 bytes transferred in 0.000187 secs (5346 bytes/sec)
    -rw-r--r--  1 bde  bin  8796093022207 Sep  7 16:04 z
    32        z
    Filesystem  1024-blocks     Used    Avail Capacity  Mounted on
    /dev/da0a         64479    27734    31587    47%    /

Bruce Evans, September 1998

You can boot by specifying the kernel directly at the second stage, pressing any key when the | shows up before loader is started. More specifically, you have upgraded the source for your kernel, and installed a new kernel builtin from them without making world. This is not supported. Make world.

We strongly recommend that you use binary snapshots to do this. 4-STABLE snapshots are available at releng4.FreeBSD.org.

If you wish to upgrade using source, please see the FreeBSD Handbook for more information.

A ``security profile'' is a set of configuration options that attempts to achieve the desired ratio of security to convenience by enabling and disabling certain programs and other settings. The more severe the security profile, the fewer programs will be enabled by default. This is one of the basic principles of security: do not run anything except what you must.

Please note that the security profile is just a default setting. All programs can be enabled and disabled after you have installed FreeBSD by editing or adding the appropriate line(s) to /etc/rc.conf. For more information, please see the rc.conf(5) manual page.

The following table describes what each of the security profiles does. The columns are the choices you have for a security profile, and the rows are the program or feature that the profile enables or disables.

Yes. FreeBSD currently runs on both Intel x86 and DEC (now Compaq) Alpha architectures. Interest has also been expressed in a port of FreeBSD to the SPARC architecture, join the <freebsd-sparc@FreeBSD.org>