FreeBSD 7 (installation in virtualbox)

Features

The next major releaser of FreeBSD, 7.0 will be released soon. There are many nice improvements:

• TCP socket buffers auto-sizing
• SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol)
• Link aggregation / trunking
• New scheduler: ULE 2.0 / 3.0
• Most GIANT lock uses have been removed (increasing SMP/multi-thread efficiency)
• ZFS support
• Security event auditing
• New privilege separation capabilities
• SATA support
• pf firewall updated to 4.1
• Upgrade to gcc 4.2

Installation

The installation of 7.0rc2 in VirtualBox went smooth, except the network part. The installer itself has not changed, so I won’t give details …

For the network, there is a bug (not sure whether it’s virtualbox or freebsd7, the bug was reported here) causing the network not to work. The solution is to force the media type:

ifconfig pcn0 media 10baseT/UTP

For automatic configuration of the if at startup, edit /etc/rc.conf:

ifconfig_pcn0="inet 192.168.1.66 netmask 255.255.255.0 media 10baseT/UTP"

(to be continued)