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FreeBSD 4.1.1 vs. Linux 2.4
A reader writes: "This byte.com
article finds byte.com's Linux guru wondering why he isn't running
FreeBSD. 'Linux 2.4.0 is available for no money. So is FreeBSD. Linux uses
advanced hardware, so does FreeBSD. FreeBSD is more stable and
faster than Linux, in my opinion. We penguinistas sometimes believe
we are having more fun than anybody. But then I lean over the fence
and discover the FreeBSD folks are having a hell of a party, too. And
their OS is as fast as I have seen.
I have to ask myself why I don't just switch my server to FreeBSD.'"
Was that a joke?
The situations where Linux beats up on FreeBSD are rare. I know. I've seen a couple of them in live production. Most people won't. Ever.
You are exaggerating the importance of SMP, I think. Yes, 2.4 (and even 2.2) have Real SMP support, as opposed to FreeBSD 4 and earlier's "one processor for kernel space, one for user space" approach. (If that's not the God's honest truth, then it's somewhat pathetic that a quad-CPU box running threaded apps at 4.0 utilization only utilized two processors in the deployment I'm thinking of) Most users won't have to care about this if they're running x86 hardware. I have seen very few sites that needed scalable SMP and couldn't afford a Sun or Sequent box at the heart of their business. (and I simply don't trust Intel hardware for applications where I can only afford to spec a single unit in production; for clustering and server farms, it's fine)
Moreover, FreeBSD 5's SMP support is likely to be on a par with 2.4's. That's pretty damn good. I haven't seen many commodity 8-way Intel boxes, and I've never seen any non-Sequent 64-way x86 machines. Ever. (I've used plenty of the rest)
On dual-processor machines, especially webservers, I have watched FreeBSD kick the crap out of Linux. On quads, Linux does indeed beat up on FreeBSD. But most people are not purchasing 4- or 8-way chassis with an eye to expansion, the way people do with Suns (eg. 4500's with a single processor board, etc).
What worries me is that the same people who consider your post 'informative' are the ones most likely to come to the wrong conclusion.
Oh well. Anyone who believes everything they read on Slashdot shouldn't be making purchasing decisions anyways...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
How about mature, working SMP support?
I swear, all these comments along the lines of "well, FreeBSD might be better for big servers, but..." comments crack me up. Fact is, Linux (particularly the 2.4 series kernels) trounces FreeBSD when it comes to scaling on high-end (read: SMP) x86 hardware.
FreeBSD is probably still better for single-cpu boxes (think Hotmail or Yahoo's server farms), though I haven't yet tested FreeBSD against a 2.4 kernel in this configuration.
Don't take this as a flame against FreeBSD; I cut my teeth on netbsd and 386BSD back in the day. I just find the lack of proper SMP support is a showstopper when it comes to deploying Free/OpenBSD in many environments.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
What religious war? They're just 3 different OS-es for different situations. FreeBSD sacrifices some portability for better performance and ease of use on the intel PC. NetBSD sacrifices some raw performance and ease of use for the broadest possible portability, and OpenBSD sacrifices some performace, ease of use and new- or exotic hardware support for more guaranteed security.
It is nothing like windows versus linux, or linux distro A versus linux distro B. When lots of people say they don't like Theo de Raadth, that doesn't make it a holy war.
He explicitely said that these benchmarks are not scientific and are merely his opinion. Therefore, this error is permissible. Besides, this optimization depends highly on the compiler used. My understanding is that gcc does not do as good a job optimizing as some other compilers. Furthermore, even if this stuff did get optimized out, I don't see how it would change the outcome of this comparison.
All in all, this is the best comparison between FreeBSD and Linux I've seen yet. Everything else I've heard up until now was basically anecdotal evidence and hearsay. Yes, this is not a real benchmark. But at least it shows some evidence.
Notice how he says that tweaking Linux improved performance a lot. If anything, this shows that out of the box, FreeBSD is better tweaked for a server than Linux, which makes sence -- FreeBSD is primarily a server OS, while Linux is targeted for both desktop and server, and different distributions configure the kernel differently. What I would like to see is a benchmark of fully-tweaked Linux (once 2.4.x tree stabilizes) and fully-tweaked FreeBSD.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
hey man , you should try windows.
tons of books and lots of sound drivers.
Hardly, why would I have been asking if I didn't already feel that way. My impressions were already "colored".
In which case, your example of your teacher is rather pointless, since it would seem you had already made up your mind about the GPL - just as he had about the BSD license.
My point with repeating this story, was that most GPL people are like this.
This is a ridiculous generalization. Have you talked with a majority of GPL supporters? Or even a small proportion? This is like me saying, "Most BSD supporters are fascists." No supporting arguments, no personal experience - just a blatantly provocative generalization.
And the GPL itself has the same attitude. You WILL do it our way, or we will find a way to FORCE you to comply.
That's just ridiculous. If you don't use GPL'd code in your own code, you have no problem. If you DO use GPL'd code in your own code, you should at least repect the license the author of that code put on it.
Trying to make me look like a childish person throwing a mindless tantrum is a nice tactic -- but it doesn't work in civilized society.
More than anything, this sentence makes me think of a teenager saying, "I'm not a kid! Don't treat me like one!" Please, grow up and respect the fact that some people like the GPL more than the BSD license, just as you prefer the opposite.
Linux support and documentation isn't the best out there. OpenBSD, for instance, has some of the best man pages I've come across. And the book, "Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls" was more than enough to help me install and configure a nicely tuned daemon firewall box.
However, not everyone goes about searching for information the same way, which in the end was my main point. For some, answers will come quickly through *BSD channels. For others, a particular Linux site may be everything they'll ever need. When I was playing around with different installs on a spare box, I never could find the information needed to get a particular sound card working, or to adjust this or that feature under FreeBSD, whereas I happened upon the solutions quickly for the current Debian setup I have now.
So, as I said originally, the main reason I use Linux isn't because of it's technological superiority or even better support, just that the layout of the user support channels happens to suit me better than it might someone else.
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"
A while ago I was issued a Dell Inspiron 7500. After taking a good hard look at the Linux distros out there (I was running Debian on my desktop at the time, I decided to put FreeBSD on the laptop. These were my major reasons:
Do I think FreeBSD is ideal for everything? No. I'm typing this from a Mandrake box I set up for my roommate to use.
Have I become a BSD bigot? Possibly. As I type this I wear a FreeBSD shirt and a tattoo of Chuck, the FreeBSD daemon.
You're right to be angry about the teacher. The choice of license should have been up to you.
Why can't both licenses exist in the world simultaneously?
Personally I look at it like this:
The BSD license gives the code away for anyone to do with as they will, relying on the kindness of others to repay the gift in terms of giving code back to the community and not abusing it.
The GPL license is more greedy by demanding payment to use the code in other projects. The payment is that you have to put your code under the same license.
In truth the BSD license is the more 'free' in terms of the coder, and does reap benefits (as one person put it, Apple didn't base Darwin on GPLed code), but I wonder if the greedier way of the GPL is more benificial to allowing the code to propogate.
(I'm just trying to leave aside the idea of which is better for the user or which is better for the programmer and just looking at it in terms of which is more likely to provide more code back to the general 'pool', but personally I believe both licenses can co-exist and serve different purposes)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
GNU/BSD? Would Debian dump the BSD userland (which is part of what BSD is) and replace it with a totally GNU userland?
--
SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Hmmm, there is clear evidence of a typo in the article. I certainly believe they meant...
'This one is a dual CPU system with PentiumIII 900-GHz processors and 768 GBs of RAM. The disks are under a RAID controller, letting the five 18.2-TB disks be visible under RAID5.'
...these boxes wouldn't scale otherwise, would they ?:)
Don't obfuscate quantity for quality. Sure when I go to Borders, I see about 5x the number of books on Linux; but all but two or three of them are on "Debian for Dummies" or "Red Hat Unleashed". They aren't really technical. I can't read Debian for Dummies and understand how Linux handles those new fangled zero-copy sockets. Now there are the couple of Linux kernel books but there is also the 4.4BSD red book. It explains the whole OS! Not just the kernel. If you've ever read the needs to be updated Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey it's like a happy medium between r33t k3rn37 d00dz and "How to tie your shoes the Linux way."
Popularity is really not a good reason to choose something. Windows is a lot more popular than Linux. It has more users, more commercial programs, more programmers, certifications, and possibly books, training courses, and any number of other things. It doesn't make it any better, really, now does it? Yes, there are more Linux users than FreeBSD users. It doesn't really make that much of a difference.
FreeBSD already emulates most Linux software out there. It runs my SBLive natively and perfectly. I didn't install it because I wanted it to do everything Windows does, I installed it because I wanted a kick-ass Unix system to run at home. I use it for a workstation at home and have it on servers at work. It is rock solid. Easy to Upgrade? Yes every morning it cvsup's that nights changes, fixes, to the src code. Then every month I run make buildworld and make installworld and I have the latest FreeBSD every bin freshened. I used Linux since 1993, since changing to FreeBSD I've had no desire to go back. The people who are complaining about lack of documentation and resources are being silly. Besides the brand name FreeBSD books out there, there are many resources and websites with step-by-step help for newbies. IRC especially has very knowledgeable people.
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
Quite correct.
According to ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/config.txt
---
wcarchive.cdrom.com is an Intel architecture PC machine running the FreeBSD
operating system.
Its configuration is as follows:
Micron NetFRAME 9201 system, consisting of:
One 500MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU w/512K L2 cache
4GB of main memory (16 * 256MB 50ns ECC EDO DIMMs)
1 Adaptec AHA-2940U2W PCI single-channel wide Ultra-2 SCSI controller
2 Adaptec AHA-3940AUW PCI dual-channel wide UltraSCSI controller
1 Intel Pro/100+ PCI 100Mbps Fast Ethernet controller
1 Bay Networks Netgear GA620 Gigabit Ethernet adapter
Please visit http://www.micronpc.com/web/walnutcreek.html for more
information on the NetFRAME 9201 system.
---
That micronpc link seems to be busted though.
A picture of the beast is here: ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/archive-info/wcarchive.jpg
Okay, well, this only makes sense if you have several machines (I've never seen the appeal of dual-booting unix), but there are definitely comparative advantages to each OS.
For mail servers, DHCP, DNS, NFS, firewall, NAT, etc., FreeBSD means less headaches. I've got plenty of FreeBSD boxes that have never been down except for OS upgrades or hardware moves. You can lock them in a closet and never think about it again - it's like the golden days of Novell Netware all over again. And under intense loads, say, a well-utilized IMAP or Samba server, FreeBSD keeps its chin up far longer than Linux.
However, the problem with FreeBSD is that, let's face it, the userland is just not as friendly as that in Linux. You spend days installing all the happy-fun GNU tools with useful command-line arguments and post-1970 approaches to system management, and by the time you've done that, you've kluged together a system only a mother could love. So, for day-to-day messing around, Linux can be much friendlier.
Perhaps even more importantly, the new generation of commercial software is largely just not available for FreeBSD. Want to run Oracle? Domino? You can try to shoehorn them into FreeBSD's Linux emulation environment, but I can tell you from painful experience, it's not pretty - if it works at all. And when you try to do things like linking other third-party software against the Oracle libraries under Linux emulation, you'll spend weeks up to your eyeballs in Makefiles and header files. Not worth the trouble, even for the incremental improvement in stability.
So they both have their places, and they're both well-worth learning about. But I'd be quite suspicious of someone who claims that one is a "better" OS than the other - it depends far too much on one's specific needs.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The errors call into question his overall credibility as a 'guru'.
He states that he has introduced floating point into the C program (to make it a tad 'tougher'), when he hasn't even done that! He's trying to asssign a floating point number to a long (which is an extended int, maybe he meant double?) so the compiler is just going to chop that number to a (long) int for him, hopefully at least giving him a warning which I guess he ignored. This guy holds a masters degree in CS?
Nobody is expecting him to come up with a perfect benchmark, but 1) he could at least know something about what he's talking about before he talks about it and 2) there's plenty of existing benchmarks for web performance that he could have used rather than creating his own questionable benchmark.
For what its worth, I run FreeBSD, not Linux, so it's not that I disagree with his results, just the way they were obtained.
The article said something about Linux performing much better after hand-tuning the VM, which begs the question, seeing as how FreeBSD tunes its own VM for good default settings, why can't Linux do the same? This is just like the IDE DMA situation on BSD vs. Linux -- FreeBSD has had autodma working forever on VIA chipsets, and Linux, even in 2.4, defaults to PIO mode on IDE disks unless you enable 'highly dangerous' code. Oddly, the I/O elevator in 2.2 has a sensible out-of-the-box setting, but 2.4 requires tuning with an arcane tool called 'elvtune' or something if you want an elevator at all. Seems like a step backwards to me, regardless of how technically superior the 2.4 way is.
Unix purists go on about how the kernel should never set policy, but that's rather silly. Really, the kernel-'enforced' policy is whatever the defaults are, as most users expect the default behavior to be intelligent. People install Linux all the time and complain about how they can't do anything without getting choppy audio and mouse movement, because IDE defaults to PIO. It's rather sad that people get bad impressions of Linux because of its braindead default settings for so many things, when it's capable of doing much more.
Maybe this is work for the distros to be doing, I don't know. I suspect most of them would prefer to pass the buck as well.
It shouldn't be a matter of dumping the Hurd - if Debian dumped the Hurd, we'd lose the developers that develop the Hurd. But if you want Debian GNU/BSD, subscribe to debian-bsd@lists.debian.org and start working. The biggest problem with Debian GNU/BSD is interested workers, not anything political and certainly not anything having to do with the Hurd.
And what's this about no sound drivers? When was the last time you actually used a FreeBSD machine? Or, if you claim to be a FreeBSD user, have you not read LINT? There are tons of sound drivers. The pcm device runs many PCI and ISA cards. And what qualifies as "and the like"? My hauppauge WinTV card works better in FreeBSD than it did in Linux. The machine doesn't slow down when I watch TV. My USB mouse was spotted and configured as soon as I started the install. The ONLY thing I miss about Linux is the Nvidia drivers.
No, I'm not a FreeBSD bigot. I use both Linux and FreeBSD. If you look, I'm actually a Debian developer. They both have a place in the world. But, if you are going to post something, post facts.
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
From the article:
'I chose -- once again -- IBM's Netfinity 5100 server. This one is a dual CPU system with PentiumIII 900-MHz processors and 768 GBs of RAM. The disks are under a RAID controller, letting the five 18.2-GB disks be visible under RAID5.'
Damn. Makes my half a gig of RAM look very sad :)
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
Let's see a good clean fight.
Also on tonight's fight card:
GNOME vs. KDE
Perl vs. PHP
MySQL vs. Postgres
RMS vs. ESR
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If FreeBSD is a server-only OS why did it get USB support before Linux did?
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS, what is PicoBSD all about?
Fact of the matter is FreeBSD serves multiple intrests as well. And it does them all reasonably well.
I've had plenty of people ask me if they should switch from MS Windows over to Linux. For some the answer is yes. But only if they're ready for the headaches that come with breaking from the pack. For others, I realise early on that they're going to be much more productive on a machine with an operating system that they're pretty much guarenteed to be able to be fixed by the local Best Buy.
It really isn't about which OS is the holy grail, perfect for all situations and godsend to all who use it. That's because such a beast doesn't exist. It's about finding the right tool for the job, and the right tool means not only the proper amount of control and features, but support and comfort for the person using it.
Despite what we geeks tell ourselves, an operating system is just a tool, not a lifestyle. Right? Right? Guys? Hello?
It's not really a matter of which is technologically superior, and I suspect that FreeBSD may in fact be so. However, in the particular style of searching for information on how to accomplish a particular task, I've always found the Linux information quicker and easier than for the FreeBSD way of doing things. Again, this doesn't mean that Linux is better, far from it. It's just easier for me to run thanks to the types of online resources I come across.
Your mileage, as always, may vary. Offer void in most major cities. Not to be taken internally, while pregnant, or running for Congress.
This, however, caught my eye:
long y;
y = 28.2839281;
x = 339829;
y = x / y;
Notice how I included some simple floating point arithmetic in the C program to make things just a tad tougher.
He admits he's no benchmark specialist, but any compiler worth its salt (and many that aren't) will optimize the floating point operations away. Also, since the result of the divide is never used, that will be optimized out, too.
I don't know what the real story is, and I do know a lot of knowledgeable people split on the Linux vs. FreeBSD issue. However, such a blatant error in benchmarking methodology gives me large doubts about this guy's credibility as a competent judge.
Popularity is really not a good reason to choose something. Windows is a lot more popular than Linux. It has more users, more commercial programs, more programmers, certifications, and possibly books, training courses, and any number of other things. It doesn't make it any better, really, now does it? Yes, there are more Linux users than FreeBSD users. It doesn't really make that much of a difference.
And besides that, FreeBSD out of the box isn't as friendly as most Linux distributions.
Care to justify that statement? Easier to learn, again, is questionable. It's easy to learn something if you have, say, a friend next door that runs the same thing. At my university, FreeBSD became very popular (much more so than Linux) because the people who took the time to help out and organize things knew FreeBSD best, and suggested people try it. Those same people who used Linux before considered FreeBSD much easier to learn. The same may apply the other way around in your area. It isn't a matter of ease, but your surroundings. If you go it alone, like I pretty much did, it ends up being a personal matter (discussed below). As for documentation, I'd say it depends on the person. The FreeBSD Handbook helped me through most of my trials, but some find it too complicated, and some find it too abstract. Greg Lehey's book is good. There're FreeBSD courses offered by BSDi, amongst others. The NetBSD documentation is technically great and complete.
Maybe when my hardware needs change, I'll run FreeBSD. If FreeBSD NFS and Linux NFS start talking to each other faster,...
The problem there is Linux NFSv3 implementation. Quite honestly it sucks.
Well, I look at it this way. I can walk into any bookstore and get an O'Reilly book detailing how to write drivers for Linux, another explaining Linux internals in detail, yet more describing for newbies how to install same. There are wonderful distributions like Debian and (well, at least when they can make a release that allows you to get the kernel to compile) RedHat, etc etc etc.
On the daemon front, I've seen books available by mail, none in the bookstores. There's certainly a lot less in terms of choice. And you can forget finding sound drivers, or the like. What you do get is the suggestion to take the drivers from the Linux people and port them yourself. Of course you can do that, because you're a g0d l337 ha>0r d00d, right? Otherwise you'd be running Windows.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
FreeBSD is a pure server OS. Nobody has to worry about the other possible applications, it is designed purely for one purpose, and one purpose alone. It does it well.
If I were running a server alone, I would use FreeBSD. For any other purpose, I would use Linux. Each have their strengths.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The