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Byte: FreeBSD vs Linux Revisited
Beerwolff writes: "This time I have remembered the link to the Byte article that's a follow-up to two of Moshe Bar's previous articles comparing FreeBSD and Linux--This time with the new Linux VM. His Apache "results show that Linux is better at handling I/O cache than FreeBSD, and that FreeBSD is more efficient at building up and tearing down processes."" As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth.
"As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth."
In particular, be sure to read the very bottom of the article:
Before you fire up your e-mail program to contest the results or suggest some neat trick to get even more out of either the Linux benchmark server or the FreeBSD server, remember what I said at the beginning of this review: This was not a scientific benchmark in a professional benchmarking lab. All results are only valid within my own environment and you are certainly bound to see a different result on your machines. The benchmark was only about finding out how well Linux handles stress loads compared to FreeBSD, and I do not claim that one OS is better than the other one.
These aren't scientific. These are the results one person sees - and also note that the various problems presented to the servers give different results. FreeBSD and Linux both had strengths and weaknesses even in his tests.
Regardsless of what some reviewer comes up with, I have just found that they each do something specific. For servers, I would run FreeBSD. All of the daemons are ported, and the security is great. For my desktop, it's linux all the way. I think this is comparing apples to oranges.
Um, this is my sig.
the daemon's in the details, too.
(shurg) Very nice and interesting article anyone else care to verify or dispute the findings?
And a serious question; does linux and bsd scale well across various architectures?
I suppose if people get riled up about any comparison maybe there should be a catagory such as "from the benchmark or skidmark dept."
Heh.
If it is not on fire, it is a software problem.
This is good.
Not to flame or troll.... but......
How come Debian has such a PITA installer? Mandrake was nice, however, OpenBSD and FreeBSD have mega-top notch installers. Easy to use, easy to configure, just say "go".
I've tried Debian three or four times before giving up... 2 years ago... about a year ago and last week...
Downloading the ISO for FreeBSD 4.4 was the hardest thing I did with that. (Still can't quite get my Linksys WPC11 card to talk to my AP but that's a different issue).
We just switched our email, file and http/servers to FreeBSD. Why? Mandrake had become a horrid mess of dependencies and package problems. Building from source (painstaking and too labor intensive for a one person admin team) had become frustrating. The machines were inherited and had never had any documentation and administrative control. I got three machines to replace them (white boxen) and started fishing for what OS to put on them. Initially, I thought, well, Mandrake8.1. I did a test install. Gigs and Gigs and Gigs of useless crap and a horrible package management system to boot. Selecting packages individually took time I didn't have. I knew I needed samba, sendmail, ftp and apache (sshd too). An admin in another department suggested Debian. But (let me put my flamesuit on), another guy said "if you are going to use Debian, why not just install FreeBSD." I did a test install. 1 hour later, I had samba cooking and talking to our Win2K DC. I was sold. This after using Linux for 6 years. I wouldn't say "I saw the light" but as far as clean and Unixy goes, it doesn't get any more so than FreeBSD. I am interested in hearing horror stories about FreeBSD, cuz so far I am very impressed.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
that ever happend to FreeBSD, was Linux. The best thing that ever happened to Linux, was FreeBSD. Instead of fighting in the mud with those other guys, both can compete on the higher ground of techinical merit. As long as both keep leap frogging each other, we are all better off.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
...throw DOS in there. :)
SIGFEH
With all the media/capital hype surrounding linux right now, BSD doesn't stand a chance. Everywhere I go on the net I see linux cluster this, linux PDAs, linux games, linux servers, linux everything..
I'm waiting for the linux powered toilet brush, personally. I'd just hope that these people who are pumping their servers full of linux goodness don't do it just because the hype is there, they really need to get more information BOTH BSD & Linux, besides benchmarks with sendmail and what not.
Linux is not the only Microsoft alternative.
Slackware is clean, extremely simple, can be easily installed without all the unnecessary shit. It can also be installed with gnome, kde and enlightenment for the desktop. Makes it easier using the same system for servers and desktops... As for package management, I just build everything myself from source. Once you learn enough about the different packages you use all the time, there's no easier way to admin a server(depending on many factors of course, YMMV and all that).
Never even tried Debian... I'm sure apt-get is nice, but I have no use for it.
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
MAXUSERS was set to 20!!
Jeez, I won't even set it that low for my personal machine. For the purposes of this kind of benchmark, I would have at least started with 128. If you want to be fair in I/O benchmarks, have BOTH machines mount the filesystems asynch. If you're going to do a comparison, at least compare apples to apples. Softupdates rocks, but I still think async is going to be faster.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
The NICs were a mix of Alteon and Intel Gigabit for the clients.
If he's using the Gigaswitch I think he's using, it takes two Gigabit Fiber Modules that each provide two 1000BaseSX ports. He's ignoring the twenty-four 10/100 ports and running a network on the backbone, as it were.
Not that it matters to a magazine columnist who has a Proliant to play with, but this is a little more expensive than 1000BaseTX, isn't it?
Personally I would use FreeBSD for a server for the sheer fact that I can never crash it. For desktop uses I would definantelly use linux.
But both of them being free in the same world will always complement each other. The only thing holding FreeBSD back from the desktop is a pretty installer ...
though this _might_ count as a desktop varient of FreeBSD ...
The latest releases of mandrake and redhat are full of wonderful packages and resources that make linux more than a prime candidate for the desktop.
But Linux and FreeBSD will ALWAYS complement each other ...
SuperDuG
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
As well as I like to see benchmarks, apache benchmarks none the less (seems kinda like the infamous Photoshop benchmarks for the average user), I'd like to see a comparison between *BSD and Linux on a desktop workstation. I've been happy using slackware for a while and would like to know the difference on a usability standpoint.
There are questions that are never answered for the average (above average for using some other platform than windows) user because of all the flame wars. How is compatability with software made for linux? Gaming support? Driver support? How do installs go? How much of a difference is there for setting up/configuring devices and other system preferences? These are things that I am interested as a perspective user and I am not that interested for this case about the differences between the BSD license and other free licenses which are important for some people. Is there a reason for me as a home non server user to switch to *BSD?
WikiAfterDark.com It's a sex wiki, go now!
I think these kind of concrete results are what can help Linux out in breaking into the enterprise market. God knows IBM is pouring all they've got into it, and now that we have a killer VM, we'll probably be seeing Linux a lot more in mission critical systems such as database servers. All in all this is great news on the kernel front.
As always, many props to Alan, Linus, et al. who make this kind of innovation possible.
Is your company running tools written by ma
now, before we start, everyone remember that *BSD IS NOT DYING!
carry on.
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
Tell one person using OpenBSD that they should use Linux instead because the I/O cache is faster, and they'll tell you to GFY. Likewise if you tell a desktop Redhat 7.2 user that FreeBSD is going to suit him better because of process creation statistics.
It's just another stupid OS jihad that doesn't matter. People should take a lesson from Linus when people ask him what he thinks of the "competition".
linuxtroll doubleplusungood verging crimethink linux 2.4 infallible VM problems imaginary
stop immediate currentaction
suggest doublepluswhack head
suggest RMS doublepluswhack head
Slackware has always had BSD-like cleanliness and simplicity. No shit to dig through in scripts and packages and etc. etc. etc., just a nice, efficient Unix-like feel. I started using Linux with Slackware and for years saw Linux as just another Unix, albeit a newer, flashier one. The first time I tried Red Hat (at 5.0) I was totally startled to find that most people were seeing Linux as a whole other operating system...
And with Slackware, you'll get the extra drivers and hardware up-to-dateness that Linux offers -- the one place where *BSD really suffers, especially for desktop or small server applications. That's my FreeBSD horror story... trying to install it on modern (Athlon+AGP graphics) hardware and on my Thinkpad.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
OK, the more important question these days is which OS (or even distribution) is better for colocated machines? I'm looking at it from the perspective that my machine would be many hundreds of miles away and I don't intend to go drive to sit at the console to do an upgrade. What would be my choices? I believe FreeBSD supposedly is strongly suited to that type of environment but it looks like Debian GNU/Linux also has strong points there as well.
The right tool for grandma is a Mac running classic MacOS.
Admittedly, Jobs has discarded this market with OS X.
Any response to a question like this is bound to upset someone. I'll /dev/null.
answer with the caveat that this is my opinion that developed over the
past three years following them both as well as other commercial OSs.
Those of you offended in any way by this, please cat flames >
That said -- the differences between FreeBSD and Linux can best be
understood in the context of American politics. There are essentially two
philosophies: Republican (FreeBSD) and Democrat (Linux).
The FreeBSD organization is a republican structure -- we have our say as
users, but the final decisions devolve to the core team who take the final
responsibility for their decisions. FreeBSD takes a conservative approach.
In other words, better things should work correctly at the expense of a
minorities desires, than to please all of the people all of the time and
have unexpected components of the OS breaking on a regular basis. We are
free to vote our approval or disapproval by changing our OS.
Linux is a democratic group. There is no single authority to accept final
responsibility except for Linus as it relates to the kernel. Linux adopted
early on a consensus approach (POSIX, etc.). In a sense, Linux is much
like current Democratic politics -- the mob pretty much rules. The end
result is that there is really no such thing as Linux -- there are
distributions that use the Linux kernel and from then on you have
essentially different operating systems. Slackware, for example, doesn't
look at all like Red Hat. Describing Linux is much like describing Mach.
(There isn't much - both are just micro kernels. _Anything_ can be
implemented over them.)
So as I see it, it comes down to this: vote for the philosophy that
appeals to you. I use FreeBSD because I rely on my machine for many other
uses besides tinkering with operating systems. FreeBSD doesn't change the
world on me every 6 months. Linux is in constant change. New things are
showing up all the time. If you like tinkering with operating systems and
having things that used to work break, Linux may be your answer. If you
don't know Unix -- pick one and get started. You'll learn how to pick the
best choice. No matter which one you pick, it will be infinitely better
that Micros**t anything.
Debian comes close to this but in a much different way that is very top heavy in terms of people assembling packages, etc.
Care to go into detail on this, and exactly how it is top heavy compared to people having to maintain ports or system source? That stuff doesn't magically appear and keep itself fixed.
FreeBSD people can talk all they want about how easy it is to keep their stuff up to date, but frankly, it doesn't compare to apt-get in the ease of use department, not to mention the speed department on my crappy p100 NAT box that takes *forever* to cvsup and recompile a shit load of source. Course, on a beefy box that is less of a problem.
I like FreeBSD, but after using Debian, I wonder why I ever tolerated spending so much time updating my OS, GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, or otherwise.
This sig is false.
Both are good, both are popular, and both should take the best from each other. What happens from now on will be interesting to see. The project with less developers may still produce something amazing that everyone wants to use.
I don't know much about NetBSD, but I several years ago it was described to me how easy it was to do a network install of the thing (insert floppy, fill in the IP address and a couple of other questions, then sit back and watch it install). A few distributions of linux have adopted the same idea. Most well written programs for linux will also compile on BSD - and probably the thing that influence users the most is the applications anyway.
Ultimately it's not a race and it never has been, it's a BMW vs Mercedes sort of argument (with Irix et al as a great big car carrying hovercraft - not so fast or airconditioned, but great if there are lots of people on board).
BSD does, of course, have a nifty little mascot. But do not underestimate Tux. His kind is always impeccably dressed, and live in an environment that would incapacitate a good 95% of the species on this planet. Tux is tough, yet classy, much like James Bond.
I've also noticed that he has a chubby, friendly serenity about him, as though he has achieved true enlightenment, and is waiting patiently for the rest of us to catch up. We can only assume from this that he is a reincarnation of the Buddha. Someday we shall learn the truth behind Tux's paradoxical koan, "There is no kernel." Once we understand, then the world will be reborn for each of us, and code shall flow like the rivers in springtime.
All homage to the penguin. Shalom.
You want the truthiness? You can't handle the truthiness!
Nothing stopping you, go ahead, do it! I've been running multi-boots for years. Nothing beats running each O/S you're interested in, and determining for yourself what suits you best. Running multi-boots are also very handy if you are running development versions of an O/S. If the new version really craps out, boot the stable version, do your repairs, and you're back in business.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
For 99% of the people here, the low-capacity applications they are discussing are going to operate identically on both platforms. Unless you are running AOL, Yhaoo, or Hotmail, you are not a corner case. Use whatever you like, it is not going to make one lick of difference in performance or stability.
If you really want to get more performance, consider upgrading that aged box. Its going to make much more of a difference than swapping OSs.
You know, everytime a topic on slashdot looks like a flamefest (*BSD v. Linux / Emacs v. Vi) everyone says something about the impending flamefest, and I have yet to see one....
Is my threshold too high?
If you're doing colo hundreds of miles away, it'd make sense to figure out how you want to do OOB management. We use HP servers and they have a great out of band management capability -- power off, on, restart and console-level keyboard and text mode display capabilities independant of the OS. Couple this with a modem and you should be able to handle anything short of a total reinstallation.
Dunno what your colo environment is, but if you're buying a couple of U of rack space you could add one of those serial port management gizmos that does dialup and telnet access to a few serial port for greater flexibility.
That being said, I've had good luck with FreeBSD just doing makeworld and installworld remotely and rebooting without the machine going foobar on me. My drive is like 10 miles and the longest part of the journey is from the parking garage to the machine room, but I haven't had to make it but once due to a stuck management controller (fixed by BIOS upgrade) that required "F2" to continue booting but also locked out out of band management.
The key is being able to whack the box remotely without driving in. Unless you totally screw the OS to the point of reinstallation, most systems with OOB capabilities can get you going when the OS prevents a ssh-type connection.
I did my own test to compare the linux VM's on a couple different kernel versions. I booted the system into the test kernel, once loaded I ran 32 simaltaneous instances of mpg123. Using BSD process accounting (thanks tcsh!), I measured the elapsed time, kernel time, user time, major page faults, and minor page faults of each of the 32 processes. I then found the mean/stddev/min/max of these numbers.
:) The 2.4.8 kernel had a lot more page faults. But the vm might measure major/minor page faults differently, I don't know. Also, my kernel configs may have been slightly different but that shouldn't matter too much. If someone wants to do a more complete analysis let me know and I can give more details.
The mean elapsed time for the process and mean number of page faults are shown below: (I'd post all the number but the slash filter doesn't like the gratuituis white space)
kernel: 2.2.20 2.4.10 2.4.12 2.4.8
mean major page faults:
7833 7208 7285 8990
mean elapsed time:
88.62 86.81 86.52 88.44
so what's this show? not much
Anyway, in terms of number of page faults:
2.4.10 < 2.2.20 < 2.4.8
of course, YMMV.
Note that this is systems benchmark, not a VM one.
There are a lot more different things in the two
kernels, than the VM. And note, that the server was
SMP, an area where FreeBSD folks admit "Linux is a
year ahead". It may turn out in the end that
actually the FreeBSD VM performs better, making
able the Big Lock BSD kernel catch up with more
fine graned Linux .
-velco
Lies, damned lies, statistics
He compared with FreeBSD 4.3, while 4.4 has been out since September. In 4.4, softupdates are on by default b.t.w. (licensing problems have been solved).
It is very clear from this article that this is a long-time Linux user who (being curious) wants to give FreeBSD a try. The difference in his expertise of Linux vs. FreeBSD shows.
Regarding I/O performance: As someone who is running both Slackware 8 and FreeBSD 4.4 on the same hardware, and being a benchmarking freak myself, I have to say that the result of his benchmark simply IS WRONG. This was (apart from a stupid MAXUSERS=20 setting) a one-sided benchmark, testing only a single program in a single (SMP) configuration.
FreeBSD is lagging in SMP lock granularity (which only affects certain programs) but any decent I/O benchmark shows that I/O of FreeBSD by far outperforms that of Linux (2.4.14): better bandwidth, response times and lower CPU usage.
There may always be some particular devices where the driver for either Linux or FreeBSD is particularly bad or good, but generally speaking when it comes to performance FreeBSD wins in almost all areas hands-down, and certainly for I/O.
Your argument makes no more sense than the following:
If journalling is so good, why has BSD not used the same approach?
Another analogy I once suggested: the various *BSDs are like the myriad of leftist political groups: no one really knows what the difference between them is, but they really seem to like nothing better than fighting among themselves.
Please karmawhore with your own material if you have to.
Slackware is great for low-end and mid-end servers - and high-end servers if you can find the fsck-ing drivers.
Debian is for overworked admins. If you're in a relaxed environment, running Slackware will teach you a lot about *nix that package management systems hide from you.
Stop the brainwash
The FreeBSD kernel is able to run Linux binaries, once you have installed the Linux emulation port (it adds a kernel module that is able to work with Linux ABI binaries plus stores a couple of system libs compiled for Linux - so it is rather a different operation mode than an emulation).
Quake3 Arena for example works under FreeBSD just fine.
Where there is a problem is the support of acclerated graphics drivers. Where such a driver is open source, it has been ported to FreeBSD (Matrox drivers, the rather slow nvidia driver for XFree86 3.3.x series, ..).
Where there is only a binary driver, and most unfortunately, this is the case for the fast nvidia drivers, this has yielded no results yet.
The problem is that while the nvidia binary driver might work in theory on all x86 plattforms, with just a different kernel interfacing (for which the source exists), in reality it does only run with certain Linux kernels. Here is a report that goes into details.
Regards,
Marc
hawk
I believe that benchmarks have shown softupdates to have just as much speed as a journalling FS. 5.0 currently has background fsck'ing, meaning that except for the root partition all the filesystems are checked AFTER the system is completely up. So softupdates+background FSCK gives you everything a journaling fs does, without the risk of a corrupt journal, is probably faster than journaling, and doesn't require a new untested FS (or new, untested extensions to an FS).
Well, that's how it used to be until the Republicans morphed into the Jesus party, with all their war-on-drugs, prayer-in-schools, we-will-legislate-your-morals bullshit.
Not that Democratic party is any prize either. ;-P
I know that Linux hardware support is at least more comprehensive, which is why I use it on the desktop. I am preparing to configure a server, and was wondering if I should do FreeBSD. I have used it in the past, and am reasonably self-assured in many areas, but I have lingering questions about these aspects:
Software RAID-5: I see vinum, is that as good as or better than linux equiv? Are there more alternatives?
lvm: seems to be integrated with vinum, is it relatively easy to shrink and grow fses and make more fses in a vinum managed group?
nat/firewalling: I've heard very little about ipf and ipnat, how good are they at what they do? Do they do stateful firewalling? How intuitive are they to configure blocking/forwarding rules vs. iptables (note I consider iptables to be extremely intuitive)?
ipsec: I see that there is support for ipsec, does it interoperate with FreeS/WAN? (Must connect to a site and tunnel network traffic with a linux FreeS/WAN box at other end.)
I have a small linux box performing the firewalling/ipsec right now. I plan to upgrade and have volume management over a raid array, as well as apache, nfs, nis, samba (file serving and PDC), and want to maintain configurability while insuring stability. 2.4.x series of kernels have seemed to be a little too flaky in my usage for a high-availability solution, and FreeBSD seemed rock-solid when I used it.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
In the opposite of what any might have predicted, the BSD in Mac OS X is now a formidable desktop OS, despite BSD users constant assertions of its server prowess.
In spite of the wars (and heavy casualties) between genome and kde on Linux, increasing vendor support has pushed Linux far into the datacenter (Oracle 8i/9i, Linux on an IBM 390, the recent Compaq release of the Non-Stop Cluster code, etc.).
BSD has nowhere near the datacenter penetration, and Linux has nowhere near the desktop elegance.
This situation is perhaps diametrically opposed to what should be, but this is what the market, the developers, and the users have decided.
Don't like this state of affairs? Port ReiserFS and XFS to BSD. Get Mac OS X running on a Linux kernel.
It will be interesting to see where things go.
I think that Linux and FreeBSD will continue to help eachother. It does seem to be true that in some applications, FreeBSD is losing to Linux, but this is happening very slowly and could easily reverse itself. The real losers to Linux are proprietary UNIX operating systems like Solaris and AIX which now more than ever have to justify their value.
I have said before that I think that Linux will "shield" FreeBSD from the proprietary UNIX OS's. In fact many people I know in the Linux community are fascinated by FreeBSD and so Linux's rise may well benefit both AND result in more portable programming.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
FreeBSD rocks!! (But Linux doesn't suck. I use both. In fact, I say use whatever is best for the job, as long as it isn't Windows, because Windows sucks. (Bear with me for a moment--this is not flamebait, just part of the overall presentation of my comment.) Yeah, Windows might be useful at serving a purpose sometimes, as long as whatever it is doesn't need to actually function properly most of the time. But then, I was talking about FreeBSD and Linux, not Windows. Because Windows sucks.)
Building up and tearing down processes is indeed one of the strong points of FreeBSD. I vaguely recall reading about that somewhere in the documentation on the website or the CD or somewhere. I also recall reading about how some older version of FreeBSD had an obscure timing-based vulnerability in some section of the forking code because keeping it fast requires it to be complicated. (Actually, it's not that complicated. It's just in deciding which parts of the process are copied to the new process and which ones aren't. Under very specific circumstances, something that wasn't supposed to be copied was, or the other way around. I just don't remember. That's what happens when you try to comment on something you read a year (or more) ago. Of course, this vulnerability has long since been fixed. The point is, I don't claim that FreeBSD is perfect while Linux isn't--they both have their strong and weak points and like I said, use whichever one is best for whatever you're trying to accomplish. And above all, like any machine, a system running any kind of operating system needs to be well maintained, and that is a big part of security. While there may be bugs in whatever parts of whatever operating system, proper maintainence will nearly always ensure that the system is kept running and is not compromised. (Unless you're running Windows, which, like I said before, sucks, so even if you maintain it properly, I am required by blood oath to tell you that it will be compromised anyway, just to make Windows look bad, even if it isn't all that bad for home use by computer newbies who just want to check out some website or whatever.))
In the Linux compatibility section of the FreeBSD manual, the author claims that FreeBSD executes some parts of Linux programs faster than Linux. (I'm sure it executes other parts more slowly. This is what happens when you run programs designed for other software--you can use some of your features (or just circumstances) to your advantage while other things just don't work out quite as fast as you'd like.) It would be interesting to analyse FreeBSD and Linux, figure out which parts are best in both in terms of efficiency at running, say, desktop software, and modify both systems for better efficiency. Oh well. I got too much work to do. Maybe tomorrow.
If you will examine www.dell.com/Oracle8i, you will find the Dell "Oracle Database Appliance." It is running SUSE.
You might also examine www.suse.com/us/press/press_releases/archive01/fas t_center.html
where you will learn that Oracle/SUSE exceeds Oracle/NT - were you going to argue that NO ONE runs Oracle on NT?
Don't know about Linux/390 yet; it's too early to tell.
I e-mailed the fellow and he confirmed that both the MAXUSERS and kernel version listed in the article were misprints. He used 4.4-R and MAXUSERS was set at 200 (still too low for a high-volume server, IMO).
I run both (slack-8/2.4.14 and FBSD 4.4) on my workstation. I find FreeBSD way easier to manage and generally have better performance, more pleasant to administer.
/ports section is IMHO one of the most elegant approaches to software packaging ("make compiling and installing from source as easy as installing a binary-only package under any other os would be").
... painfully). Redhat is comparable, with other tradeoffs not really worth detailing here. Ditto for Suse.
.deb created is easy and painless for the impatient.
... which is why choice is so marvelous and why I use both).
... a compliment of the highest order to both approaches.
I use both FreeBSD and GNU/Linux (debian testing with some packages from unstable), and have used Redhat, Mandrake, and Suse in the past. All are excellent systems, with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. Your reference to the maintainability of FreeBSD is right on point, it is excellent, and the
Mandrake has the smoothest, easiest install, but is often plagued with bugs early on, and really isn't upgradable without reinstalling (I've tried
Debian, on the other hand, has a very dated install that is quite demanding, requiring the user to have a fairly high level of competence and familiarity with their hardware prior to installation. Nowhere near as easy as setting up any of the other three GNU/Linux distros mentioned, nor as easy as FreeBSD. However, it is amazingly simple to maintain and upgrade. I have literally installed ancient versions of the distro because those were the disks I had handy, pointed apt to a (much) newer testing or unstable release by editing two lines in one file (/etc/apt/sources.list for the curious), then running two commands at the command line, namely "apt-get update" (update the list of available packages) followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade."
This is like upgrading from Mandrake 7.0 to 7.2 or 8.0, or upgrading FreeBSD from 3.4 to 4.0 or 4.1. In two painless commands, which grab the latest packages from one of the numerous debian package servers and installs them. Never again installing from scratch, even for major upgrades. Security patches? While they make it into testing last of all (a really critical machine such as a firewall should really be running the staid but rock solid "stable" release, for which security patches come out within 24-48 hours, or better yet, some version of *BSD), pulling them down from unstable as source via "apt-get source [package] --compile" followed by a "dpkg -i [packagename].deb" of the
The point of all this rambling? FreeBSD is great. GNU/Linux comes in many flavors, all of which are generally compatible but each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. For maintainability, stability, and quality Debian is IMHO at the front and very comparable to FreeBSD (in some ways better, in some worse
Others value other aspects of their respectively favorite distributions of course, which again is what makes the freedom of choice we as Free Software users enjoy so marvelous. I toute my own favorite merely to point out that, if maintainability and managability are your primary concern (as they are mine), you may definitely wish to give Debian a gander. Install off the old "stable disks," point sources.list to testing or unstable (I typically point the deb lines at testing and the deb-src lines at unstable, but others have other strategies for finding their comfort zone vis a vis stability vs. bleeding edge fun), run a couple of commands and you're good to go.
That having been said, FreeBSD's source-based "ports" section is the only software distribution approach I've ever seen that in many ways I actually prefer to debian's approach (though the paradigms are in some ways apples and oranges to each other)
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Would you like to cite some references where there are patent violations in reiserfs?