Slashdot Mirror
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.
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. "
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".
...who *ahem* just want to have their TV tuner working out of the box.
Read:
Those who want their operating system to work as it should when they install it.
Yes, there are arguments against running Mandrake (stability maybe) But not using it because it works doesn't make sense.
"Yea, I tried Mandrake, but it worked too good... I switched to [insert distro here] so that I could spend hours trying to get every piece of my hardware working correctly."
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.
Every installer I've ever used has sucked in some way, shape, or form. I'm a very experienced computer user, so much so that I do tech support at my university, but I keep running into problems. I think I just got my first real working linux install up and running this afternoon. Here is my analysis, from the point of view of a very technically competent computer user who just doesn't happen to have had that much experience with linux.
Windows: Usually works very well. When it doesn't, you're screwed.
Red Hat: I installed 5.1 a few years ago on a partition-rich windows machine. I got X working, but I don't think I had a window manager installed, or if so, I was not informed of this. Regardless, it was useless. I managed to mount my windows partitions. This was very useful, because it enabled me to copy my bashrc to a windows partition, so I could boot into windows and create an alias setting ls to equal ls --color. If you're wondering why I did such a strange thing, I ask you how you would do with vi if you had no experience and nobody looking over your shoulder. I had to use Norton AntiVirus to remove lilo because it broke the CD player under windows. I'd launch into it from windows, read some man pages, try to get X to work, and give up. Then I got a girlfriend, and uncooperative OSs lost importance. I even had Windows 95 mostly stable.
I tried 7.0 several months ago, and had great difficulty because I was limited to 2 635 MB hard drives (what was laying around). I had gnome-games. Yay. I tried Debian on the same machine, but as my internet connection was a PPPoE DSL, I could never get a connection for apt-get. I'm told it can be done, but I was never told HOW it can be done. I checked the HOWTOs and couldn't find anything.
Debian: A friend helped me install it a few weeks ago, and I didn't get around to hooking it up until a week ago, because I was bogged down with work requiring windows software, and didn't yet have a hub. Last week I hooked it up. I liked it a lot. I wanted an IM/ICQ client. I tried building GAIM from source. It had a GTK+ dependency. I got GTK+, which needed GLIB. I got GLIB, but since they hadn't updated their changelog from 1.2.7 to 1.2.9 I got the wrong version, so GTK+ wouldn't build. I tried getting the right one. The multiple versions made my system very happy. My friend suggested I just apt-get it. I had already tried this, and he explained that I needed to get it from the unstable tree. I modified my sources.list to get unstable. I ran apt-get install gaim. This broke X. I tried changing back to stable and reverting, but couldn't get it to work. I removed X. For some reason, dpkg took the liberty of REMOVING GCC and associated development tools in the process. My machine was now completely fucked. I ran the installer again. I forgot to configure my ethernet card, so I needed to run it again. This required changing my boot order to boot from CD-ROM. I couldn't do this, because something in the installer had apparently mangled my BIOS so it wouldn't read keystrokes until the OS started booting. I did a jumper reset of the BIOS and it installed just fine. There was just one hitch though. While configuring the X server, I couldn't get the mouse to work. I tried various protocols, various device names, but nothing would work. The answer was right in front of my face: the refresh rate was defaulted to 0. WHAT KIND OF IDIOT DEFAULTS A MOUSE REFRESH RATE TO 0? It took a few hours of staring at this to realize something I hadn't really noticed because I considered it's misadjustment to be outside the realm of rational action, as I still do.
If FreeBSD is as easy as I'm hearing, I may try that out the next time Debian self-destructs.
Windows and Linux both suck. The difference is that Linux sucks twice as fast and 10 times more reliably, and since you have the source, it's your fault.
WARNING: there is a trojan on your
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.
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?
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
Your argument makes no more sense than the following:
If journalling is so good, why has BSD not used the same approach?
Please karmawhore with your own material if you have to.
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
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).
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.
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