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Interview With The FreeBSD Core Team
Gentu writes "OSNews features an ultra interesting and in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core team (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). They discuss issues from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even... re-unification of the BSDs."
OSS is part of enlightenment?
Since when?
With BSD, or most any other Unix system including Linux distributions, you get a time-tested and proven base upon which all the system's services rest. You get a well-understood system upon which hundreds of thousands of people have built upon, and millions of people have hands-on experience using. You get not only an operating system, but a thoroughly proven model for maintainability, ease of administration, and security.
Windows 2003 Server is a new and unproven offering from a company whose past successes in marketing have been dwarfed in the public eye by the harms due to their failings (see, e.g., Nimda, SQL Sapphire Worm). Nobody has years or even months of experience on Windows 2003 Server, and its frequently accurate technical documentation cannot match the depth of understanding which Unix professionals bring with their platform.
You could choose Windows 2003 Server, and your staff might be able to make it work for you. But what will you do in two years? BSD, Linux, and the rest of the Unix heritage will still be going strong -- but if history is any guide to the future, Microsoft will be running ads touting Windows 2005 Server, a new and equally unproven platform, and telling you that 2003 Server is a piece of unstable trash. What kind of a future is that for your business?
No, Microsoft wins hands down your back pocket, searching for your wallet.
Windows 2003 hasn't even been widely deployed yet and every MS product whore is proclaiming it the Holy Grail of IT. Get real, Windows (just the operating system) has a shameful security and reliability record compared to FreeBSD (the operating system and included applications.)
And last time I checked, Windows includes no support whatsoever. You're left to forge around for answers on the Internet, just like with *BSD and Linux. If you want Fortune 500 support, you have to pay for it.
Unfortunately, *BSD runs best on single-processor desktop systems.
- Linux has several thousand different distributions, each one with a different file structure, configuration, UI and way of doing things.
- Linux is a religion, where most of its adherents border on zealotry and refuse to accept that there might be alternatives to their blessed hack.
OpenBSD is more stable...
Care to back that up with a link or something?
Why do I keep typing pythong?
Surely you mean "useful" with only one "l" and spRouted (not spouted) wings. English is Eugenia's second language, she seems to be doing well enough to get her point across.
Unless English is your second language too, I'd say people in glasses houses ought not throw stones.
OpenBSD hasn't even moved to ELF format binaries yet. This means that development on binutils tools (such as ld, etc) has stalled - and as a result, certain applications (eg, avifile) simply won't compile under it.
I like that OpenBSD in that it has been ported to more platforms than FreeBSD, but the years-old binutils is incredibly annoying.
-- Even if a god did exist, why the fsck should I worship it?
I wish I could find this webpage again. (Google's not responding and I'm too busy to wait.) Anyhow, some guy had a great quote which IMHO accurately summed things up as far as free operating systems go. Went something like (in random order)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Not for everything. Windows beats Unix if you want to run Photoshop. :) I was talking specifically about server systems, where reliability and understandability of the system is crucial. I think the Unix edge is not merely the Unix architecture, but also the history and deep understanding which Unix professionals bring. It just isn't possible for a culture to have that kind of deep understanding of a system that has just been released -- no matter how featureful it may be.
To be snarky about it: On Unix systems, novices know they have no idea what is going on, and experts know that they know what is going on. On Windows systems, novices think they know what is going on, and experts know that they do not know what is going on. That may make Windows experts more Socratic ("Socrates is wisest, because he knows that he knows nothing") -- but I would not want my enterprise database dependent upon Socrates.
X works through the /dev/io and /dev/mem devices which allow priveleged applications to talk directly to the corresponding busses.
:) And XFree86 lives up to this, unfortunately.
/dev/io and /dev/mem just to play a song, do you? We have drivers for a reason. One nice thing about the Linux Framebuffer is that you can change the permission of your video with chmod.
Close enough. To me, "DOS-Style" means "App-can-take-your-system-down-Style."
The linux framebuffer is a kernel land driver, but it's not needed.
Of course it is not needed, it is just a better design. You don't think xmms should access
... huge make install nightmare.
/usr/ports/java/jdk13. /usr/ports/distfiles. /usr/ports/distfiles.
Huh?
Steps for native JAVA on FreeBSD:
1) cd
2) Execute make.
3) Download patch file from URL make provided into
4) Execute make.
5) Download source from URL make provided into
6) Execute 'make install'.
It is a little troublesome but still quite easy.
This is such an important point! It's so easy to get tempted into playing feature-chase, especially when just about all IT-centric publications push this aspect in every publication, every ad, and every "news brief"^h^h^h^hpress release.
But advanced features are often worse than useless: not only do we have problems with bugs and leaky abstractions, but we have a whole army of professionsals to re-train, in the vain hope that THIS time, it will be different.
Notice that Microsoft's biggest problem these days is that it sold Windows NT/98 too well. Yes, that combination was technically inferior, but it was fairly simple, and once the bugs were worked out (3-4 years later...) IT departments finally got a hanlde on it. So, do they want to give up this comfort zone for a new slew of untested systems, and then aNOTHER new slew right after that? Heck no!!
This is exactly where FreeBSD has greater strength than any other OS, period. There are no sudden jumps in features, users don't have to re-learn everything 3 years later, and in fact FreeBSD 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x machines can easily be handled together, sharing almost identical configuration scripts, filesystem layout, etc...
(Notice that the parent comment in this thread looks like it was written by a Microsoft marketing executive? Hmm.... nah, it couldn't be.)
Thats the problem.
I have not done system administration for a couple of years but non journaled raid volumes take hours and not seconds to do FSCK. NT4 and Novel servers with close to a terrbyte of data before journaling came around took 4 to 6 hours to reboot after a crash. That costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost time. About a years salary for some of the IT workers.
I have also seen FSCK unable to repair damaged ext2 filesystems after they became corrupted. Its not perfect and its only a last resort after shit really hits the fan.
Were not talking about your home pc but a real enterprise environment. If the BSD developers want to move into this area they need to implement some of these features that Unix and Linux have. I can not convince my boss to use FreeBSD at work until it has this feature. Evem though FreeBSD is more stable then Linux. Also I do not get the argument of stability with journaling filesystems? Ever reliable os on the planet now has one without problems. It can not be that bad. All I know is in case of a power outage I absolutely need to have the disk working in seconds upon reboot without data corruption.
You trade off performance for reliablity with soft updates. It seems soft updates are trying to implement some of the features of raw i/o which FreeBSD is lacking in that Linux and Unix have as well. Its conservative is making if fall behind even though it does guarantee its stability.
soft-updates!= journaling.
http://saveie6.com/
UFS is not perfect. The unix haters manual mentions about the slowness and lack or reliabilty with it.
If I am writing a large set of data and the power goes off even with synchronization on I still lose data. It wont corrupt whole partition tables like ext2 but it certainly would corrupt a database if the piece of data happened to be part of an index table.
These posts just reconfirm the elitism in the BSD community. There is a port for xfs which is a realtime meta filesystem with great journaling so we will wait and see.
I also remember an old 2 year old post which showed Linux beating the crap out of FreeBSD. FreeBSD advocates pointed out that ufs+s was on for reliability and disabling it would increase performance. Well if you do that then the filesysem is no longer reliable.
The point is that async i/o is an important feature just like cutting down on the number of races are in a kernel. You create contetion and waste cpu cycles.
Obviously a journaled filesystem is certainly required with async i/o and even IBM mainframes use both and have decades of uptime. Its perfectly reliable and required for any server.
Keep in mind Solaris also uses UFS and has put in journaling for good reasons in their os.
http://saveie6.com/