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."

Comments

Go for the servers!

[Blaine Hilton]

I'm glad to hear (again) that the freeBSD team is concentrating on the server segment and not on desktops, which IMHO is better suited for Linux.

Go calculate something

Re:Go for the servers!

[BrokenHalo]

Quick disclaimer here: I don't use FreeBSD, but I have no quarrel with those who do...

But I find some of the arguments these guys have produced in support of their hostility towards Linux slightly disturbing. I am quite happy to believe them when they say that BSD is just as good as Linux for the desktop, but get a load of this:

in a seminar by the Australian Government. We supplied all delegates with a CD-ROM of OpenOffice for a number of platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux and Microsoft. It proved to be easiest to install the FreeBSD version of OpenOffice. Linux required significantly more work.

This is just plain silly. What is so damn hard about ./setup -net ? This kind of specious argument does nothing to convince me of the value of their product.

Re:good analysis

[ih8apple]

Here's the slashdot discussion of the afore-mentioned article.

Why not use OpenBSD?

[use_compress]

Please excuse my ignorance, but why would I choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD? OpenBSD is more stable and secure. Why take the extreme step of using a *BSD distro if you're not goning to with the most secure one. If you value ease of use, why not go with some advanced flavor of Linux or even *GASP* the latest version of Win2K Server.

Re:Why not use OpenBSD?

[jamezilla]

From the extremetech article on the differences between the various BSDs:

"FreeBSD has the largest development team, the largest user base, the largest number of ported applications, and the largest collection of active e-mail lists. It also has the best documentation..."

It also points out that installation is easier. In short, you use FreeBSD because it has the richest feature set and greatest ease-of-use. You use OpenBSD when security is your first priority and you don't mind struggling a little bit.

Re:Why not use OpenBSD?

[chefbimbo]

I might be alone on this, but for most tasks (webservers esp.), you're better of spending the cash for SMP on another machine. Gets you redundancy if you do it right. Of course that's not really an option for heavily loaded backend DBMS but for frontend servers, we've found it to be the ideal solution!

About Debian's FreeBSD based system.

[GrimReality]

The Debian guys are porting NetBSD (for x86 and alpha) and FreeBSD (for x86) for use with their existing Deiban system. Since both these are in their early stages the pages contain not much detailed information.

Any comments or enlightening information would be great.

A couple of more specific questions:

1. Is it a joint project by FreeBSD and Debian teams?
2. The Debian is basing their efforts on the already established ports of various applications on *BSD. eg. see the following from Debian's NetBSD based distribuition's information pages:

   ...Debian GNU/NetBSD does not exist in order to provide extra software... ...the *BSD ports trees are already comprehensive...

   Does this mean that we could expect to see more such efforts?

Thank you.
GrimReality
2003-04-28 21:01:19 UTC (2003-04-28 17:01:19 EDT)

Re:Get Gentoo.

[kwerle]

OSX works on 5% of American (!) desktops(!).

Whereas FreeBSD + Linux is running on much less than 5% of American desktops. Who cares?

And it's not free.

Some portions of it are not some definitions of free. Some portions of it are not any definition of free. But I click the pulsing system update button and it updates my system, which is really really nice. Even nicer than the FreeBSD system, which wants me to rebuild MY ENTIRE SYSTEM when there's an OpenSSL bug fix.

And you don't get ports from FreeBSD (welcome to the hell when you want to install update anything from the opensource world!).

No, welcome to fink (fink.sf.net).

If you really need Java on really free OS

I don't, which is why I'm planning to move to OSX for my servers. Gentoo may be a fine Linux, but I've always preferred BSD for my servers. Dunno - I prefer Vanilla over Chocolate, too. Maybe there's a corrolation (and maybe I can't spell :-)

Thanks for the pointer, I will check out Gentoo.

Re:Getting started with FreeBSD

[rutledjw]

First off:

I agree that - FreeBSD is a great OS, if you get to know it.

I'm pushing it as a solution for our corporate web machines (DMZ level stuff). My company has made some good progress there. Six months ago, I was told in no uncertian terms by my boss "I never want to hear the 'L' word again. We'll pay big $$$ per Windows server and that's it." Asshole, he's going the way of the Tandy now...

Here's my issue. Java support in BSD is spotty. I know the knee-jerk reaction is "And we care why?" but that's not appropriate. Server-side Java is very important for web-services and web-apps. Reading the article, it looks like they're working on it and ran out of money. My opinion is that until you get more native support from IBM (WebSphere), BEA (WebLogic) and some SDK developers (Sun, IBM, whomever) BSD isn't even an option.

If this support was better, BSD would be a legitimate candidate for application-level boxes (instead of just web-level running apache) running the real guts of the apps & services. As it is...

Re:Getting started with FreeBSD

[Billly Gates]

Java is quite stable. Its just not kosher meaining not certified. BSD users do not care as Linux users generally over such things since commercial support is alot more limited in the bsd world.

For a decade FreeBSD has beaten the crap out of linux in almost every catagory untill smp and journaling filesystems during the last 2 years. THe reason why Linux is gaining momentium is because of things like certified java, distro's paying hardware makers to write drivers, and commerical apps.

BSD hackers have elitism karma about them. For example read gregs comments in the interview about java and a journaling filesystem. They are very conservative and elitism. They need to think outside the box and focus on things like java for good reason. Another thing that might hurt FreeBSD is lack of hotswappable hardware support. Unix is still king in this area. Linux is about to take over during the next kernel release. More drivers for this are deffinetly needed.

Its a different culture in bussiness then in hackerdom. Linux hackers at least figured this out back in the late 90's and made strides to fit in with bussinesses. Distro's really made the difference since they were bussiness oriented and acted as a liason to corporations. BSDI is the company to thank for java actually. Without them going to sun, FreeBSD would of had no java support at all.

But the good part is FreeBSD is probably the most stable operating system out there due to its conservate development model. You can't have both ways.

The Glory of SunOS lives on

[YetAnotherName]

Back when I used to be called the Sun God (SunOS sysadmin 1989-1993), BSD/386 hadn't yet split, and Linux was in its infancy. A few years later, it was about time I get Unix onto my various Intel systems.

The question was, Linux or FreeBSD?

Today, the answer is a resounding both (FreeBSD runs perimeter firewall and fileservers, Linux runs my desktops), but back then, FreeBSD was the obvious answer.

Why? Because it was the most like good old SunOS 4.1 you could get on an Intel chip. That's a good thing? Fuck yeah! Before Sun abandoned beloved Berkeley Unix for the nightmare that was, is, and will forever be System-V, they had an OS on a platform of choice. Not just choice, but prime (and I don't mean Pr1me, either, god help us).

SunOS gave us a shockingly stable platform on the Motorola 68030 and SPARC chips. It provided some of the most stable TCP/IP around at the time. C-News (remember C-news?) rocked on it. C-News didn't have a prayer an the new-fangled AIX that we got to evaluate.

Graphics? Fuck yes. I/O bandwidth? Fuck yes. xbattle at 1am after closing the terminal room? Fuck yes.

And even then, it had lightweight processes, secure RPC, a super-clean dev interface, and other experimental features that we take for granted today.

Solaris arrived shortly on the seen, I changed jobs, and SunOS is just a memory for most of us grizzled Sun Gods now. But you can still see a lot of SunOS in FreeBSD. I even remember when the -a option appeared in ifconfig on SunOS. It appeared in FreeBSD very shortly, too.