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FreeBSD, Stealthy Open Source Project
zam4ever writes "Sean Michael Kerner has written an article on how FreeBSD has become a Stealth-Growth Open Source Project with various reasons outlined for FreeBSD's growth over the last years."
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I bet Netcraft doesn't rely on those uptime statistics, but rather polls and does OS fingerprinting.
-Kenneth Sundby-
The tests were more 'tests' than 'real world'... create a million files and delete them, generate a million big numbers, shuffle great gobs of stuff around in memory, spawn/fork a million processes, etc, etc, etc. The BSDs took a shocking beating.
On the other hand, the BSDs, and FreeBSD in particular shows up in a *lot* of large and heavy duty installations, so maybe the tests weren't representative of the real world?
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Netcraft queries uptime on servers periodicaly and uses fingerprinting to identify the OS.
Old COBOL programmers never die. They just code in C.
It is not "based" on FreeBSD. It incorporates much of FreeBSD here and there, (and NetBSD as well). It's atleast more "based" on mach than .. OSX.
FreeBSD. And no, Netcraft reports OSX as
I have several corporate systems consisting of Sun E10k hosts, Linux, and FreeBSD systems. In my experience, FreeBSD performs very well under heavy load, on par with Solaris and slightly better than Linux. Not that I'm downing Linux; Each OS has strengths and weaknesses, but the author seemed to indicate that FreeBSD was not suitable for corporate use and I believe that it is.
Some just don't talk much about using FreeBSD. I myself admin boxes for a large ISP that runs Solaris on enterprise production boxes. I run FreeBSD on several non-enterprise production servers. I have also tried several Linux distros and run some of them to test dialer support and I still don't like Linux for some reason. FreeBSD is more stable for one thing, and the ports system runs rings around the various Linux package systems. I find it frustrating when an RPM package refuses to install because I have a library or other dependancy that is a LATER version than the one that the package wants. Ports just seems to iron all that crap out for me.
I assume you are talking about this: Benchmarking BSD and Linux from this slashdot story. Linux 2.6 is the clear winner in all almost all tests.
(The trick for finding it was to use google instead of slashdot search. This search found it at once.)
The trick for finding it was to use google instead of slashdot search.
I wouldn't think that's a ``trick.'' Slashdot search has proven itself to be entirely useless for any purpose.
Where Linux does badly is in "out of memory" situations. I doubt a load average of 7 will, by itself, kill any system, but I've seen Linux boxes become unusable because of memory leaks -- hard reboot required, or equally bad, eventually some random processes get killed that bring the machine back up but all those processes have to be restarted by hand. Ditto if all those processes contributing to the load average of 7 required a huge chunk of memory. FreeBSD shines in this situation. If you configure enough swap space, it will usually get through somehow, if not, it will kill the offending process but not butcher the system.
it uses a much more monolithic kernel than Linux, making it lose some flexibility
Wrong. FreeBSD uses KLD modules just as extensively as Linux.
You wouldn't really want to use FreeBSD for an embedded system
I'm using FreeBSD on Soekris net4801 boxes as router/postfix/imap/http/... low-power ADSL appliance.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I don't believe (although I could well be wrong. Please correct me if I am) that it uses the new KSE in the 5.x branch, so it's still slower than on other platforms for multithreaded things.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
As both a FreeBSD user and Gentoo user, I think the best description would be that Gentoo is BSD for Linux users. As a humourous aside, some friends have also started describing Gentoo as "ricenix: 2Fast2Optimized". ;-)
Gentoo is laid out fairly logically (no idea if it follows the Linux Standards Base though). The main benefit is the total control you gain over your installation - much like you gain with BSD (hence, BSD for Linux users). Though it is achieved through the remarkable Portage package management system, vs FreeBSD which is a wholly maintained o/s, with a very large "ports" system.
The only thing that keeps me from using FreeBSD on my workstation is that I do play some games on Linux, and write software to support game playing on a local Australian gaming network. For those that don't need the fluff that's supported on Linux (games being a primary example), almost everything else is available under FreeBSD. But to save you extra work, Gentoo is probably the way to go (easy to manage once installed through portage).
Man watching 6 MSCE's around a sun box, looks alot like the opening scene's of 2001:space odyssey...
I had high hopes that Apple would contribute back to the community, but I don't think that has materialized like I had hoped.
Mac OS X uses the Mach kernel with a FreeBSD layer above it. This means that much of Apples work on the Mach kernel is irrelevant to FreeBSD. Mach is a microkernel, which was of course derived from BSD Unix, but it was forked so long ago that few similarities remain.
As far as stability and consistancey goes, only Debian-Stable approaches BSD
The BSD's also benefit from being a complete system, not a kernel with various userland stuff slapped together into 1001 distributions. This means that users running the development versions are using the same userland as the developers, and bugs can be shaken out far quicker.
Chris
It's not about how small the kernel image gets, but how much RAM it typically uses. The net4801 is a rather powerful box with 128 MB RAM. You can easily fit a FreeBSD base system on a 512 MB CF card and operate without the need for swap. A stripped down kernel would take approx. 2.5 MB diskspace, but you can tune it down to nearly 800k if you really must. BTW, you can put a small Linux system on that box just the same. It just happens hat I used 5.2.1 because it supports PXE booting and network install out of the box.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The article ignores the biggest obstacle that *BSD faced in its early days, which gave Linux a big head start: the AT&T lawsuit.
The FUD was flying and unlike today's situation with the SCO attacks, the open source model was not well known, and the idea of a free *BSD was not as established as Linux is today. The suit was eventually taken care of (AT&T had violated UCB's license terms, heh, heh) but the damage to *BSD's momentum was done, and Linux had taken a mindshare lead.
Also if you notice the The socket benchmark, FreeBSD was optimized for when a process allocates in excess of 3500 sockets. Also in Measuring HTTP request latency you can see that there is optimization for when there have been in excess of 4000 requests. These types of clever optimizations are what sets FreeBSD apart.
Also keep in mind that absolute magnitude is not what is really important in these test results. The idea is that if your software scales well, you just get enough hardware to handle what you expect as worst case. The nice thing is that FreeBSD has some optimizations that are directed for scaling even better under some particular high load cases.
I would not say from these tests that FreeBSD performed much worse than Linux. In fact mmap syscalls are not actually used much except for mapping in dynamic libraries on many server type loads.
That quote seems to imply that FreeBSD does not have a POSIX thread library. This is simply not true, and has not been true for years.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The names match. The code never did. Alan Cox once
asked Berkeley to use the BSD code under the GPL
and was turned down. Thus, the BSD code could not
be used.
It's obvious if you look at the old code. BSD has
a VAX heratage, where pages were 512 bytes and
memory was costly. Thus BSD used the mbuf, with a
linked list of little memory blocks. Linux used the
skbuf, which involved a nice linear chunk of memory
for better performance on a PC.
Mac OS X uses the Mach kernel with a FreeBSD layer above it. This means that much of Apples work on the Mach kernel is irrelevant to FreeBSD. Mach is a microkernel, which was of course derived from BSD Unix, but it was forked so long ago that few similarities remain.
Technically, Mac OS X's "xnu" kernel is not a microkernel with a BSD server process. The BSD emulation runs within the kernel address space for better performance.
cpeterso
grandparent post:
As far as stability and consistancey goes, only Debian-Stable approaches BSD
parent post:
The BSD's also benefit from being a complete system, not a kernel with various userland stuff slapped together into 1001 distributions. This means that users running the development versions are using the same userland as the developers, and bugs can be shaken out far quicker.
It's odd that you'd point that out as a difference from Debian-Stable, since that's exactly what the Debian project, especially the stable distribution, does.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Official, Sun-approved BSD Java is available right now.