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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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Quandt also contends that FreeBSD is not currently on the same level as Linux when it comes to supporting heavy enterprise workloads...
:)
I was almost certain this paragraph was going to end praising FreeBSD over Linux, and I was slightly suprised to see this was not the case. FreeBSD's ability to cope with extremely high workloads is often cited as one of the reasons to use it over Linux in such environments.
However, I don't remember ever seeing any evidence of this, except that FreeBSD has proven itself time and time again on some of the largest, busiest internet sites. It'd be interesting to see how the two compared side-by-side in a real production environment. Perhaps someone can convince Yahoo to switch to Linux for a day
</ BSD advocacy >
Woah, 3 devils on the main page (for me at least), all posted within a few minutes. Is BSD dying faster today or are they simply on Speed?
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Uh oh. I read the sentence "Linux actually inherits a lot of BSD code" and immdiately thought of Ken Brown. Ken, if you're reading this (or having it translated into a version using only monosyllabic words) be advised that the preceding quote refers to GNU/Linux, not the Linux kernel that Linux wrote in a year.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
It is now official. FreeBSD is Undead.
It has long been argued that FreeBSD is dead, but now new evidence is coming to light that it has been resurrected, and like a zombie process is lurching across the Unix landscape once again.
Recent growth in FreeBSD's market share, as reported by Slashdot, is evidence that a Faustian pact with the daemons has been made. Stay tuned for more on this recent development...
But why hasn't FreeBSD become as widespread as Linux? The answers may lie in its history.
That's roughly like asking: why do people eat less chocolate than they eat potatoes?
The answer is not history, it's that they are different kinds of "products" with different strengths and weaknesses.
The thing that sells me for FreeBSD in corporate environments is that FreeBSD is an operating system. The same group of people do the kernel *and* the OS. I've put a lot of FreeBSD boxes in production corporate environments, and I've never been bitten by the choice of OS, so I've become a pretty loyal punter. On the other hand, I just can't bring myself to put any OS that uses the linux *kernel* (there isn't an OS called 'linux' as best as I can tell) on a production enviroment - I've always had the impression that the Linuxes are all terribly fragmented, incoherent, and you never know what you're getting.
(by about now, all the script kids with mod points have cluelessly clicked the 'flamebait' button already... should I bother going on?!!! :-) )
In other news, I've become a really big fan of Gentoo Linux... it's just brilliant. I'm using it all kinds of non-production environments, and loving every minute of it. Bottom line though, it's too hard to sell something that is just a kernel as stable, reliable, and suitable for business.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
FreeBSD is a "stealthy" open source project in the same way the Brooklyn Bridge is a "stealthy" public works project:
It's been there forever, doing its job, fully appreciated only by an informed minority.
PS: Neither are for sale. :-)
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
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.
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 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
A lot of "Daemon worshipper since ever" and "Tried Linux, didn't like it" in here. Some "Like both". A few trolls have been modded down.
But when looking at it, *BSD users are throwing praise at each others in here. It's not like anyone is arguing in here, because mostly people with the same opinion responded to the article.
But no one is really talking about why Linux has more market/mind share. Or why the kernel developers for Linux have created a technologically similar kernel without having a head start (i.e. a full UNIX kernel). Or why - if any *nix - is taught, nearly always Linux is taught at universities. What made Linux the platform of choice for so many people in so "little" time?
These are not flames. These are questions I'd really like answers for. And maybe the *BSD communities should have them, to take advantage of that knowledge!
Nothing gained from 20 somewhat posts of the style "I like the ports tree", "Me, too!".
Start asking: "Why isn't *BSD dominating the *nix world now?" Don't answer: "It doesn't want to." Because that's not true. Hear yourselves talk. You want to! But you don't.
So why? Don't give me the USL/Novell case. In the time from 1991-1993 Linux had not become a comparable kernel, it became after.
Is it the license? The more chaotic collaboration? Linus' personality? The anti-Windows stance? The urge for people to develop something new (that lured more developers)? Why is (almost virtually etc.) nobody talking of a FreeBSD desktop?
As long as a lot of people talk about history, or past successes, or think along "I always have done it that way / have used it" nothing is won for *BSD in terms of "innovation" (it hurts to write it). *BSD needs some new answers to the Linux question, not some self-content same ol', same ol'.
If *BSD asked these questions, found the answers for them, and used them, it actually again become the most-used *nix system.
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.