FreeBSD June-December Status Reports

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "FreeBSD just published status reports covering June to December '04 with many interesting details about the work that went into 5-STABLE and a look ahead on plans and projects for 6-CURRENT."

Comments

Text here

[grub]

Site is already slashdotted, here's the compete text:

June, 2004: Patient is complaining of pain in side. 4th time here this month. Hypochondria a possibility.
July 2004: Pain is severe, admit to hospital. Recommend morphine drip.
August 2004: Kidneys failing, urea levels high. Recommend immediate dialysis.
September 2004: Patient delusional, calls for "grandpa AT&T"
October 2004: Grand mal seizures, complete kidney failure. Heart and lung congestion worsen.
November 2004: Patient in coma. Total brain death, recommend removing from life support and issuing a DNR.
December 2004: Patient dies. Awaiting full autopsy report from Dr. Netcraft.

Re:Text here

[Omniscientist]

Hmm, have something against FreeBSD?

Well to join the fun, Dr. Netcraft has just confirmed it...the death can be attributed to poisoning from an internal source.

Re:Text here

[Anonymous Coward]

No, actually I like FreeBSD a lot. It's the system I went to after using Linux for several years. I'm a big OpenBSD fan nowadays.

Re:Text here

[MPHellwig]

"Site is already slashdotted, here's the compete text" No it isn't, besides a bsd will stay up even after death, a daemon is not a mortal beast so it can not die, tux on the other hand...

Re:Text here

[Fallingcow]

will stay up even after death

Yeah, rigor mortis does that sometimes. That, or too much viagra.

Re:Text here

[Triumph The Insult C]

January 2005: Patient miraculously recovers, thanks to the Amazing Kreskin!
February 2005: PROFIT!!

Re:Text here

[VagaStorm]

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=Netcraft .com

Seems like they run FreeBSD them self :)

Re:Text here

[randallpowell]

Yup, FreeBSD is dead and confirmed by Netcraft. Too bad it can't detect my hardware properly. Or maybe the hardware can't detect FreeBSD.

Re:Text here

[sremick]

Right. Because obviously it was SO funny the other 10 million times we saw it last month, your using it has got to be even funnier. As well as the 1000 or so encores of the same we'll see on this thread.

*yawn*

Considering that the lame "joke" has no basis in reality, I wonder just why the people who continue to toss it around do so. Desperation? Jealousy? Do they feel threatened? Who knows.

Either way, it's a badge of lameness. Too bad the people using it can't figure that out.

Re:Text here

[grub]

I'm a big BSD user (Free and Open), it just happens that I can take and make a joke. Lighten up.

Re:Text here

[sremick]

Then it's all good... no hard feelings :)

Cheers...

Re:Text here

[EvilAlien]

I think the joke will continue until either of two things happens:

1. BSD actually dies ;)
2. BSD fans stop reacting so defensively

I don't get defensive when someone attacks BSD, but I have to admit I get a little defensive when Solaris bigots attack Linux.

I tried to have a conversation with someone today about why they thought "OpenBSD sucks!", and actually got to some rational reasons while others were whining about stopping yet another OS holy war discussion. Everybody needs to stop looking at operating systems as a religious issue and discuss things rationally. Personally, technical merit (including user interface design) is all I care about. I don't choose technology for any Stallmanesque ethic.

Re:Text here

[xA40D]

> Everybody needs to stop looking at operating systems as a religious issue and discuss things rationally

Could not agree more.

And when igniting a holy war we need to do so tactfully and with respect for the opinions of others.

And when we are done we should embrace in the spirit of brotherly love and agree that both sides benefit from such discourse.

Re:Text here

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dying

Re:Text here

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is dying.

Look up the word kaput for clarification.

Hope this helps.

Re:Text here

[Anonymous Coward]

Denial is the first stage of grief. FreeBSD is dead. You are in denial.

Try to work through your grief. Thanks in advance.

Re:Text here

[Anonymous Coward]

The news that FreeBSD has lost more market share, serves to reinforce what we've known all along. FreeBSD is collapsing in complete disarray. This interesting fact is fittingly illustrated by FreeBSD failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test. FreeBSD failed completely, even losing to Windows. FreeBSD finished dead last.

Re:Text here

[Anonymous Coward]

RFC: New FreeBSD Mascot
From: FreeBSD Core

"Chucky", the current mascot, is getting a little long in the tooth what with those stone age high top sneakers, and a perceived resemblance to certain Satanic figures. Therefore, we the FreeBSD Core are contemplating a newer, more inclusive mascot to better reflect FreeBSD's message. We are posting a request for comments for the New FreeBSD Mascot Unless otherwise determined, this will become the new mascot.

Thank you for your support.

-- FreeBSD Core

I like the naming convention

[Quasar1999]

I like the 5-stable 6-current... I think we should apply it to Microsoft OS releases too... hmm let's see...

Dos 6.2-stable
Windows XP- no wait...
Windows 98- no wait...
Windows 2000 - current...

there we go... :)

Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

Nice overview, although the wording may have been chosen with some more thought, take for example this entry on ifconfig:

The ifconfig program used to configure network interfaces

OMG, but now it's been relegated to kitchen duty?! ifconfig dishwasher0? How will I configure network interfaces now?

was overhauled.

*whew* Damn you for scaring me like that!

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[agent dero]

-2 Overuse of Sarcasm

Come on, cut them some slack, a even improving the little things is still helpful

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Brandybuck]

Those of us who can actually read to the end of a sentence without having to stop to take a breath had no problem with it at all.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

Those of us who can actually read to the end of a sentence without having to stop to take a breath had no problem with it at all.

That's only because you read out loud. Everyone in your office heard you read that as "used to" as in "I used to read out loud when I was a child."

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Brandybuck]

Everyone in your office heard you read that as "used to"...

That's "used to" as in "you-zd two" (present tense), and not "you-st two" (past tense). See the difference? Taken in context it's clear that the present tense is meant.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Coward]

Most systems experts now agree that FreeBSD is no longer relevant. FreeBSD5 took a path that will end up with an unmaintainable, unscalable, inefficient kernel threading model. It's doomed to obsolescence. Recent benchmarks with NetBSD demonstrate that NetBSD beats FreeBSD in a lot of critical categories, and the NetBSD team is doing it with fewer developers. How is FreeBSD going to cope when every other OS outperforms them? They'll have to adopt a new model, and the target will likely be DragonFly.

DragonFly is making huge advances. Sweeping changes are being made all the time that make DragonFly easier to maintain and more scalable, but performance is still good on a uniprocessor system, and stability is much the same as FreeBSD4 (which was the last FreeBSD release which actually worked). When the giant lock comes off, FreeBSD likely won't be able to hang with them. The upcoming multicore processors will just make things worse. FreeBSD6 is following the same path as FreeBSD5. If things keep going the same way, FreeBSD7 will have to be a DragonFly fork, just to stay relevant.

But will anyone care? FreeBSD is hemorrhaging developers. Right now, if the right three or four developers left, there wouldn't be enough detailed knowledge about the kernel workings to maintain the kernel without a long learning period that the FreeBSD project can't afford. Furthermore, how many of those developers will want to keep working on FreeBSD when it's just a DragonFly fork? DragonFly is positioned to replace FreeBSD, as well as fill niches that no BSD has filled before. Why would anyone want to work on FreeBSD, either as a DragonFly fork or as an obviously non-viable kernel model?

FreeBSD was nice, and is nice; I'm using RELENG_5 now, but shortly DragonFly will have a lot of its features in place, and I'll be moving to it. There are many others like me, ready to swap once DragonFly is ready, and you'd better believe that's trouble for FreeBSD.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

That's "used to" as in "you-zd two" (present tense), and not "you-st two" (past tense). See the difference? Taken in context it's clear that the present tense is meant.

The ifconfig program used to... - that alone is not enough to be able to tell the difference, you have to read the entire sentence to see what was meant. That was my point. Inserting 'which is' or putting a comma between program and used would have solved the ambiguity.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Coward]

LONDON (Reuters) - The dead could soon be speaking from the grave if an American inventor's plan becomes reality. Robert Barrows, of Burlingame, California has filed a patent application for a video-equipped tombstone that will display a video message from grave's occupant.

"If his patent is granted, Barrows hopes that when people make out their will, they also leave a parting video with their lawyer," New Scientist magazine said on Wednesday.

The hollow, talking tombstone will include a flat touch screen and will house a computer with a microchip memory or hard disk. It will be powered by electricity from the cemetery's lighting system.

The plan will not be the first electronically enhanced tombstone. An American company has a patent on a gravestone that will display photographs of the deceased and tributes from friends, according to the magazine.

But the Barrows plan will go one further by including contributions actually from the deceased.

"It's history from the horse's mouth," he said, "and the message is FreeBSD is dying."

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Coward]

Matt, is that you?

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Brandybuck]

that alone is not enough to be able to tell the difference, you have to read the entire sentence to see what was meant.

Which was my entire point. Most of us CAN read all the way to the end of that ten word sentence. In fact, most of us go through life reading every sentence all the way to the end to see what was meant. It's a normal way we read. We don't stop to ponder what the author meant until we hit the period.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Coward]

The FreeBSD platform in general is very unreliable, and many many problems have been reported over the last week alone. One appears to be a stuck interrupt, but all that code has been redone for SMP support. Why do they bother? SMP SUCKS on FreeBSD.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Cowherd X]

Which was my entire point. Most of us CAN read all the way to the end of that ten word sentence.

You don't first read the whole sentence, then buffer it, semantically decipher it (and decide how to pronounce used to) and then pronounce the processed sentence, that's not how humans read out loud, pronunciation decisions are made in a very localized context that is no bigger than a few words. Besides, you are taking my humorous post way too seriously.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Brandybuck]

I must not be human, because I can do it. Then again, I'm an English major, so I have an unfair advantage...

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Coward]

Emily Dickinson Mourns *BSD

Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for *BSD;
The carriage held but just our bad code
And our mortality.

We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
Passing Linux, we dared salute, a foe superior
My coding work was but a-waste,
Doomed OS a triviality.

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Coward]

Hawkins,is that you?

Re:Nice, but in need of better wording

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem is that FreeBSD keeps falling farther and farther behind. It is slipping into irrelevancy.

raised from the dead

[millahtime]

January 2005: The stone is rolled away and behold the might FreeBSD has raised from the dead.

Wow, this is really great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish they released status reports more frequently, the stuff in there is really neat. I follow the FreeBSD mailing lists once in a while and sometimes it's hard to get "the big picture" from the details. As someone who follows the Linux kernel mailing list, I guess the same problem exists there. Have they considered doing something like the lkml summaries? That might help get the word out about some of the cool stuff that's going on.

Re:Wow, this is really great!

[Anonymous Coward]

I was really pleased to see the level of work that's apparently going into SMP. With many new systems around the corner slated to be dual-core, it's really critical to have stronger SMP support than was offered in earlier FreeBSD releases. I guess the interesting question now is whether the NetBSD/OpenBSD folk will start to pick some of this up -- with the sheer volume of work happening with the network stack and I/O systems, they'd presumably be best served by just lifting the FreeBSD stuff and taking advantage of the nature of open source!

Re:Wow, this is really great!

[drdink]

There is now a weekly cvs-src summary that is sent to the lists and available on the web in HTML, text, and RSS. I find it very useful for catching up with the lists when I've been away.

Re:Wow, this is really great!

[parc]

There's a weekly summary of -current activity posted by Mike Joihnston, mirrored in HTML at http://www.xl0.org/FreeBSD/ and available as an RSS feed at http://excel.xl0.org/cgi-bin/rss.py. While it's not as exhaustive as Kerneltrap, it's very good.

Re:Wow, this is really great!

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD has never had a bug problem as bad as it is now.

Stability hasn't been this bad since 2.0. As I see it, the major bugs in FreeBSD are

• SMP (particularly bad on amd64)
• threads (deadlocks and performance issues)
• HT scheduling (completely broken)
• MT network stack (unexplainable freezes)
• overall performance

Re:Wow, this is really great!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're welcome to come over and try NetBSD.

We've avoided the problems from which FreeBSD suffers.
The NetBSD goal is always to get it right the first time.

Frankly, more and more FreeBSD users are switching to NetBSD,
as can be seen in our friendly mailing lists which are loaded with eager
refugees from FreeBSD. We are always happy to accommodate newbies.

Re:Wow, this is really great!

[molnarcs]

Yeah, at least a bi-montlhly status report would be great, although this one is pretty huge and a very interesting read. My random favorite parts: (for those who find the report too long to read)

Thanks to Michael Johnson, the FreeBSD GNOME team has recently been given permission to use the Firefox and Thunderbird names , official icons, and to produce officially branded builds. Mozilla has also been very interested in merging our local patches back into the official source tree. This should greatly improve the quality of Firefox and Thunderbird on FreeBSD moving forward.

Nice to see that there is good cooperation between FreeBSD and the Mozilla Project.

FreeBSD profile.sh

URL: https://projects.fsck.ch/profile

Contact: Tobias Roth <ports@fsck.ch>

FreeBSD profile.sh is targeted at laptops. It allows to define multiple network environments (eg, home, work), and will then detect in which environment the laptop is started and configure it accordingly. Almost everything from under /etc can be configured per environment, and only the overrides to the default /etc have to be defined. Suspending in one environment and resuming in a different one is also supported.

Proper integration into the acpi/apm and several small improvements are underway. More testing with different system configurations is needed.

That's a nice touch for laptop users, and I never heard about it, though I follow some of the mailing lists pretty closely (but than, I just learned a week ago that I don't have to go through the shutdown-p now routine to switch off my puter - pressing the power button will will suffice).

FreeBSD 5.3 is the first release to include PF. It went out okay, but some bugs were discovered too late to make it on the CD. It is recommend to update `src/sys/contrib/pf' to RELENG_5. The specific issues addressed are:

* Possible NULL-deref with user/group rules.
* Crash with binat on dynamic interfaces.
* Silent dropping of IPv6 packets with option headers.
* Endless loops with `static-port' rules.

Most of these issues were discovered by FreeBSD users and got fed back to OpenBSD. This is a prime example of open source at work.

PF rocks! I just swithed to pf from ipfw2, and even though ipfw is really good and easy to configure compared to iptables/ipchains, pf is even more noob friendly. You can do powerful things with pf _very_ easily.

Some other things: PHK's status report is in itself very interesting. So are the more gory details of changes in the OS internals. It seems to be that there is a general trend of modularizing the system and providing good API's for 3rd party development (GEOM comes to mind). Also: what's not in the status reports - the recent kickoff of freebsd-usb mailing lists that tries to enhanche ehci (usb2). There was a recent call to arms for rewriting the FreeBSD sound system. Many improvements in the bktr (tvtuner) driver over the past few months. Jeff's schedgraph that measures scheduler performance, and only two days after commit there were some bugs fixed in the scheduler that increased performance by 10%.

Although 5.3 was a good release (worked like a champ on my server and my desktop machine) - I'm very much looking forwards to 5.4. I upgraded all my puters to 5-STABLE, and they seem to run fine, and, I already see a slight performance increase (it can be just the driver upgrades, my server has the problematic if_sk). If they can fix ULE for 5.4 (or at least unbreak it) than FreeBSD would be a very good desktop choice as well (not that it isn't currently - it is somewhat more responsive than 2.4.x based linux distroes, but it isn't as good as 2.6.x, not with the 4BSD scheduler).

Cheers to FreeBSD developers.

netcraft

[millahtime]

poking around netcraft you'll find that freebsd is growing at a decent rate. forget death, it's getting bigger having grown at a very high percentage rate in the past year.

Some of the articles are links...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read through, some of the news articles are actually just links to whole other news letters. These guys are nuts :-).

BSD vs. Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

For Linux users like me, take a look at this to see how BSD compares to Linux from a BSD point of view.

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4l in ux/bsd4linux1.php

Re:BSD vs. Linux

[cheshire_cqx]

Mod parent AC up. This is a good link.

Re:BSD vs. Linux

[Scott7477]

Fooled me...

Re:BSD vs. Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

BigTux project shows Linux scaling to 64 processors

ZDNet UK
January 18, 2005, 15:55 GMT

HP has demonstrated Linux running on 64 Itanium2 processors without any loss of efficiency, and says it's seeing growing interest in Linux from financial institutions.

HP on Tuesday demonstrated Linux scaling to 64 processors on its Superdome hardware as it seeks to reassure customers who are increasingly considering the open source operating system for enterprise applications.

Running three different benchmarks on a standard Linux distribution based on the 2.6 kernel, the Superdome showed linear improvements for kernel compiling, memory bandwidth, and the HPL common supercomputer benchmark.

Operating system scalability is important to companies; without it, throwing more processors at a problem will result in diminishing returns. With OS scalability, doubling the number of processors should double the performance.

On the Superdome, demonstrated at HP's labs in Böblingen, Germany, a kernel compile using a single Itanium2 processor took about 19 minutes (there are about 20,000 files to compile in this job).

Because the compile contained serial jobs, during which one processor intermittently collated the work, performance improved by a factor of 26 when all 64 Itanium2 processors were used. With no serial jobs a performance improvement of 64 would have been expected, said Sebastien Cabaniols, engineering project leader on the project.

In the STREAM benchmark, memory bandwidth rose from 5GB/s with one 'cell' of four processors, to 10GB/s with two cells, and continued to double until all 64 processors -- or all 16 cells -- were switched on to provide 80GB/s of bandwidth.

The HPL benchmark, which is used to measure performance when solving large linear equations, produced similar results, rising from 18 gigaflops with one cell of four processors to 277 gigaflops with all 16 cells, or 64 processors, running.

"This was a standard Linux distribution," said Cabaniols. "The kernel was able to discover the topology of the system and discover the memory in a NUMA pattern."

NUMA, or 'non uniform memory architecture', refers to the cell-like architecture of the Superdome in which the 64 processors and their associated memory are split into 16 cells. In the demo machine half the 256GB of RAM was configured as local memory for the cells, and the other half was configured as pooled memory.

"The 2.6 kernel is NUMA aware," said Cabaniols. Some patching was necessary, he said, but "all patches developed for the BigTux project are going into the mainstream Linux kernel and are included in standard distributions."

Eva Beck, Linux business manager for HP Europe, said that in the past year and a half the company has seen customers using Linux for application servers. "Today it is a complete environment," she said, alluding to the use of Linux across all types of server, from Web servers and email servers to technical applications and now enterprise applications. "One the client side we're seeing a much stronger push too, prompted largely by the public sector installations," she added. "Banks and insurance companies are among those showing more interest in Linux on the desktop now."

Re:BSD vs. Linux

[cheshire_cqx]

It is a good link, just need to fix the space inserted by Slash.

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4lin ux/bsd4linux1.php

BSD is dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

Long live Apple OS X, the only true heir to the throne of Unix!

Re:BSD is dead!

[Anonymous Coward]

In the final analysis only one fact remains:

*BSD is dead

Re:Better insight into the problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Great article, worth the look

Re:Netcraft confirms, but Apple resurrects !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft would seem to say that FreeBSD is growing at a rapid pace, even leaving out Mac OS X users (who are basically FreeBSD users although they don't know it). I was chatting with some Apple guys last fall and they were becoming more and more BSD-centric -- all their new Microsoft SMB stuff came straight from FreeBSD, as did their IPv6 support, IPSEC support, etc. I'm hoping they'll pick up the ipfw2 code from FreeBSD soon, which is basically a virtual machine that executes firewall instructions in kernel -- damn cool stuff.

Re:Netcraft confirms, but Apple resurrects !!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I bought a PowerBook. Great piece of hardware. But OSX only survived a week before it was replaced by DebianPPC.

Wow! An Anti-BSD OSX troll.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I've really seen everything. ./ comments, taking the word uninformed to a whole new dimension.

Why don't I use *BSD?

[mcrbids]

I'm a heavy Linux user. Why don't I use BSD? I've considered it heavily, and revisit my decision from time to time:

1) BSD makes a lousy desktop. I would thus want to use something different on my laptop, like Fedora Core. This increases administration overhead.

2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully.

3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux - most interesting packages are developed on Linux, and "maintained" elsewhere.

4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management.

5) As of Redhat 7.x, Linux is "good enough"(tm) and getting better fast. Keep the patches up to date, (it's easy with yum - as a policy, I patch monthly or when "critical" issues are found) apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.

6) BSD has much more limited hardware compatability, and drivers for "cool stuff" can be hard to find.

All the above said, I might still move to BSD. Later. When I have time to. When I get a chance to play with it more. When I decide I'm ready to make the switch.

But, for now, it's RedHat/Whitebox Linux for me!

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[snorklewacker]

> 1) BSD makes a lousy desktop.

What makes it a lousy desktop? It's not like it won't run KDE and Gnome on X with all extensions and the same fonts. From the graphical environment alone, I defy you to tell me the difference. In fact, BSD as a desktop used to be a lot snappier than Linux, down to less pointer lag and all. More recent linuxes have caught up with the low-latency patches, but once they run into swap, they still bog -- because Linux's VM system is still bolted on and degrades very poorly.

FBSD 5.x I understand, has made some pretty painful tradeoffs for throughput and lost quite a bit of ground in responsiveness. If you want to try BSD out sometime, I actually recommend giving DragonFlyBSD a look -- it's based on FreeBSD 4.x, with some 5.x stuff backported, plus quite a bit of original work, and it reputed to be quite fast indeed.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Err I don't know why people think BSD doesn't make a good desktop. It's the same exact X.org codebase, and the pretty much all the apps are identical.
FreeBSD even has driver support for 3D video cards. I personally don't need that stuff though.
For that matter, how many people use an SMP desktop machine anyway? Ok, you two geeks in the back can sit down. The rest of the world uses mainly single-processor machines. Server are a different ball game. We're talking desktops here, right? (and for that matter, Sparc/Solaris trounces Linux in the i386/SMP department).
So anyway I think you're saying a whole lot about nothing.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[0racle]

Congradulations, your an idiot.

1) BSD makes a lousy desktop
It can use the same Windowing system you use on Fedora

2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully
Chances are FreeBSD will handle SMP better then Linux will, and it has for some time

3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux
It has a dedicated team of people that develop the system as a whole and i386 has over 10,000 ports that have been verified to work

4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration
Ya learning things sucks, especially when it uses pretty much the same tools as Linux does, and the packaging system makes far more sence, well at least to me it does. Is this the same argument you use for not using Slackware?

5) As of Redhat 7.x, Linux is "good enough"
At least you have a sense of humour.

6) BSD has much more limited hardware compatability
BSD often gets drivers before Linux and with few, though sometimes notable exceptions, if your system runs Linux it will run a *BSD.

Why didnt you just say you dont use it because you don't want to instead of making up some 'insightfull' points that show you don't know what your talking about.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Jesus 2.0]

BSD makes a lousy desktop.

I assume you mean relative to Linux. If so, in what way?

Is Gnome on BSD different than Gnome on Linux? KDE? XFCE? Any number of other WMs or DEs?

If so, how so? If not, what are you talking about?

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[gstoddart]

Why didnt you just say you dont use it because you don't want to instead of making up some 'insightfull' points that show you don't know what your talking about.

Simple. Because this is Slashdot and the moderators in a topic on FreeBSD don't know or care if the poster was insightful. He used insightful sounding words.

Bash Windows. Bash FreeBSD. Winge about Macs. Tin-foil hats. 'Yay Linux' and PHP seem to be the order of the day. All other stuff is either offtopic, troll, or overrated.

Me, I'll stick with my nice stable FreeBSD box with a huge ports collection to console myself. :-P

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Brandybuck]

1) BSD makes a lousy desktop.

It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems.

2) BSD doesn't do SMP gracefully.

First, it does do SMP just fine. Second, you probably don't even have an SMP machine on your desktop anyway. People don't need SMP on their destkop. And yes, you're talking about the desktop, because that's what your very first question was about. For some servers SMP is important. Good news is that FreeBSD supports it just fine.

3) BSD doesn't have the mindshare of Linux

So what? Linux doesn't have the mindshare of Windows, so why aren't you using Windows? All the popular stylish people are using Windows, why don't you to?

4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management.

This is a stupid argument. Replace "BSD" with the name of any Linux distribution. "Oh poor me! I can't use [Debian|Slackware|SuSE|Mandrake] because I would have to learn a new adminstration system. Oh boo hoo!"

5) As of Redhat 7.x, Linux is "good enough"(tm) and getting better fast.

Some of us don't want "good enough." Some of us prefer "damned fine and strutting like she knows it!" Far be it for me to stick up for Linux, but she deserves a lot more respect from you than merely "good enough". Sheesh. ...apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.

Side note: telnet is disabled by default in FreeBSD. It comes secure out of the box. It's not perfect, but for a tenth the work you would have to do on a telnet-by-default distro you could have FreeBSD locked down as tight as anything.

6) BSD has much more limited hardware compatability, and drivers for "cool stuff" can be hard to find.

If you want "cool stuff", then stick with Windows. I understand it has drivers for ALL the "cool stuff". On the other hand, if you want drivers for all the boring stuff you use every day, then FreeBSD will have them.

In fact, I was not initially able to install Linux on my current home system, because at the time I built it (18 months ago) there were no Linux distros that supported SATA out of the box. But FreeBSD did. It wasn't until about six months ago that some Linux distros started shipping with SATA on by default. Many still don't.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried DragonFlyBSD, but it corrupted its file systems quickly and left me with an empty root partition. Matt told me it was a brief glitch for a bug he'd already fixed, and wasn't representative of the system as a whole, but I have to wonder... Most operating systems have a "stable branch" or "patch levels" to allow you to update so that in regular use, you don't have to worry about hitting developer instability. It turns out that DragonFlyBSD is regularly unstable and there's no "stable" recourse if you want bugfixes and updates -- it's really a system for the developers not the users, at least for now. So I went to FreeBSD 5.3 -- it seems to be quite stable, and gets both critical fixes and security fixes in a way I can pull down the updates automatically in cron. I think the work they're doing on DragonFly sounds interesting, but the project isn't run in a way that a production end user can use it. I'll stick with FreeBSD and wait for any interesting stuff to end up back there.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[archen]

4) Getting to know BSD would require getting comfortable with a new administration system for startup, shutdown, and package management

Actually that's sort of funny because when Redhat dumped support on me I had to do just that. It was hard enough getting my boss onboard to implement some of that "Linux" stuff, but the price was reasonable for up2date. Then no more 7x updates after about what 1 year, 2 years?

I looked at various Linux distributors but tended to be wary of commercial vendors. Debian looked promising but just didn't strike me as the right choice. By contrast I found good performance and security as well as a stable consistent OS with up to date packaging in FreeBSD. I had to not only re-learn package management, but system administration as well. And you know what, it's the same for most Linux distros because they're all different. Even worse that Redhat tends to spoon feed you with their own special tools - I became a better admin when I moved to BSD, not because BSD is neccesarily superior, but because it gave me another perspective on how things could be done.

Well most of the other points are flamebait as well (although I sort of agree with some of them) but I thought I'd address that one point.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have FC3 on my IBM T40 and it's been a pain in my ass. I had gpg, ssh, sound, wireless AND USB issues. In fact after the last round of updates I can not access any USB storage device. Way to go guys.
Ironically when I boot gnoppix everything, EVERYTHING works just fine.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[mcrbids]

It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems.

And what did you have to do to achieve this? What did you have to compile?

First, it does do SMP just fine. Second, you probably don't even have an SMP machine on your desktop anyway.

I misspoke. OpenBSD doesn't do SMP. I don't have SMP on my desktop, but I DO like having as similar an environment as possible from Desktop to Server, thus this is an issue.

Linux doesn't have the mindshare of Windows, so why aren't you using Windows?

Because the smaller mindshare of Linux (And I'm not so sure it really is much smaller) is worth it to avoid the worm-of-the-week (tm) syndrome so common with Windows. I didn't say mindshare was all-encompassing.

I can't use [Debian|Slackware|SuSE|Mandrake] because I would have to learn a new adminstration system. Oh boo hoo!

It is definitely NOT a stupid argument. I have people in line to get XYZ done. I can either do XYZ and make paying customers happy, or take a performance hit while I get used to a new environment. Which do you prefer? Money to pay for kid's college tuition, or time spent learning new stuff so that you can do what you were doing before?

Some of us don't want "good enough." Some of us prefer "damned fine and strutting like she knows it!" Far be it for me to stick up for Linux, but she deserves a lot more respect from you than merely "good enough". Sheesh. ...apply some sane policies to configuration, (disable telnet, etc) and it's quite secure.

And to many of us, "damned fine and strutting like she knows it" IS "good enough". I'm not sure what you are saying here; it seems self-contradictory. Linux does the job competently, and to me, that's "good enough". Who mentioned telnet?

If you want "cool stuff", then stick with Windows.

Refer to the previous point, about "good enough". In my experience, Linux has excellent hardware compatability, and BSD is so-so.

Grandparent was /NOT/ intended to be a troll, but rather an honest indication of my perception of BSD (specifically, OpenBSD) when I evaluated it for the next round of upgrades.

My conclusion was that Whitebox Linux would be the best solution for my specific needs.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[omaha]

Me Too!
I was in the same boat with RH and decided after trying a number of dists to go with FreeBSD. I haven't been disapointed. Granted these were all server machines but since then I've installed it on my teenager's computers, the kitchen laptop, my laptop.

Happy Me!

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[someonehasmyname]

OpenBSD does support SMP.

http://www.openbsd.org/smp.html

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[SillyNickName4me]

> I misspoke. OpenBSD doesn't do SMP

As of version 3.6, it actually does support SMP

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[mcrbids]

As of June, 2004, SMP (Symmetric MultiProcessor) support has been merged into the main OpenBSD development branch. At this time, the i386 and amd64 platforms supports SMP, but hopefully others, including macppc, sparc, and sparc64 will ultimately support SMP.

Did you read the link you posted? It's "in development"...

Looking at http://www.openbsd.org/amd64.html

Starting with OpenBSD 3.6, OpenBSD/amd64 supports most SMP (Symmetrical MultiProcessor) systems. To support SMP operation, a separate SMP kernel (bsd.mp) is included with the installation file sets.

As this is a new feature, developers will want to see what hardware does and doesn't work when running SMP, so it is even more important to send a dmesg after install.

Sounds nice and stable, doesn't it?

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[sp0rk173]

In fact, I was not initially able to install Linux on my current home system, because at the time I built it (18 months ago) there were no Linux distros that supported SATA out of the box. But FreeBSD did. It wasn't until about six months ago that some Linux distros started shipping with SATA on by default. Many still don't.

Very good point. I have two 120 gig sata drives in a raid array. First I tried windows...it worked, but was a pain in the ass to set up (why the hell doesn't Windows XP x64 have sata support out of the box yet? Ugh). Then I tried Gentoo, because windows got boring. It detected by sata drives individually, but the array? Nope. In order for that to work I'd have to install it on a smaller ata drive, then build a kernel to recognize my particular hardware raid chip, then copy over the base system onto the array and boot from it. "Fuck that!" I said. Then I tried ubuntu...and same thing. So i finally gave up and decided to just say fuck it and install FreeBSD. It detected two identical drives and set them up as individual devices (ad0, ad1) and a raid 0 array device (ar0) - so i could pick if i wanted to use them as individual drives or as an array. Linux may have more hardware support than FreeBSD...but the hardware support FreeBSD has is done correctly and Just Works. Once again, FreeBSD won my heart over...even after I slammed it for not being as technically sound as DragonFly. Regardless, until DFly comes out with 1.0-STABLE, My box will be a FreeBSD box. Less headaches, hastle, and bullshit. It just works.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem for FreeBSD is that as a second-tier player, it is always lagging behind. You rarely ever see the latest and greatest on FreeBSD. New software is never available for FreeBSD until many months (if not years) after its initial release. Using FreeBSD in 2005, is a bit like using Windows95 or Red Hat 5.2. Sure it works to a degree, but it is behind the curve.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out for speed benchmarks.
You can't rely on old assumptions anymore.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's stable on i386, and that's what matters now (that's what's most common today).
I'm sure over time the other archs will get stable smp too.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Man that's an old benchmark. In fact it pointed to a problem in the obsd kernel that has since been fixed.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Brandybuck]

...but I DO like having as similar an environment as possible from Desktop to Server, thus this is an issue.

While this sounds fine on the surface, on closer inspection you'll find that the needs of the server and desktop are so different, that they might as well be different. My desktop is going to have a full blown desktop, but my server won't even have a video card installed (let along Xorg).

I can either do XYZ and make paying customers happy, or take a performance hit while I get used to a new environment.

While you certainly don't want to switch systems every other week, that's no reason to lock yourself into a single vendor for your entire lifetime. Elsewhere you talked about evaluating OpenBSD. Why the heck did you even bother when you knew in advance you were going to keep the old vendor? In my experience, people who abhor change don't evaluate new products.

And to many of us, "damned fine and strutting like she knows it" IS "good enough".

To many people, "good enough" is synonymous with mediocrity. Windows is good enough. Really it is! The whole secret to Windows' success is that it's just good enough that the average consumer won't flush it down the toilet in disgust.

Some of us don't want "good enough", we want "better", or if we can manage it, "best."

Who mentioned telnet?

You did in your grandparent post. I'm quoting you directly. Unfortunately Slashdot mangled my post by dropping a <p> tag.

In my experience, Linux has excellent hardware compatability, and BSD is so-so.

And in my experience it's just the opposite. I've already mentioned my SATA experiences. I've heard similar experiences with USB and several audio cards. I have a laptop where I had to go through several Linux distros before I finally found one that would install on it. It was Gentoo that finally worked, with all the others I tried (Slack, SuSE, Debian, Mandrake) hanging while booting from the install media. But FreeBSD installed the very first time.

Grandparent was /NOT/ intended to be a troll

Bullshit. You didn't post to Whitebox Linux story, or even a generic Linux story. You posted to a FreeBSD story. Your very first statement was "BSD makes a lousy desktop". And you say you weren't trolling? Hah! If I posted to a Linux story claiming that Linux made a lousy desktop, I would be modded down so fast my eardrums would rupture.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[sp0rk173]

I'm a heavy Linux user. Why don't I use BSD?

I have a better question, as I don't care why you don't use FreeBSD: why do you feel obligated to tell us why you don't use it? If Linux works for you, great. Quite honestly all of your points are moot from my point for view for the following reasons:

1) This depends on your definition of a "desktop." To me, a Laptop is not a Desktop. If they were the same thing, why would they have different prefixes, Desk- and Lap-? I've used Fedora Core and I think it makes a Lousy Desktop. It has too many things I don't use installed in the default Desktop install. FreeBSD makes a much better desktop, with a much tighter install, while keeping all the bells and whistles *I* like. My opinion though. Since this is a subjective thing, I would say this point is moot and completely relative to the user.

2) Why would you need SMP for a standard desktop? And while I would Agree that FreeBSD doesn't do SMP Gracefully, it still does it basically the same way as Linux does from a theorhetical standpoint. I would argue the same thing that Matt Dillon argues - the basic underlying ideas behind both Linux and FreeBSD's SMP model are flawed and ungraceful. Check out the DFly site for more details. Technically, this is a moot point and is only a matter of time before FreeBSD is at the same level as Linux...i would argue they're so close right now the difference is insignificant.

3) While you might be correct with mindshare, there is not correlation between quantity of mindshare and quality of the final product. While the linux kernel is generally good, due to the decentalized nature of the linux community in general you end up with literally thousands of different distributions for different purposes, most of which are redundant and virtually useless. With BSD you have four to five different "distributions" with generalized goals - FreeBSD (server/workstation performance), OpenBSD (security), NetBSD (portability/stability), DragonFly BSD (cutting edge research/kernel-level innovations), and Darwin/OS X (general desktop optimization). While most interesting packages are indeed developed on linux, the majority run fine on all BSD's, with FreeBSD being compatible with the majority of the so-called cool linux-developed apps, including binary commercial linux games. FreeBSD also has binary 3D acceleration on x86 if you use an nVidia card, just like Linux. Moot point.

4) You mention the learning curve. Trust me, when i moved from linux to FreeBSD, there was virtually no learning curve. The RC system is much more sensical than the init.d system in my opinion. /etc/rc.conf controls base-system-level startup scripts with a simple binary switch (i.e. sshd_enable="YES"). User-installed programs with startup scripts are controled by their own files in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. To activate these, generally you just move prog_name.sh.sample to prog_name.sh. The system will then start it up the next time you reboot. The scripts are also startable from the commandline by root, without need for a reboot. Package management is as easy as pkg_add -r [progname] for binary packages, or simply installing something from the ports directory. The program is then patched and compiled from source. Simple. It would take you, if you're an advanced linux user, probably a weekend to get up to speed on how to admin a FreeBSD machine, and maybe a week to master it.

5) As for patches, you'll probably notice by checking out the FreeBSD website there hasn't been a security advisory in the base system since December 1st, 2004...more than a month ago. When they tag a source tree as stable, you better fucking believe it's stable. Ports, however, may introduce security vulnerabilities as they're programs not directly controled by the freebsd project, perse. If there's a program that the ports team feels isn't secure, they won

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

With all due respect, your one data point is no more than an interesting anecdote, without any statistical significance. I'll share an anecdote with you. Read on.

Right now I'm using FreeBSD 5.3 and I'm about to give up completely. There is a bug in the FreeBSD SATA command queuing which completely corrupts the metadata. Oh, the metadata is there, alright. And it "looks" correct, but after a fsck all the data on my SATA drive is mangled. Open one file, and it will have parts of several files interspersed throughout.

My flac audio files all show CRC errors. I think the files are still there but the metadata doesn't point to them correctly. FreeBSD 5.3 is broken. I'm sorry to say.

My plan is to install another BSD and see if I can mount the drive which FreeBSD 5.3 corrupted. I'm hoping NetBSD or DragonFly will allow me to do this so that I can recover my files. I'm not worried about all the reports, I have backups. But if I lose my audio files, I will be despondant. My problem was that I trusted the FreeBSD hype. Fool me once, shame on you.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[molnarcs]

4. rc scripts actually a little more complicated in FreeBSD, they're in more places, but less than half hour to learn. boot process of FreeBSD is weird too. Package and ports are trickier for sure in FreeBSD

What?! One of the best things in FreeBSD is that startup scripts are much less complicated than in linux. Startup scripts for services included in the base system: /etc/rc.d Startup scripts for packages installed from ports: /usr/local/etc/rc.d - And that's it about it. And you don't even have to no anything about startup scripts. When you install a package, it installs a startup script in rc.d, and you only have to know one thing about startup scripts to have it enabled: put one single line in rc.conf. Just to make it sure that no one thinks that FreeBSD is complicated - this is my entire rc.conf, which controls almost all aspects of the system:

# networking
ifconfig_rl0="inet 172.17.141.160 netmask 255.255.252.0"
defaultrouter="172.17.140.19"
gat eway_enable="YES"
hostname="mcsaba.sh.nek.klte.hu "
ifconfig_ed0="inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 255.255.255.0"
tcp_extensions="YES"

# network services
sendmail_enable="none"
sshd_program=/us r/sbin/sshd
sshd_enable="YES"
lisa_enable="YES"
pureftpd_enable="YES"
pureftpd_config=/usr/local /etc/pure-ftpd.conf
samba_enable="YES"
apache2_e nable="YES"
mysql_enable="YES"

# other services/options
linux_enable="YES"
usbd_enable= "YES"
# clear_tmp_enable="YES"
moused_flags="-z 4"
moused_type="auto"
background_fsck="NO"

# pf options
pf_enable="YES"
pf_rules="/etc/pf.conf" # rules definition file for pf
pflog_enable="YES" # start pflogd(8)
pflog_logfile="/var/log/fw/pflog" # where pflogd should store the logfile

That's the best thing about bsd's rc system: you don't have zillions of symlinks in various runlevel directories. You don't have to worry about proper naming either. rcNG (NG=next generation) checks for dependencies automagically: you instal samba, put samba_enable="YES" in your rc.conf - end of your worries, for all the services it needs will be started up automatically.

The only reason for thinking it's complicated is that it is simple :) - as weird as it may sound. When I switched from linux, (of course I read the handbook) sometimes I had this feeling that there must be something more to it I am not aware of. And I thought that because I can't find it, it must be more complicated, until I realized that it is really that simple. No /etc/sys/networking/somefile (mandrake) or /etc/networking (debian) just to config your network interfaces. See my rc.conf - that's the simplicity and user-friendliness of BSD.

About yum - please, don't suggest such things. In FreeBSD, the best thing is that you don't have to worry about dependencies and about adding some package repositories (than removing others, because they conflict with each other). The ports system just works, without any need to configure it (except one line which is like "CHANGE_THIS.freebsd.org" preceded by a comment to put there your local mirror - but only if you installed the portupgrade tools). No freaking repositories (just over 12000 ports - see freshports.org)

As to the desktop: some obligatory screenshots.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

A *BSD Carol

"Spirit," said Scrooge, with an interest he had never felt before, "tell me if *BSD will live."

"I see a vacant seat," replied the Ghost, "in the poor chimney-corner, and a crutch without an owner, carefully preserved. If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, *BSD will die."

"No, no," said Scrooge. "Oh, no, kind Spirit! say it will be spared."

"If these shadows remain unaltered by the Future, none other of my race," returned the Ghost, "will find him here. What then? If it be like to die, it had better do it, and decrease the surplus operating system population."

Scrooge hung his head to hear his own words quoted by the Spirit, and was overcome with penitence and grief. It was sad to see any operating system die, even one so obviously flawed and useless as *BSD.

God bless us, every one.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh fuck off! If you don't like it don't use it.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

>Oh fuck off! If you don't like it don't use it.

Ehm.. you just replied to a copy-and-paste.
http://www.google.com/search?q=%22The+failure+of+B SD%22&num=100&hl=it&lr=&filter=0

The amount of FUD that has been spread for years - and continuously - here on slashdot by a few linux advocates is a clear measure of how much they fear BSD.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[molnarcs]

It's running on my work and home desktop and my laptop. It runs KDE and GNOME, with all the bells and whistles, with absolutely no problems. And what did you have to do to achieve this? What did you have to compile?

Well, I don't think grandparent was a troll, but it was (is still) -5 uninformed. What you have to do to run kde is install it from the first CD (takes 5 minutes). Or, you can: pkg_add -r kde. AND you have a choice to install it from ports, compiling it for your specific hardware with optimizations. All it takes is one command: portinstall kde - if you want everything but the kitchen sync, or if you want a streamlined kde: portinstall kde-light.

learn more... it's not that difficult.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Chreo]

4) ... /etc/rc.conf controls base-system-level startup scripts with a simple binary switch (i.e. sshd_enable="YES"). User-installed programs with startup scripts are controled by their own files in /usr/local/etc/rc.d. To activate these, generally you just move prog_name.sh.sample to prog_name.sh. The system will then start it up the next time you reboot. The scripts are also startable from the commandline by root, without need for a reboot.

Just a small correction. Renaming prog_name.sh.sample to prog_name.sh is the "old" way and not rcNG-style. Ports that are "converted" to the new rcNG-style, install rc-scripts as prog_name.sh and use the switch prog_name_enable="YES" in /etc/rc.conf just as the base system does. This makes it coherent and easier to control what's being run on startup. Otherwise excellent post.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to try BSD out sometime, I actually recommend giving DragonFlyBSD a look

Any idea if it has UBC and if so how well it performs against NetBSD?

I recently tried NetBSD because I was benchmarking a few different Unix'ish OS' for a particular exercise that had disk intensive processes running for days, and NetBSD has been absolutely incredible as far as its VM system performance goes.

BTW, I also use BSD's for my desktops. OpenBSD for many years and now also NetBSD when I really need speed above all else. NetBSD, from CDR to networked X desktop with WindowMaker, takes me about 20 minutes. Without X, OpenBSD and NetBSD take less than 5 minutes to install.

I've been using Linux and BSD's for about 8 years, but I last commited myself to personal Linux usage about 3 years ago, ending with Debian. I still take care of Linux machines when I need to, but OpenBSD and NetBSD are so damn fine I stick with them.

Seriously, if anyone wants a trip to the most amazingly well done documentation, give OpenBSD a shot. It only takes about 140MB to download enough to burn a bootable i386 CDR with X (don't download the .tgz's which start with x if you don't want X). Buy some books on it, read the clean complete man pages and never look back.

Or, if you need another clean system (which has decent man pages) with extreme disk cache performance, try NetBSD. The Unified Buffer Cache is shockingly fast. If you have a really disk intensive application, try it on NetBSD. You will be sold on it just on the huge performance increase. My tasks went from infeasible given time constraints (weeks), to same day.

Fedora Core 3 has the HDD light pegged hard on for the duration of my tests, yet in NetBSD it comes on once and then stays off while it flies!

I will try SuSE 9.2 and I am willing to tune and tweak with new Linux kernels, but out of the box, NetBSD goes quick.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi 0racle,

I love the BSD's, use them every day at home and work where I can, but... "i386 has over 10,000 ports that have been verified to work", I would have to say hmmmmmmm. 10,000 sure, 10,000 that are verified to work, I don't think so. This is just not true.

I have seen many cases where a FreeBSD port just does not work.

OpenBSD on the other hand, has much less ports, but they pretty much all work without a hitch. The ones that don't are typically one-offs which slipped by the freeze QA period.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know; I use both systems.

Jeez thats funny, I've been using many different flavours of BSD and Linux distro for about 8 years and find the opposite.

What's more, NetBSD for example, out performs Linux when running native Linux binaries under Linux emulation mode.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

More recent linuxes have caught up with the low-latency patches, but once they run into swap, they still bog -- because Linux's VM system is still bolted on and degrades very poorly.

Are you a troll or seriously have no idea about how Linux is designed?

The virtual memory system is where the pagecache, filesystem, block device layer and process memory (also pagecache) come together. In one direction it drives the VFS, and in the other direction it initiates block IO.

Along with the process model and scheduler, trap and interrupt handler system, and architecture hooks, the VM system is the most core part of the Linux operating system. Can you clarify what you mean by "bolted on"?

No, scrap that, never mind about clarifying. There is no way it can be "bolted on", so you must be either clueless or a troll. Either way I don't want to listen to any more bullshit from you.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you've ever looked at the source for linux and bsd both, you'd see what he meant. bsd is built around vm objects. linux treats them as raw storage buckets. the bsd vm subsystem is openly envied on lkml. linux doesn't need asshole fanboys like you.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[iggymanz]

whether the ports "just work" depends on which ones you use; see the discussion lists for all kinds of issues still being worked out for freebsd 5.3 Release. Some of the Ruby stuff is broken as well as X.Org stuff needing cleanup, I can tell you.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[iggymanz]

well, in Linux I can switch a particular init.d file in or out of all runlevels with a single command, so I don't have to worry like in FreeBSD whether rc.conf will handle the job or not (it does control most but not all). The other thing we might as well mention for anyone wanting to give freebsd a spin is that in /etc/ttys controls whether one gets a graphical login or not (there's your "runlevel 5", haha).

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux abstracts them to the level required for the generic code to run on more architectures including architectures without mmus, and architectures without page tables (PPC64) than NetBSD.

So I think that's just fine, thank you very much. If FreeBSD wants to have a wank fest overengineering a slow and bloated "academically nice" solution, and give it a cool sounding name and write lots of papers about it then fine. Doesn't mean Linux's VM system is bad.

the bsd vm subsystem is openly envied on lkml. linux doesn't need asshole fanboys like you.

Bull fucking shit. First, Linus thinks that Linux has probably the best VM abstraction of any operating system he's seen. Second, point me to a *single* post on lkml that "envies the bsd vm subsystem". If you can do that, point me to a single one in the last 4 years.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Brandybuck]

And what did you have to do to achieve this?

I chose "KDE" as my desktop during installation. Duh!

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have recently installed some new software on my FreeBSD computer but I have some questions. One thing it is apparently doing is detecting bad "scripts" on web pages and asks me if I want to debug them.

The question I have is "what exactly is scripting" and "debugging" and how I am supposed to debug? Can someone with some techno experience explain what is scripting, coding, etc...Also, what is a "RunTime Error". The exact line that pops up says: "A runtime error has occurred. Do you wish to debug? Line:52 Error 'null' is null or not an object" What does this mean?

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey troll boy, DragonFly 1.0 was released last July.

Busted!

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[molnarcs]

How do you know which file you have to swap out? How can you say that searching for a specific file (how do I know its name - or rather, why do I have to know its name?) and "swapping" it out is easier than inserting a hash mark before samba_enable="YES"

Your laughter rings quite hollow btw. Can you explain the joke? How are runlevels better with having to edit a separate file just to have a graphical terminal?

---snip---
ttyv5 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure
ttyv6 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure
ttyv7 "/usr/libexec/getty Pc" cons25 on secure
ttyv8 "/usr/local/bin/kdm" unknown off secure</a>

It is because turning that off to on is more simple or what? It doesn't matter really though, you proved multiple times that you don't know what you're talking about. In fact I'm pretty sure that you're really trolling. There is one ports system for all the bsd releases btw. (in answer to your other comment) Is there an event when a port doesn't work? Sure - out of 12000+ ports of 3rd party software, yes, there are some that might be temporarily broken. Just like in any other OS I have tried that supports lots of 3rd party software.

The way you sidestep the issues I rised (rcNG vs SysV Init - tell me how the the latter is superiour - does it have proper dependency checking, or the order is decided by the name of the files lol) and bring in new ones is just pathetic. Have a nice day.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Congradulations, your an idiot.

Holy crap that's funny shit, because YOU'RE actually the idiot for misusing the word "your".

See, back in the day "you're" used to be a contraction for "you are" and "your" used to be used to show posession of something.

Oh and also: congratulations, you misspelled congratulations!

and also you misspelled sense. ok this isn't funny anymore. lets just agree to disagree. but i love freebsd, so we kind of agree. but your spelling fucking sucks! ok, freebsd is sweet, ports are alright, and spelling is semi-ok. fair enough?

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[iggymanz]

I'm having a nice day, I serve 4 domains with FreeBSD, and one startup venture with Linux. In the context of a graphical login, a runlevel might be nice if other services are also desired along with font server & X, if not then BSD way easier. There's more to which OS is "superior" to a given application than a bunch of silly shell scripts that are invoked during boot; I could give any Linux distro a FreeBSD type rc structure in probably 4 hours if that's what I thought made or broke the use of Linux over FreeBSD. My only point about rc.conf in FreeBSD is that not all services are controlled there, one does have to be familiar with what's set up on the machine. It sounds like you are the troll, you don't like the opinion and observations of someone who uses/likes more OS than just your pet one. I even find my Solaris and IRIX box better at some things than my favorite Linux distro or *BSD; I've made $$$ on all of them.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy crap; you misspelled "let's" as "lets" (it's a contraction of "let us")! And "alright" isn't a word; you mean "all right."

Also, it's an official fact that *BSD is dying.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[molnarcs]

Ok, I regret calling you a troll - made a mistake, thought you wrote the grandparent post. That said, I didn't speak about the superiourity of one OS over another - and no, I don't think init scripts are the most important factors in evaluating an os. And FreeBSD isn't my pet OS - it just suits most of my needs, and that's it. When it doesn't, I use WindowsXP (installed it on my gf's laptot, for she uses SPSS, I have it on my on puter as well, along with Slackware 10). Nevertheless, I do think that what you wrote is innacurate at best - there is far less to worry about in the rcNG world of Free/NetBSD than in SysV Init, and your insistence on the issue without addressing any of the points I made, even though I gave specific examples made me think you're trolling.

My only point about rc.conf in FreeBSD is that not all services are controlled there, one does have to be familiar with what's set up on the machine.

You see? Example? I don't run every service there is, so I can be wrong (mysql/apache, sshd, pureftpd on one server, samba on another, plus all on my home/test machine) - but I have yet to find a sercice that is not controlled by rc.conf. "One does have to be familiar with what's set up on the machine" - Thank you Mister Stating_the_Obvious - isn't that true for any important production system? Tell me you don't have to know what's installed on your linux server to run them properly.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[emidln]

As a FreeBSD user myself (only OS I run currently), I'll disagree that it's secure out of the box. The exception is syslogd which is configured to run on all interfaces out of the box. This can be a bad thing. Other than that, it's decent. Run a sockstat -4 on a FreeBSD machine after an initial install to see what I'm talking about.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[sp0rk173]

haha you have no idea what you're talking about. I said 1.0-STABLE. No one on the dragonfly team would recommend using Dragonfly in a production environment, therefore it is not stable. Nice try, though.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from FreeBSD's core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

You OS zealots are a hoot. If either way of starting init scripts is too much for you to comprehend and wrap your little mind around, perhaps we should change the subject.

Now tell me, which is the correct way to make a pizza, with the sauce over the cheese or the cheese over the sauce? Chicago, New York, or Montréal style?

(ps: you should see Monty Python's Life of Brian -- you might actually learn something important)

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

The main difference is that KDE, Gnome, Firefox, GCC, Samba, Wine, and just about anything modern you can name are developed first on Linux and later ported to FreeBSD. These ports are never as good at the native builds on Linux.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

The main difference is that KDE, Gnome, Firefox, GCC, Samba, Wine, and just about anything modern you can name are developed first on Linux and much later ported to FreeBSD. These ports are never as good at the native builds on Linux. Everyone knows this. It's no secret.

The best a FreeBSD user can expect, are the crumbs which fall from Linux's bountiful table.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[iggymanz]

I'm glad the discussion has turned to something of true importance. If one has a high temperature oven, then the best way to make a chicago style pizza is with the sauce on top, but the typical home oven is not up to the task. For a New York style, the question is moot, since the cheese must be on top. They make pizza in Montreal?

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I see you've got nothing. Let me put this into terms your small slashdot addled mind can understand: YOU FAIL IT.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

freebsd is dead.

Re:Why don't I use *BSD?

[leshert]

1) BSD makes a lousy desktop. I would thus want to use something different on my laptop, like Fedora Core. This increases administration overhead.

FC has better laptop support?

Funny... that's why I switched from Fedora Core 3 to FreeBSD.

As always, your mileage may vary.

Be quiet Bill

[essreenim]

Nothing to see here, move along

Re:Plans for FreeBSD7

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or did the anti-BSD troll start using DragonFly? Or maybe the anti-BSD troll is just leaping on DragonFly, which appears to be a small special-interest project rather than a general-purpose system, to make more noise and try to claim BSD is fragmenting.

Regardless, the writing style is identical -- the rhetorical "hemorrhaging developers", "going to cope!", etc, stuff. I guess we can only hope that it isn't a DragonFly developer, because that would speak quite badly of the project as a whole: open source is about friendly competition and cooperation, not this sort of negative and unproductive drivel.

sremick

[Triumph The Insult C]

to prove it to him, i think you need to post your "gloat" video again grub =) that's some funny shit man

Re:sremick

[Anonymous Coward]

Good idea :) That video brought to you courtesy of Fort Garry Dark Ale

Re:sremick

[Anonymous Coward]

wow....i thought i was the only one.

Re:sremick

[Anonymous Coward]

haiku

flask of ripe urine
pressed to dead bsd lips
bsd drink up

BSD is dying, but portaudit eases the pain

[puzzled]

/usr/ports/security/portaudit - instead of tracking your apps and their vunerabilities you just you this gadget and it tells you. This is hot++

FreeBSD might be dying, but its a pretty corpse :-)

Re:Plans for FreeBSD7

[Anonymous Coward]

Perhaps someone can be simultaneously anti-FreeBSD and pro-DragonflyBSD?

FreeBSD really is stagnating. Questions to the mailing lists go completely unanswered more than half the time.

Re:Plans for FreeBSD7

[Anonymous Coward]

The status report seems to refute you here.

Re:netcraft

[sremick]

Not only that, but the irony of the "Netcraft" jokes is Netcraft actually runs FreeBSD themselves.

Oh... for a second I thought...

[eno2001]

... they were refering to some kind of twisted BSD based romance chick flick. You know what I mean, the whole May-December romance plot. Oh... you don't? I should have figured. ;P

MOD PARENT UP

[Anonymous Coward]

excellent analogy slam on the granparent post

Re:Plans for FreeBSD7

[Anonymous Coward]

DragonFly, which appears to be a small special-interest project rather than a general-purpose system

DragonFly is being designed to run on clusters, but the changes that have been made so far that enable the scalability have been done while maintaining uniprocessor performance. I.E., it's as good as FreeBSD4, but more scalable.

the writing style is identical [to a BSD troll] -- the rhetorical "hemorrhaging developers", "going to cope!", etc, stuff

I tend to sound oratory sometimes, but these things are still true. Most of the BSD trolls have been corrected for grammar and spelling by now, so if you mistake a well written, genuine post for a troll, that's just you. Furthermore, since there's currently some dissonance touching FreeBSD, it's not surprising that honest posts could be mistaken for trolls.

I guess we can only hope that it isn't a DragonFly developer

It's not. DragonFly will stand on its own technical merits.

open source is about friendly competition and cooperation

Is it? Research how DragonFlyBSD and OpenBSD got started. There's certainly no lack of hostile words, but the world is better for having OpenBSD, and the world is better for having DragonFlyBSD.

this sort of negative and unproductive drivel

If you look at the facts from a technical standpoint, you'll see that this is in fact honest commentary about a project that is in some real trouble. Nothing I said was untrue, and it's quite productive to analyze the how and why, and the upcoming years of FreeBSD will be worth watching for the manager's lesson, just as DragonFly will be worth watching for the engineer's lesson.

Today,

[AtariAmarok]

Today, I booted up my FreeBSD install and received a system message that Netcraft was dying.

Nice too see that the *BSD shares code....

[Homology]

and contrary too what many believes, it actually does happen. FreeBSD has now imported CARP and the dhcp client from OpenBSD. The OpenBSD packet filter is also updated on FreeBSD. Just in this status report.

OpenBSD has imported the 802.11 wireless network infrastructure from FreeBSD, as well as the Atheros driver, among other things last year. Now, OpenBSD is reverse-engingeering the binary HAL part of the Atheros driver, so I wonder if FreeBSD will dith "their" HAL when this is completed.

And, not to forget the code sharing with NetBSD.

Re:Nice too see that the *BSD shares code....

[Anonymous Coward]

The End of an Era

[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]

When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.

Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.

FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.

It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.

So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.

Discussion

I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.

From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.

There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.

Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.

Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?

Shouts

To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.

To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. I

So many trolls, let us count the ways...

[Anonymous Coward]

So many trolls, so little time:

Anti-Microsoft, Pro-GPL
Anti-GPL, Pro-Microsoft
Anti-Microsoft, Pro-Linux
Pro-GPL, Anti-Linux
Anti-BSD, Pro-Linux
Pro-BSD, Anti-Linux
Anti-Linux
Anti-Microsoft
Anti-Sun
Anti-Java
Anti-IBM
Pro-Java, Anti-IBM
Pro-Java, Anti-Sun
Anti-glibc
Pro-Hurd, Anti-Herd
Anti-FreeBSD, Pro-DragonFly
Anti-NetBSD

Why is it that the noisy people always seem to hate something so much? And why is it that people take their opinions seriously?

Re:So many trolls, let us count the ways...

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to list

Anti-Troll

type of troll

6.0R brings shorter release cycle/fewer features

[ikewillis]

One of the big differences between 5 and 6 will be a substantially shorter release cycle. According to this report, 6.0R should be available in August:

For the 6-CURRENT development branch as well as all future development and stable branches, we are planning to move to a schedule with fixed timelines that move away from the uncertainty and wild schedule fluctuations of the previous 5.x releases. This means that major branches will happen at 18 month intervals, and releases from those branches will happen at 4 month intervals. There will also be a dedicated period of testing and bug fixing at the beginning of each branch before the first release is cut from that branch. With the shorter and more defined release schedules, we hope to lessen the problem of needed features not reaching users in a reasonable time, as happened too often with 5.x. This is a significant change in our strategy, and we look forward to realizing the benefits of it. This will kick off with the RELENG_6 branch happing in June of 2005, followed by the 6.0 release in August of 2005.

Help - I didn't get it!

[ulib]

Could some kind soul explain me the joke?
I tried - and really bad! - to figure it out, but I really didn't get it. ;)
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

to the Finux crowd

[JDizzy]

A few reasons I use fbsd:

I don't have to mess with dependencies with RPM's, or deb's, or whatever flavor of package.

The system installer is better than what Slackware had in 1997 (when I moved to BSD).

FreeBSD is not controlled by a dictatorship (Linus, RMS, et'all).

The GPL has a major restriction that what it links with must also be GPL, and that sucks. BSD is way more altruistic to the notion of "no strings attached" open source.

The same people working on the kernel also work on the C/C++ library's, and the userland. There isn't a zillion loose canons developing in different directions.

Updating a freebsd system (3rd party packages) is much easier with the ports system, and it is FRee. You dont' have to pay a subscription to use up2date, or have a local satellite server.

Staying current (base system) with fbsd is much easier with the various source code syncronization systems.

I can run all the Linux apps I want on FreeBSD.

sysVr4 style init system is lame, and cause you to edit a zillion startup scripts, where in BSD you just drop the changes for your system in rc.conf.

I can use whatever desktop system I want, including a fully loaded KDE, or Gnome. I use fluxbox myself.

acceptance of good ideas, and rejection of bad ideas by a congress of fbsd commiters. This keeps fbsd on the cutting edge, and maintains stability.

Documentation! FreeBSD has the best docs of any Unix like system around.

Finally, to those Finux users who think they are 31337 because they joined a smaller group of computer power users, just try to put your self in the perspective of any FreeBSD user that migrated away from Linux to get away from you (the hoard of crying windows haters)! Linux has become diluted with wanna-be's looking to be l33t.

Re:to the Finux crowd

[Anonymous Coward]

From an ex-LUser (Linux User) I couldn't agree with you more!

Re:to the Finux crowd

[ArbitraryConstant]

"Updating a freebsd system (3rd party packages) is much easier with the ports system, and it is FRee. You dont' have to pay a subscription to use up2date, or have a local satellite server."

As a BSD and Linux user, I think apt-get and ports are pretty evenly matched. apt-get is more automated, ports is more deterministic.

Some of the Linuxes are 31337 and unreliable (Gentoo), some are more stable than BSD (By stable I mean no major changes for long periods of time.) (Debian-stable).

It's a mistake to paint all the Linuxes with one brush. Don't confuse Gentoo fanbois with Debian users.

Personally, I've never been able to get OpenBSD or FreeBSD working satisfactorally as a workstation OS, but Debian-testing has been great. Conversely, Debian-testing is probably the best workstation OS I've ever used.

Java

[discogravy]

What's the status of the Java port/package(s)? Nothing in the report about it.

Re:Java

[atcurtis]

1.5 is available for the brave and adventurous.

1.4 and 1.3 seem pretty stable.

Only 1.3 is available as a binary due to Sun's restrictive licenses.

Re:Java

[Anonymous Coward]

I am glad we have it, but SUN released 1.3.1 in May 2001. With such a lag no serious Java developer would consider FreeBSD as suitable platform for Java apps. I make my living at Java, and FreeBSD ain't there for me. In my professional opinion FreeBSD's Java support is second-rate at best.

Re:Java

[sp0rk173]

Well - all releases - even 1.5, *WORK* on x86 FreeBSD. You just have to compile them yourself and download the source packages and patches yourself. The only thing special about 1.3.1 is that it's a Sun-licensed, *legal* binary distribution. Again...for x86. What I want is Java for amd64, as that's my primary platform.

Hope they don;t share offices

[AtariAmarok]

"... the rhetorical "hemorrhaging developers"..."

I sure don't want to use their chairs on the night shift.

FreeBSD is flawed

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD suffers from serious process flaws -- it is an operating system which is truly at home neither in the open-source nor the proprietary markets primarily because, although the source is open, the development team is not. Furthermore the license allows proprietary software to "steal" source code and use it. The combination of these problems leads to a somewhat inferior OS.

Now, Apache uses a BSD style license but they have an open development model which allows them to take advantage of a very large developer pool in order to stay ahead of their competition. In fact although proprietary versions of Apache exist which perform better than the official releases, SGI has put out some open source patches which generate even larger performance boosts. This is the reason why they have such a strong showing in terms of market share.

BSD once had potential but the procedural problems they are experiencing hurt it when it comes to the market. I suspect that this is probably in part because the BSD teams are not interested in such things, and that is a shame... In fact, although I labeled it as an inferior OS, this is not due to lack of progress within BSD -- it has been progressing somewhat, but rather because all the improvements they make tend to be quickly copied by their competitors AND they lack the developer pool to stay ahead of this game (a problem which does not exist in the Linux or Apache communities, though for somewhat different reasons).

I don't think that there is enough widespread support for BSD to save the operating system. What must be done is an opening up of the development process OR a GPL-style restriction on redistribution. In many ways I favor the former.

Even in a worst case scenario, I don't see BSD completely dying. I think the developers are less into competition and more into a sort of idealized cooperation. As a result, even if BSD becomes more marginalized, I don't think that it will die outright. It will most likely outlive Netware, for example.

Re:Why I don't use Linux or BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is, for me, Windows is not "good enough"(tm).

It also has much more limited hardware compatibility than Linux, actually, with Linux being the most portable general purpose operating system in existence, running on everything from zSeries mainframes and POWER5 monsters to 512 CPU Altix machines, to embedded CPUs without MMUs.

Re:Plans for FreeBSD7

[Anonymous Coward]

It is time to take your head out of the sand. Making like an ostrich won't solve FreeBSD's problems. And believe you me, there are more problems than you can shake a stick at. The most glaring is how FreeBSD performance has slipped so that it slower than any other free operating system which you can name. FreeBSD has been trashed in the benchmarks by all comers.

Don't you ever wonder what caused this? Why do you think that all the talented developers are gone from the FreeBSD project? Something has to be done before it's too late for FreeBSD. But it may already be too late. Come June, DragonFly will be ready for primetime. What will FreeBSD's answer be? Denial? Name calling? Signifying?

Re:6.0R brings shorter release cycle/fewer feature

[Anonymous Coward]

What about the bugs? A faster release cycle is only as good as the bug fixes. Merely bumping the revision level won't magically make the bugs go away. FreeBSD has never had a bug problem as bad as it is now. Stability hasn't been this bad since 2.0. As I see it, the major bugs in FreeBSD are

• SMP (particularly bad on amd64)
• threads (dead locks and performance issues)
• HT scheduling (completely broken)
• MT network stack (unexplainable freezes)
• overall performance

Re:netcraft

[molnarcs]

Not only that but this is what Mike Prettejohn (of Netcraft) wrote when asked about FreeBSD:

Initially [early 1995], we opted for FreeBSD because it was similar to SunOS, which we knew and liked.

We felt safer with FreeBSD because we were quite conscious of the security implications of the Internet. We wanted to run an operating system for which source was available in the expectation that fixes for security vulnerabilities or other serious bugs would become available more quickly, and if needed we would have the opportunity to write it ourselves.

FreeBSD wasn't a big investment in money or time, and so we thought if we wanted to replace it when something better came along it wouldn't have cost us much.

So far [nine years & counting ...] we've not felt the urge to replace it :)

Mike

source: http://ezine.daemonnews.org/200410/netcraft.html

The usual Linux FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

Same old Linux FUD, that has been disproved countless times...

BSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

nice try, but no thanks
BSD doesn't need a "new life".. you know, it already has one of its own. ;)
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=132918&cid =11097565

RFC: new FreeBSD mascot

[Anonymous Coward]

"Chucky", the current mascot, is getting a little long in the tooth what with those stone age high top sneakers, and a perceived resemblance to certain Satanic figures. Therefore, we the FreeBSD Core are contemplating a newer, more inclusive mascot to better reflect FreeBSD's message. We are posting a request for comments for the New FreeBSD Mascot Unless otherwise determined, this will become the new mascot.

Thank you for your support.

-- FreeBSD Core

Re: SMP on the desktop

[caveat]

I beg to differ with your "people dont' need SMP on the desktop" statement; I have a dual G4 and I absolutely love it - it never ever gets hung on a single proc-hungry task; sure, it's probably not as absolutely fast as a P4, but the overall responsiveness of the system is unmatched, at least in my limited experience (and a nice shiny new dual G5 should make up in the speed department, just need to get that mortgage :D).

Now, that rant done with, what about Darwin's SMP code? It seems to be pretty efficient [of course I've never run any other BSD on this box, so I can't say how well it stacks up against them, but I do hear the "BSD SMP sux0rz" line a lot], at least for 2 chips; has anybody considered trying to reuse it in the other BSDs? AFAIK the APSL isn't incompatible with this sort of idea...

Re: SMP on the desktop

[Brandybuck]

While SMP is certainly nice on the desktop, it is not necessary. Millions of people use single CPU systems on their desktop every day. And I dare say the vast majority wouldn't see a benefit to SMP if it were given to them.

To most Linux advocates SMP is merely a checkbox. It's something to brag about even though they don't use it. Let's face it, *EVERY* OS out there (but for a few embedded variants) has SMP. All of the BSDs do. Bragging about SMP is like a corporation bragging about their ISO 9000 status. BFD!

Re: SMP on the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Long before you were born, a man named Aesop wrote a parable about the Fox and the Grapes. You see, that fox licked his lips for those grapes hanging off the trellis. But try has he might he just couldn't jump high enough to reach them. Eventually the fox gave up and told his pals, "those grapes were sour anyway" . . .

That fox is like the freebsd fanboi. SMP is broken on freebsd. What does the fanboi say--"that SMP stuff isn't important anyway".

Looking for Easy *BSD firewall distro

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry for the off-topic post.

I'm reluctant to post in BSD-related discussions on Slashdot because they tend to attract the most severely disturbed people on Slashdot (in addition to normal and better-than-normal people...).

I found that installing an easy Linux-based firewall box was an excellent way of getting familiar with Linux without risking my main computer.

I'd like to try setting up a *BSD firewall for the same reason - to get myself familiar with some BSD
variation. Can anybody recommend a custom *BSD firewall distribution, or a comprehensive (and current) guide to setting up some-bsd-or-other as a firewall?

Re:Looking for Easy *BSD firewall distro

[ulib]

I'm reluctant to post in BSD-related discussions on Slashdot because they tend to attract the most severely disturbed people on Slashdot (in addition to normal and better-than-normal people...).

I found that installing an easy Linux-based firewall box was an excellent way of getting familiar with Linux without risking my main computer.

I'd like to try setting up a *BSD firewall for the same reason - to get myself familiar with some BSD
variation. Can anybody recommend a custom *BSD firewall distribution, or a comprehensive (and current) guide to setting up some-bsd-or-other as a firewall?

OpenBSD makes an excellent firewall, but FreeBSD and NetBSD are good as well, so it's really up to which BSD you'd like to learn first.
Personally, I would recommend FreeBSD since it's the most popular, and that makes it an excellent starting point.

If I were you I'd ask here as well, for any BSD-related issues
http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Re:Looking for Easy *BSD firewall distro

[nbritton]

Try m0n0wall if your looking for a custom FreeBSD based firewall: www.m0n0.ch/wall

Re:Lessons from the Grave

[Anonymous Coward]

That Rice study on the TCP/IP stack uses FreeBSD 2.2.6. Way to go, fucknut!

You have been trolled

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT YHL HAND

It Is Official

[Anonymous Coward]

IT IS OFFICIAL; WIRED NEWS CONFIRMS: LINUX IS SUPERIOR TO *BSD
*BSD is Dying, Says Respected Journal

Linux advocates have long insisted that open-source development results in better and more secure software. Now they have statistics to back up their claims.

According to a four-year analysis of the 5.7 million lines of Linux source code conducted by five Stanford University computer science researchers, the Linux kernel programming code is better and more secure than the programming code of *BSD.

The report, set to be released on Tuesday, states that the 2.6 Linux production kernel, shipped with software from Red Hat, Novell and other major Linux software vendors, contains 985 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code, well below the average for *BSD software. NetBSD, by comparison, contains about 40 million lines of code, with new bugs found on a frequent basis.

*BSD software typically has 20 to 30 bugs for every 1,000 lines of code, according to Carnegie Mellon University's CyLab Sustainable Computing Consortium. This would be equivalent to 114,000 to 171,000 bugs in 5.7 million lines of code.

The study identified 0.17 bugs per 1,000 lines of code in the Linux kernel. Of the 985 bugs identified, 627 were in critical parts of the kernel. Another 569 could cause a system crash, 100 were security holes, and 33 of the bugs could result in less-than-optimal system performance.

Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity, a provider of source-code analysis, noted that the majority of the bugs documented in the study have already been fixed by members of the Linux development community.

"Our findings show that Linux contains an extremely low defect rate and is evidence of the strong security of Linux," said Hallem. "Many security holes in software are the result of software bugs that can be eliminated with good programming processes. *BSD developers, on the other hand, do not have these practices. All in all, we consider the *BSD projects to be dying."

The Linux source-code analysis project started in 2000 at the Stanford University Computer Science Research Center as part of a large research initiative to improve core software engineering processes in the software industry.

The initiative now continues at Coverity, a software engineering startup that now employs the five researchers who conducted the study. Coverity said it intends to start providing Linux bug analysis reports on a regular basis and will make a summary of the results freely available to the Linux development community.

"This is a benefit to the Linux development community, and we appreciate Coverity's efforts to help us improve the security and stability of Linux," said Andrew Morton, lead Linux kernel maintainer. Morton said developers have already addressed the top-priority bugs uncovered in the study.

Fuck You

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't use a dead OS for a firewall - get something approved by Linus.

DAEMON LOGO MUST BE CHANGED!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless we do something about the FreeBSD logo, then it is like majority of people are saying - FreeBSD is dying - better yet - FreeBSD is dead.

Corporations WILL NEVER jump in the FreeBSD bandwagon as long as we have daemon as a mascot. Corporations have respect for religious values of their employers and some people will never accept daemon mascot. Face it - it is a fact.

June to December Status report...

[trixy_1086]

dead.