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The Case for FreeBSD
essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the
accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is
a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of
their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."
I just installed FreeBSD this morning... I must say, straight off the iso, a quick install had me up and running pretty darn fast... much quicker than any linux distro I've tried in the recent past... Now if only I could figure out how to get visual studio to run under it, I could ditch windows... stupid work... stupid requiring development on Windows...
;)
One serious thing about FreeBSD over linux distro's... It feels like it has more of a structure, especially when installing utilities and apps... I find with linux distros, the stuff included feels like it's all over the place, hard to find where things end up installing... but I'm really a vxworks fan... so take what I say with a grain of salt...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I don't see why people are so worried about advocacy. If you're not making money, what is the difference? Continue to refine the thing and get what you want out of it, and if other people don't get it, who loses? Personally I have a use for only a couple of operating systems now, and they are Linux and netbsd. netbsd because it runs on just about everything, and Linux because it's most supported. It's nothing against FreeBSD, which I simply don't need. The point is, I use whatever fits the job and if that was FreeBSD then I'd use that. The best fit is determined partially by functionality and partially by familiarity...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...FreeBSD is getting a new logo (well, 0 submissions to date, but still !
In fact, for those who haven't tried it, it's quite an excellent full-featured Unix, with everything you'd find under Linux. In fact, it's fully binary compatible with Linux.
The only difference is that it does things the old way -- vi is vi, not vim, and you get sh, csh or tcsh instead of bloated bash. It doesn't have anyone pushing for "ease of use," though it's about at the level of slackware, except with ports, the greatest package management system known to man. Gentoo's portage doesn't even come close to the flexibility and reliability of ports.
Internally, it runs great, because it's not doing things the kernel shouldn't do to boost benchmarks. It's not deeply involved in corporate America, but remains strong due to good management.
Plus it's far more secure. With how much Linux websites are hacked these days -- see http://zone-h.org/ and check out the statistics section, at least 70-80% of website hacks are Linux based -- I wouldn't run it on Linux. FreeBSD is the obvious choice, as it runs its services flawlessly.
- - - - - Fear not the reaper, but my shiny white teeth.
I also heard that Windows used or at least used some BSD work in it's internet capability push years ago. One question will always dog me: Why aren't the BSD's as popular with their very good license at least in the eyes of the IBMs and HPs?
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Also, the development is getting very political, this also scares off people.
What really sets FreeBSD apart is its robust death cycle. No other BSD at any price dies so reliably and consistently, with painless migration between deaths. It's clear that the FreeBSD development team has death as its highest priority and the result is easy to see in the product.
Scott has several good points. FreeBSD still has the same level of polish, the same amount of "professional" feel as it always has and it's just as consistent as before. The documentation is fabulous, Netgraph can do a lot of neat tricks, GEOM handles storage pretty well, vendor support is improving, etc. However, I think the most important one is discovered if you read between the lines: "don't focus on microbenchmarks."
NetBSD 2.0 is a higher-quality release than FreeBSD 5.3 on the IA32 platform. There's just no other way to put it.
My experience with FreeBSD is that the 4.x branch is rock-solid stable, fast, and everything works as it's supposed to.
NetBSD has basically reached that level of quality, with better performance.
FreeBSD 5.x has been unstable for me at best. While the userland programs are pretty much the same, the kernel-level changes have killed reliability. Furthermore, some of the much-touted new features simply do not work yet. I'm sure the SMP performance is much better, but I don't have many SMP machines. I've had problems with hard lockups, just doing things like trying to combine vlan and pf. The bridge interface, afaik, also, still doesn't work with pf.
As far as packages go, ports has more packages, true. Still, rarely has there been something not in pkgsrc that I absolutely needed. Pkgsrc is also much easier to work with, and far more friendly when it comes time to upgrade things. Portupgrade is an abortion, especially compared to even *gack* portage from ricerloonix.
There are reasons there's a buzz around NetBSD these days -- and reasons FreeBSD isn't getting the love it used to. I don't know whether the FreeBSD developers bit off more than they can chew, or if they just are rushing things out the door. But until they get their act together and put out a 5.x-RELEASE that truly is release-quality (by which I mean, all the features *work*, and the drivers are supported the same way), I'm going to be using NetBSD and advising my friends to do the same.
A decent number of them are marked BROKEN.
If by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.
Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.
Gentoo may have fewer ports which are marked as BROKEN at any given time; but does it actually have fewer broken ports?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The NetBSD team were not criticising FreeBSD: basically, NetBSD stepped up their advocacy as part of NetBSD 2.0 release, including some whitepapers on performance comparision between NetBSD and FreeBSD. If anything, the BSD camps all have decent respect for each other, and honestly, Scott suggested that there was more animosity from the NetBSD camp that I think is the case in reality. All of the BSD camps could do with better advocacy, and Scott's post is more an indication that none of them are doing very good marketing, and as soon as NetBSD stepped up the marketing, the other camps (i.e. FreeBSD) felt they weren't getting a good rap: but really, the issue is, that FreeBSD guys just haven't been out there pushing their case as hard as they should really be.
"so of what consequence are NetBSD's criticisms?"
Just because NetBSD has fewer users doesn't mean its criticisms are without consequence. After all, by that logic FreeBSD's criticisms of Linux would also be without consequence.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
if BSD is dying /dead , then its one hell of a zombie. .
I use three OSs, debian GNU/linux , freeBSD and Mac OS X.. and i think all three are as healthy as ever
im not sure on the whole of apples market share I think about 5% , but considering that OS X has its roots firmly in BSD from its NeXT heritage not to mention the programs it has from the FreeBSD project, then its safe to say that BSD is more alive than ever
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
I've been using Linux since around '96 something, first Redhat, then Slackware and recently Gentoo when I got my AMD64. I tried FreeBSD for the first time a few months ago when I had an old 200mhz machine that I just wanted to use for something, and since that seemed to work ok (a very basic install, no X or anything like that) I decided to give FreeBSD/AMD64 a try when I had to do a reinstallation due to hardware changes.
I downloaded a minimal boot CD, burned in, booted installed the base system over FTP and then X, KDE etc via ports...
After only a few hours I was totally confused. Everything just worked!! Well, almost everything. I had some problems with the soundcard, that was solved thanks to great documentation pointing me to a very logical solution.
I'm still a bit lightheaded. An operating system just can't be this good, I'm probably going to wake up soon.
I just posted an article that's been sitting around on my hard disk for awhile now (I'm testing out nanoblogger). It's about how I'd improve LAMP, but it ended up becoming an advertisement for FreeBSD.
Have a look if you can stand an honest critique of Linux (I love and run Linux on everything, so don't accuse me of FreeBSD shilling).
Gentoo uses more bleeding edge packages than FreeBSD. Even in using the stable branch, I've downloaded borked packaged more than once. While the ports in FreeBSD are order, they are tested MUCH more & the broken packages are actually labeled broken!
Portage does have some advantages over ports. Package stability is not one of them.
6) no root exploits every month 7) decent codebase 8) organized filesystem layout 9) commits to the OS are closely monitored and quality-assured, unlike linux 10) an OS as a whole, not just a kernel.
Everyone says apples hardware is overpriced. Prove it.
Maybe their hardware is actually worth more for longer.
Both chrysler and BMW make cars, but BMW's cost more generally...why?
It would be nice if people would be more rational about hardware and quit parroting lame statements that don't make sense.
Yes, but there is a very dedicated team that manages to produce a very high quality J2SDK implementation, even if the installation involves compiling Java from scratch. 1.4.2-p7 runs a production Tomcat site like a dream here. I am very happy with OS X as as desktop OS, but i would not rate Apple's SDK as highly as FreeBSD's one, YMMV, of course. BTW, nobody knows if Apple intends to ship a 64bit JVM with Tiger, au contraire, FreeBSD's Java team has an already working, if early one, for AMD64.
c) Make sure to have a relatively recent ports tree /usr/ports/java/jdk14
--------Quick recipe to get up and running with Java under FreeBSD ------
a) Make sure to be running a modular kernel OR a kernel with linux compatibility enabled (Compile phase only)
b) Read http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-java/
d) cd
e) make install
f) follow instructions.
Where are all the geom HOWTOs?
The linked man page is "tasty" n'all, but details on implementing such magical wonders, until recently, have been rather scarce.
This man page is better than the one linked to in the original post. There's also some information from committer (read: major contributor to ggate ) Pawel Jakub Dawidek in Poland.
Not that the info isn't there now, right under man, but for a while it was all very vague.
When searching about all that is BSD, don't forget Google's special google.com/bsd section.
You can also search the freebsd-geom mail list archives to learn more.
geom-gate sure looks nifty! It's akin to block-level NFS (though that's most likely an extremely oversimplified view). All the fun things you can do with geom you can do over your network. Need worldwide distributed, encrypted, multi-level RAID? Go right ahead!
Pretty slick. We'll be hearing more about this.....
I'm happy that the FreeBSD people like their OS. Call me when they fix SMP.
[o]_O
I have S3 suspend/resume working on both a Gateway 450ROG and a Toshiba 4600. It was as simple as adding a few lines to /etc/sysctl.conf. I don't have any experience with Linux but the ACPI support in FreeBSD 5-STABLE is what convinced me to upgrade from 4-STABLE.
--Ecks
So why would anyone consider Linux over Windows?
Furthermore, 27 million AOL users can't be wrong.
And the short version of the same thing, but using a recovery CD instead of a live system http://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/24/freebsd-howt o-gmirror-system/
Kind of a coincidence that this gets posted today on /., as I've spent most of the morning setting up geom on a new 5.3 box, had used Vinum in the past on 4.x, and have loved FreeBSD for servers since 2.2.5
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
When I was on an "advocacy kick", I spent a year (well, a few minutes every day for a year) answering Linux questions on Usenet. A year after that, I took a good part time job offer from someone who remembered seeing my name and college in those newsgroups. A year or two later, when I was hunting for finite element software to help with a class project, I downloaded the most appropriate program I could find and was surprised to find my name on the acknowledgements page, because apparantly I'd helped fix the author's first Linux installation.
Of course, this could be "random good luck" as much as "bread on the water", and it probably helped that my "advocacy" was helping others rather than just preaching to them, but I think the lesson was clear: free software users don't give you money, but some can give you respect and some can give you more software. That wouldn't be worth it if the respect and software were all you were interested in, of course; it's just a bit of added reward for doing something like rooting for a baseball team that some people find fun to begin with.
I feel your pain Mike, but you haven't gone into specifics. It just looks right now like you've not gotten your way about certain directions the core is going, and you've taken your marbles home.
Good luck to ya, I hope you can take your expertise with BSD and make Apple's offering that much better. I just am saying that your post is lacking specifics.
I certainly understand how it might look that way, but it's really not the case.
The BSD community at large are painfully honest. When somebody complains about some missing feature, you usually hear "Yeah, it's too bad we don't have that, you should use something else if it's important to you." Meanwhile, in the Linux world, even with practically the same complaint, you'd hear "You shouldn't be using that, and we don't want it in our system."
Now, that could be because a program is missing certain functionality, because the kernel is missing some feature, etc.
Unfortunately, what I've seen of Linux users bashing BSD, is always uninformed nonsense. I think the most popular one is complaints about the lack of a GUI installer from people who have probably never even used it. As if the BSD installers somehow aren't usable just because they don't have RedHat/SuSE logos for you to look at while your partitions are being formatted.
So, there is a huge difference between the criticisms you hear about BSD from BSDers, and the criticisms you hear about BSD from Linuxers.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Like all OSes -- including Microsoft Windows and Apple's OS X as well as the various Linux distributions and other BSDs-- FreeBSD has it's pros and cons. Choosing which to use boils down to prioritizing what you need the system to do and what's less hassle for you. If you're a Windows admin primarily, it's going to be immeasureably easier for you to set up LDAP on an AD box; if you're primarily a unix admin, you can just as easily do the same thing on a *nix.
FreeBSD for the impatient.