OpenSolaris Or FreeBSD?

Norsefire writes "I am in quite a predicament. I decided a while back to branch out and use a new operating system (currently running Debian). After a bit of searching (trying Gentoo, Gobo and Arch along the way), I decided to use something that isn't Linux. Long story short: I narrowed the choices down to OpenSolaris and FreeBSD, but now I'm stuck. OpenSolaris is commercially backed by Sun, has nice enterprise-y tools in the default install, and best of all, a mature implementation of ZFS. FreeBSD is backed by a foundation, has a minimal default install and a rather new (but recently improved in the 8.0 release) implementation of ZFS, however it offers the Ports Collection (I quite like the performance boost due to compiling from source, no matter how small it might be) and a bigger community than OpenSolaris. That is just a minimal mention of the differences. I would be interested to see what the Slashdot community thinks of these two operating systems."

Comments

Go the whole hog...

[Enter the Shoggoth]

Rather than playing with just another un*x clone, try something like Haiku or FreeVMS or my personal favourite Plan 9

OpenSolaris is more supported

[vanilla_face]

When it comes to things like flash, acroread, nvidia drivers, fluendo (multimedia plugins, DVD Player), skype etc being supported, having the commercial entity behind OpenSolaris does seem to help...I think behind the scenes Sun offer some sort of incentive to these companies to support OpenSolaris. I do like that FreeBSD is backed by a foundation though, it is much more reassuring to an open source project to know that its backing entity wont dump them the next day.

Linux has more users and software

[h00manist]

I assume you are looking for a server. If it's for a desktop, more users and software help a lot. Although BSD and Solaris are more reliable indeed, the intricately, meticulously designed user-oriented design interface of Linux provides details and config files enough to entertain for generations. I have never tried out GnuStep, however an open source nextstep-like interface seems promising.

Re:Performance boost?

[arcade]

I only have my own anecdote about this, but I kind of like it.

Back around '00, I had several computers (I still do, but that's beside the point). I had my main desktop, and I had this nice old Pentium 200. I also had a TV-card (Hauppage, I think). If I tried using the TV-card on my main desktop, it would be hellishly slow for doing other things. In addition to some of my screen being covered by the TV-window, of course.

So, I installed the Hauppage card in the P200, which was running stock FreeBSD. It worked, sort of, but the machine was almost unusable for other things.

I tuned the kernel, fiddled with compiler flags, and remade the world.

And what do you think? The entire machine went from lurching slow to usable, while displaying TV. It was the "little extra boost" that was needed.

Now, of course, I don't think it would be of much use to me in most cases these days - as machines have grown so extremely much faster since back then. But, it's the story I tell whenever people ask about performance boosts from recompiling everything.

FreeBSD

[tgetzoya]

I've used both as my primary desktop (each for a few months) and if you want to try something new, go with FreeBSD. OpenSolaris felt like GNU/Solaris, which it mostly is, with a few Sun coded things (I think it was libc and a few more of the libraries). FreeBSD was all about fine control: I found myself wanting to recompile the kernel and playing with rc scripts and asking my OpenBSD-using friend so many questions he demanded I switch to Linux:-D
Plus, when you've spent a whole night figuring out why KDE won't compile correctly on FreeBSD....it feels good, like you've accomplished something.

Re:My take on this

[CoolVibe]

I'd have to agree here. Although FreeBSD's ZFS support is getting quite good now. I'm using it on a production system and it hasn't let me down. It even saved my bacon a couple of times (yay, ZFS snapshots). I guess it depends on what you want to do. Both have strong features. OpenSolaris has Crossbow, but FreeBSD will have vimage soon. Both have Dtrace and ZFS. Solaris has zones, FreeBSD has jails. But I think FreeBSD is easier to tinker around with (personal opinion).

FreeBSD ZFS kernel panics?

[david.given]

Does ZFS on FreeBSD still suffer from random kernel panics when it gets low on memory?

I'm particularly referring to this bit of documentation:

To use ZFS, at least 1GB of memory is recommended (for all architectures) but more is helpful as ZFS needs *lots* of memory. Depending on your workload, it may be possible to use ZFS on systems with less memory, but it requires careful tuning to avoid panics from memory exhaustion in the kernel.

Yeah, kernel infrastructure that can't cope with running out of memory. That fills me with confidence. Particularly I've run ZFS on OpenSolaris on a 48MB Pentium laptop and it coped fine.

Unfortunately the FreeBSD ZFS pages are a wiki, which means they're badly organised and out of date. I have no idea when the above was written or whether it's still valid. Does anyone know?

Can give a boost even with same instruction set.

[spaceturtle]

You can also gain some performance by tweaking code for different processor types, even if they have the same instruction set. One example would avoiding XOR swaps on CPUs that have instruction pipelining, which is independent of the instruction set.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XOR_swap_algorithm

This maybe wasn't the best example since XOR swaps are rarely useful anyway. I suspect that other things like word (mis)alignment and varying cache miss costs may be a factor for different processors.

Gentoo claims that picking e.g. core2 over nocona can boost performance by 15% (which seems a bit much to me), so picking the right x86_64 variant is still something that is considered. Not something I worry about though, unless I am compiling from source anyway.

I've been Happy with Both

[N9VLS]

I'm quite happy with both OpenSolaris and FreeBSD as desktops, as well as servers.

You didn't specify what your primary goals are for the system in question-- if you're looking for a general purpose web surfing/light development machine, OpenSolaris should be fine for you-- as long as you have at least a gigabyte of memory and a moderately fast processor.

FreeBSD's a lot less resource intensive in my experience-- I'm currently supporting two sites that still have Pentium III/600-based servers with uptimes approaching a year each. (Last reboot for each was due to a multi-day power outage.)

If you have VirtualBox installed, give both FreeBSD and OpenSolaris a whirl, see what you think.

Re:Depends on what you are looking for

[thegrassyknowl]

Therefore if we are to restrict our options to OpenBSD and FreeBSD i would lean towards FreeBSD simply due to the large no. of apps available through ports.Also i believe driver compatibility is a little better in FreeBSD, especially recently with nvidia cards.

FreeBSD only had NVidia on i386 kernels at least when I tried it on the desktop and quit about 2 months ago. You have the open source driver with works, but for decent multi head on a new model card you still need the closed source driver. OpenBSD has similar and (in my case) sometimes better hardware support. The Intel wireless card in my Dull laptop is supported on OpenBSD out of the box but FreeBSD still required me (at 8.0-RC1) to download a driver and munge with boot options to make it happen. Doable, but mildly annoying since it is the essentially the same driver with an extra PCI ID added to it to let it use the card.

If you're building a kick-ass server then the choice is up to you. You can't go wrong with Slowlaris or *BSD. I like FreeBSD because it has jails. They take a little getting used to but they are great. It's particularly useful to be able to give people root in a jail to admin something and know they can't actually root any of the other jails or the host. Solaris has Zones. Linux has a suite of patches that can do jails but it's not mainstream yet, and I wouldn't trust it as far as I could throw it if I were trying to attach a patched kernel to a current distro.

Solaris and FreeBSD have ZFS. Both are stable. Solaris has the slightly more mature support, but I've never seen FreeBSD lose data or kernel panic on me because of ZFS. There's a LOT of advantages to using ZFS. Quite a few are met with LVM on Linux or dynamic disks on Windows, but not all.

OpenBSD is going to be more secure out of the box, until you start installing from ports or packages.

Solaris is heavy. The default install was massive last time I tried it and it took forever to boot. Linux is even worse on size but fast to boot now (Ubuntu and Fedora at least have made huge advances in their latest releases). FreeBSD and OpenBSD can be shoehorned into very little space if needed without resorting to rolling your own distro, which can be advantageous.

For hardware support, Linux is generally better than the alternatives. If you only have very new hardware then Windows 7 is going to have better support.

Right; it should be clear as mud now that every system has its own advantages and disadvantages. It's like asking "should I choose a Porsche or a VW" (Ok since VW owns half of Porsche now...) Horses for courses as they say. You'd test drive the cars if you were looking to make sure they met your needs. Try the different operating systems on a sacrificial machine or VM. Stick with the choice that you feel comfortable with.

Re:Why pick just one?

[ivoras]

I'd say the problems we saw were the effects of unfortunate interactions between a kernel that was designed to be frugal on resources (e.g. because of its 20-something years heritage) and a kernel-level system (ZFS) which was designed on "resources be damned! full speed ahead!" principles. I know there have been efforts to throttle down ZFS memory greediness after it was imported but for some reasons they were not successful and eventually a newer version was imported and the resource limits were increased just in case. The problem is - ZFS is greedy in unexpected ways. Of course, there have always been users for which ZFS has always worked without any problems at all - on various architectures and amounts of RAM - but as far as I know there isn't any correlation between them that would be telling why they have it smooth and others cannot do anything with it without jumping hoops. Solaris and FreeBSD are different enough that "conventional wisdom" from one system isn't applicable to the other.

I'd say that statistically, ZFS is now safe to use from the point of memory allocation failures simply because the number of user reports to it has fallen off dramatically after the new version and resource limit patches got in (which was significantly before 8.0-release so there was plenty of time to observe the effects).