Slashdot Mirror
In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop
snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying — at least I've said it many times — that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'"
At least it's that way for us in HPC. Sure, FreeBSD is rock stable and all, but if you run stable, you'll be trailing behind and won't get to use the latest packages. This may be fine for ordinary HTTP server, but when you need an updated NUMA aware scheduler for your 48 core/4 socket machine or the latest drivers for your InfiniBand hardware, then you'll happily give up some alleged increase in stability in favor of real performance. Same is true for Debian stable.
Computer simulation made easy -- LibGeoDecomp
Are you really suggesting that the time I spend will "come back in spades?"
Sorry, but as a longtime FreeBSD user and having wasted days of my life getting the graphics card to work and then tuning every last parameter, I'll take Ubuntu or Fedora on my desktop, thanks.
Sorry, but it's not worth the time and whatever "spades" you're getting paid pack in are 99% emotional, not physical.
Kriston
Sir, this is /. I have NEVER read an article.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
If you want your Operating System tuned and customized to your hardware can't you just use Gentoo Linux? Then you won't lose the benefits of the better support that Linux has.
I read TFA when it was on OSNews, and it's a waste of space. I was expecting some actual points, but it seemed to boil down to 'I haven't rebooted this machine for three years! FreeBSD is therefore awesome!' When someone talks about uptime, it's a clear sign that they are an idiot: uptime is irrelevant, downtime is important. You can achieve good uptime by failing to install security updates, but it's far better to spend a minute rebooting than to spend a day cleaning up and reinstalling after a machine is compromised.
I have these reasons for using FreeBSD on the desktop:
I don't want to have to spend ages configuring stuff, or learning how to configure stuff. With FreeBSD, the stuff I learned ten years ago is still relevant. I only need to learn new things when there is new functionality. Contrast this with Linux where userspace tools change more often than Paris fashions. Just as you've learned one, it's deprecated, and then replaced by something else.
APIs are well designed and stable. A couple of years ago, I wrote some code for getting the battery status on a variety of platforms. On NetBSD, OpenBSD, and FreeBSD it was a few sysctls and worked on every architecture. On Linux, the interfaces were subtly different on every architecture, but there was a 300KB library that abstracted this for you. The code to invoke this library was more complex than the entire *BSD implementations combined.
Sound Just Works. FreeBSD has low-latency sound mixing in the kernel and has a really amazing implementation of the OSS 4 APIs. Multiple applications can just open /dev/dsp, issue a couple of ioctls() to select the sample rate and so on, and away it goes. I installed FreeBSD on a NAS / Media Center box a few weeks ago. 5.1 sound output in VLC just worked[1], and I can ssh into the machine and run another music player with the display exported to my laptop without needing to close the VLC that has the sound device open to play audio from DVDs, or configure some userspace sound daemon. The kernel just does what a kernel is supposed to do: abstract the details of the underlying system (including the fact that multiple unrelated processes are running) from userspace apps. This was what made me switch from Linux to FreeBSD in the 4.x days - multiple apps playing sound at once was easy. Apparently, three sound daemons later, it's almost easy in Linux, in a hacky kind of way, as long as PulseAudio doesn't hate you as much as it apparently hates most people...
ZFS. Seriously, if you haven't used it then you don't know how awesome it is. Creating new filesystems is as easy as creating new directories. Transparent compression, deduplication, and free snapshots are amazing. Even better is the integration with the ezjail tool, which clones a base system install and creates a jail. This is great if you want to run some untrusted code, or just set up a test environment - it takes a few seconds to create a new, isolated environment where you can test things, break things, and then destroy it when you're done. I've only used it on the most recent FreeBSD machine I've installed, and after a day I started missing it on systems where I wasn't using it. There are some places where it could be better integrated, for example apt-clone on Nexenta took a snapshot, installed a bunch of packages, and then reverted the filesystem if any of them failed - I don't know of any FreeBSD equivalent yet, but hopefully pkg-ng will introduce one.
Capsicum. The first security framework I've seen that is actually well designed. It's in -CURRENT, not sure if it will make it into 9.0, but should into 9.1 if it doesn't. Most of the standard userland tools are being modified to use it, and things like Chromium have already had Capsicum integrated - a tiny diff to do fine-grained sandboxing. An increasing number of ports are getting Capsicum support too, so expect to see your favourite desktop applications start to run with the absolute minimum required privilege soon.
[1] I spent a couple of hours looking for documentation on how to configure it. Then I decided to actually test it, found that it worked already, and felt quite silly.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The fact that Apple has largely abandoned the server market, and is the only source of hardware on which OSX is blessed to run probably doesn't help.
Yeah, you can get the "Mac Pro Server"(Oh Boy! you can by a rack shelf and then put two of them on it, for up to 4 whole sockets in 12Us! The bitchin' Radeon HD 5770(whose mini displayport and DVI outputs aren't compatible with my KVM gear) totally takes my mind off the fact that xserves would have done 24 sockets in the same space. Dual PSUs aren't an option; but does your shitbox dell server have bluetooth or S/P-DIF audio? Thought not...) or a "Mac Mini Server"(a server that supports up to 8GB of RAM, fuck yeah! Wait, you mean that "apple remote control" is the name of an attractive IR remote, not a LoM card? Shit, no wonder is seemed so cheap.)
For many people's desktop requirements, the fact that Apple refuses to make a sucky-but-wildly-inexpensive tower isn't actually a huge deal. The server market is a whole lot less forgiving of deviations from reasonable form factors and common redundancy and management features...
Could you elaborate?
I have an AMD 1090T (6 cores @ 3.2 GHz) that I've run FreeBSD 8.2 and Debian 7 on. I run Povray 3.7, which is multi-threaded (compared to the prior version which was not), on this machine and was testing out OSes. Using the latest gcc version for each OS (4.6), it turns out running on FreeBSD is about 15% faster than on Debian running the standard benchmark:
FreeBSD 8.2, gcc 4.6, -march=barcelona
Render Time:
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 2 seconds (2.390 seconds)
using 9 thread(s) with 2.763 CPU-seconds total
Radiosity Time: No radiosity
Trace Time: 0 hours 3 minutes 10 seconds (190.466 seconds)
using 6 thread(s) with 1113.568 CPU-seconds total
Debian 7.0, gcc 4.6.1, -march=barcelona
Render Time:
Photon Time: 0 hours 0 minutes 2 seconds (2.277 seconds)
using 9 thread(s) with 2.648 CPU-seconds total
Radiosity Time: No radiosity
Trace Time: 0 hours 3 minutes 38 seconds (218.326 seconds)
using 6 thread(s) with 1277.363 CPU-seconds total
No, BSD was UNIX when it contained AT&T UNIX code and AT&T owned the trademark. After the UCB vs AT&T lawsuit, BSD removed the last remaining traces of UNIX code and was not UNIX.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
"Note to all: Despite what you might read on Slashdot or other aggregators, this piece is about servers, not desktop FreeBSD use. Not sure how that got misconstrued, but I'm talking exclusively about server use. I haven't run *BSD on the desktop since 1998, hence my comment about Linux on the desktop and FreeBSD on the servers. "
The important part isn't how FreeBSD's ZFS compares with Solaris's; it's how it compares to available Linux filesystems. You're not getting triple parity or dedup support there either. The ZFS v15 is still miles ahead of any stable Linux FS for many applications. Block checksums is the feature I miss most on Linux, with good snapshot support being a close second. v15 may not have the latest snapshot diffs, but it's still better than how Linux's snapshots require LVM to work, and even then are very hackish to use.
So true...For me, FreeBSD adoption went like this: Debian eventually became huge stagnant swamp. To get out of it, you had to run unstable. A big mess ensued. Enter Ubuntu, the revenge, the promise. Poor documentation. Installation breakage. 6 months later, upgrade wreckage. Fsck this, I thought.
I have installed FreeBSD once. Ports may take longer, but they are much more current then Debian ever was, and than the current Linux I use, Mandriva. You have to wait for the Package Masters...Also, with ports I have a much more fine-grained control. But let's get this out of the way: you can install packages in FreeBSD, and you do binary upgrades. There are lots of tools to handle ports. With today's speeds and RAMs, it's no big deal compiling ports. Only huge software, such as Java may take many hours (use the weekend or get the binaries and that's that..) FreeBSD takes some tweaking - because all you get is a Unix with no assumptions about what color the user favors, or which icons... -, but it's not a problem for the advanced Linux user (if you're a n00b, then there's PC-BSD, which actually should be the first approach to BSDs for the user workstation these days).
I look at today's Linux and I don't regret my choice. What's the sane choice? Fedora is an experimental platform for Red Hat. That means, from time to time, they'll make you their guinea pigs...Debian can't even be considered secure (no less than twice they had their servers hacked), and who cares about dinossaurs, anyway? Ubuntu's the new Debian. Ubuntu shoves their choices down your throat and continues the Debian tradition of delivering broken software (the new GUI, etc.) and infighting. And Ubuntu is a fantasy. The only reason it exists is because there's a money-loosing millionaire backing it up. The fantasy island one day will blow up in the fanboys' face. Mandriva I find agreeable, but they don't offer many packages, and they have too few commercial partners (so why pay?) Other distros aren't even worth mentioning.
I've used expensive proprietary mathematical software for Linux on FreeBSD, using their Linux binary layer, after the Linux upgrade destroyed library compatibility (they pride themselves in having unstable ABIs).
Linux are a mess. Each one is different, full of stupid little quirks. Libraries differ in place, version, even names. FreeBSD is just as good for the desktop. The system is sane, advances by increments, has documentation, and man pages that are actually worth reading. It's a system where decisions are not made on political bases, but technical. The noise level is much lower. One of the reasons Linux makes much more headlines (besides the PR department from Big Iron, that is) is the constant noise and turmoil. BSDs are not like that...6 months later, you learn they added a cool feature. "Thou shall not fight about bikesheds."
Linux development might get more resources. But, of course it does! Linux was part of a strategy to kill Sun Microsystems and Solaris.
Main difference between the BSD license and the GPL license: one is from California and the other is from Massachusetts