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FreeBSD 12 Released (freebsd.org)
New submitter vivekgite writes: The 12th version of the FreeBSD has been released, bringing support for updated hardware. Some of the highlights include: OpenSSL has been updated to version 1.1.1a (LTS). Unbound has been updated to version 1.8.1, and DANE-TA has been enabled by default. OpenSSH has been updated to version 7.8p1. Additonal capsicum(4) support has been added to sshd(8). Clang, LLVM, LLD, LLDB, compiler-rt and libc++ has been updated to version 6.0.1. The vt(4) Terminus BSD Console font has been updated to version 4.46. The bsdinstall(8) utility now supports UEFI+GELI as an installation option. The VIMAGE kernel configuration option has been enabled by default. The NUMA option has been enabled by default in the amd64 GENERIC and MINIMAL kernel configurations. The netdump(4) driver has been added, providing a facility through which kernel crash dumps can be transmitted to a remote host after a system panic. The vt(4) driver has been updated with performance improvements, drawing text at rates ranging from 2- to 6-times faster.
Various improvements to graphics support for current generation hardware. Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default. The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously. The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support. The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9). The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation. The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run within a jail(8). Various Lua loader(8) improvements. KDE has been updated to version 5.12.
Various improvements to graphics support for current generation hardware. Support for capsicum(4) has been enabled on armv6 and armv7 by default. The UFS/FFS filesystem has been updated to consolidate TRIM/BIO_DELETE commands, reducing read/write requests due to fewer TRIM messages being sent simultaneously. The NFS version 4.1 server has been updated to include pNFS server support. The pf(4) packet filter is now usable within a jail(8) using vnet(9). The bhyve(8) utility has been updated to add NVMe device emulation. The bhyve(8) utility is now able to be run within a jail(8). Various Lua loader(8) improvements. KDE has been updated to version 5.12.
FreeBSD tends to gracefully overload. Linux tends to crash and burn. Linux is perfectly fine as long as you don't overload it. FreeBSD's performance just levels off once it reaches maximum load. Linux has negative scaling where it becomes slower past max. It's the kind of thing system admins care about but devs don't.
Quite a few blogs from big companies that specialize in network or storage, like Netflix, where they thoroughly tried Linux. Tried every optimization, hired specialists, made their own custom tweaks, but Linux kept spontaneously blowing up under extreme loads. Think of a single server saturating a 100Gb interface while maintaining 10 million connections and creating 100,000 new connections per second. Linux' IO stacks cannot handle those loads without a major refactoring the stacks and the kernel as a whole. FreeBSD was engineered from the very beginning for these kinds of things. It's not perfect and has a lot of areas for great improvement, the structure is all there, purposefully architected and designed.
And due to licensing, FreeBSD gets a lot more research. At least in the USA, publicly funded research must be free for all and that does not play well with GPL. FreeBSD's licensing doesn't care. This same issue also applies to many internet standards, where the sample implementation must be license compatible with everyone. GPL does not play well with others.