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Intel using FreeBSD

Posted by Nik on from the Capital-F-damnit dept.

From Wes Peters, via DaemonNews. Intel's InBusiness Storage Station is a network file server in-a-box. Intel, despite their investment in Linux companies, is using FreeBSD as their OS of choice, as they are now stating. Of particular interest is their Mean Time Between Failure, 77,244 hours, or a shade under 9 years. That's probably a little on the low side, but quite respectable nonetheless.

1 of 218 comments (clear)

  1. Linux documentation disarray by Tom+Christiansen · · Score: 5
    Linux has much better documentation
    Are you really serious? Have you truly looked? Linux documentation is abominable! Even the worst BSD distribution is at least an order of magnitude better at documentation than the best Linux distribution. I'm not kidding in the least. It abominable.

    Take Redhat/Linux, for example (please :-). Most of what Redhat ships is undocumented, and that which exists is severely underpowered compared with BSD.

    For example, let's suppose you'd like to learn about the interface to the system's terminal drivers. That's in tty(4).

    redhat% man 4 tty | wc -l
    66

    redhat% find /usr/man/man4 '*.*' -type f -name -print | wc -l
    62

    openbsd% man 4 tty | wc -l
    299

    openbsd% find /usr/share/man/cat4 '*.*' -type f -name -print | wc -l
    371

    That's a huge difference. As you can plainly see, the amount of info on just one device in BSD is much better than on Linux. And if you look at the overall device coverage, the same theme carries through.

    And that's just part of it. Here's a bug list on Redhat docs that I've submitted, along with programs to automatically detect these problems. You should really read those over to start to get a feel for how bad it is.

    I'd like to make clear that redhat has done a very great job at fielding these bugs and trying to do something about them. I am completely happy with their customer service. I'm not trying to knock that.

    Some of the tools I used for this are:

    • cfman - make sure manpages have accurate SEE ALSOs
    • no3man - identify which library calls aren't mannable
    • noman - identify which commands are installed without manpages
    • scatman - find turds in mantrees
    So not only is the documentation exceptionally scarce in Linux, it's very, very buggy. You wouldn't believe how nasty the situation truly is. Run those on your own systems and you'll see what I mean. And yes, I checked this on Debian/Linux and SuSE/Linux as well as Redhat/Linux. It was all nasty. I also checked on OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and Solaris. You'll see that there's a world of difference here. Find yourself a Redhat system and an OpenBSD system, for example, and start poking around. You'll see.

    My point of view is that it isn't fair to the user of your system for you to ever include something that isn't documented. When I have been part of releases, either the old Unix releases from years ago or even the new Perl releases today, the rule was simple: if it isn't documented, it isn't shipped. No excuses.

    I strongly believe that the Linuces should do the same. Let no program or library be shipped which is undocumented. It's the very least a systems integrator can do. That's just part of what we mean when we say that BSD distributions are more "solid" than Linux distributions. The commercial Unices and the free BSDs take this kind of thing seriously. The Linuces, so far, do not. I have hope that this will change, and Redhat has a truly positive attitude about all this, but right now, you just can't compare them.