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You should try FreeBSD (2014)

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Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#111

Post by KirinDave »

I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity.

Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago.

Lately I've been trying to ship software from the newly open sourced and open-er licensed .NET CoreCLR and Mono (via C# & F# respectively) and FreeBSD. The results are surprisingly good, especially with the new native executable compilation target stuff.

And the docker pass-through to FreeBSD jails is hot like the sun. It's like a Docker container with similar constraints but without such severe security issues. That and the new network stack makes containers on FreeBSD pretty compelling, even compared to the 1.9 security work.

And there is that thing where linux is locked in a death roll with itself regarding its initalization system? Freebsd don't have that. And that thing where Apple makes you boot into safe mode and flip an NVRAM bit to actually have root on your box?

Of course, I'm not personally shipping code on iOS, so this discussion is a lot more flexible for me than it might be for many.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#112

Post by floatboth »

davidgerard wrote: post #100
gregory-nisbet wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've read about the FreeBSD Linux emulation layer, but don't know that much about it. What exactly does it provide besides emulation of Linux system calls? How reliable is it in practice?

This was ten years ago, I have no idea what it's like in 2015. It's a syscall emulator and a pile of libs from Red Hat. It was reasonably reliable. X font rendering was awful. But then, Linux at the time wasn't much better; Ubuntu had only just started on the process of making the Linux desktop less annoying.

It is maintained. epoll support is coming to the linuxulator in FreeBSD 11.

But you don't need it really. All the usual desktop software is available natively. Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Transmission, VLC, GIMP, darktable, ioquake3 :-)

You don't need to compile anything (if you don't want to, say, use LibreSSL everywhere), pkgng is excellent.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#113

Post by lgunsch »

JupiterMoon wrote: post #107
lgunsch wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That type of viewpoint is hurting our industry. Just blindly doing things is not productive at all. You should learn and understand what it is you are doing before you do it. Just getting shit tonnes of stuff done is not productive at all if you don't understand how or why you are doing it. Truck drivers actually know how to drive, Crane operators know how to run a crane, and people operating production servers costi…

As a counterpoint. Truck drivers don't need to know how to build a truck nor to crane operators need technical understanding of the materials in the crane's structure.

Yes, but I was talking about its usage, not it's construction. Most of the users of FreeBSD know how to operate it, but may not understand OS theory about how the kernel and userland work together.

Understanding everything beforehand is not what I was attempting to communicate, but simply researching and understanding why a stack overflow comment is the answer, before just copy-pasting it into the terminal. Like reading the man pages of the commands to be run before running them.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#114

Post by JeremyMorgan »

I've been using FreeBSD since 1999 or so, and I love it, but not really for a desktop. On a server you can spend a lot of time dialing it in, building from source, etc. and have a rock solid performant server, and in most cases it's worth it.

On the desktop you can get a system that's basically the same as Linux but you will spend more time on updates and building stuff, and it will be harder to configure your hardware. If the philosophical differences between FreeBSD and Linux are important to you, it's worth it. Otherwise I'm not sure there are many advantages that make it worth the hassle.

I have tried PC-BSD but haven't spent enough time with it to make a really solid conclusion about it.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#115

Post by lgunsch »

themartorana wrote: post #109
lgunsch wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That type of viewpoint is hurting our industry. Just blindly doing things is not productive at all. You should learn and understand what it is you are doing before you do it. Just getting shit tonnes of stuff done is not productive at all if you don't understand how or why you are doing it. Truck drivers actually know how to drive, Crane operators know how to run a crane, and people operating production servers costi…

As another counterpoint, my small business that runs full-stack in AWS and FreeBSD - I am most certainly not perfectly educated in server and network management, and actually excel in software engineering as opposed to server management and configuration. AWS lets me get shit done. I know enough to get several services running on an EC2 server, and I don't have close to the $100k+ required to hire an excellent networ…

I wasn't trying to imply a person needs to have the entire set of domain knowledge before operating a server, but simply researching about what you are attempting to do before just copy-pasting bash lines into your terminal and not even recognizing how it even works at all.

AWS lets you not have to know a great deal about setting up servers and networks, which is great, because they are very skilled at it when they set it up for you. Then, all you need to research is what you need to do/use to deploy your apps.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#116

Post by samstave »

JeremyMorgan wrote: post #114

I've been using FreeBSD since 1999 or so, and I love it, but not really for a desktop. On a server you can spend a lot of time dialing it in, building from source, etc. and have a rock solid performant server, and in most cases it's worth it. On the desktop you can get a system that's basically the same as Linux but you will spend more time on updates and building stuff, and it will be harder to configure your hardwa…

So... what then do you prefer for your desktop?

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#117

Post by kris-s »

KirinDave wrote: post #111

I sort of hope people are waking up from the rut the industry has been. OSX for dev, Linux for backend services... Even AWS. If I were to start another company today, I'd almost surely be using none of these options to max my productivity. Right now, OSX has become increasingly hostile to dev and Linux is great at modularizing other features FreeBSD built years ago. Lately I've been trying to ship software from the n…

What would you develop on then?

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#118

Post by fisk »

I tried 10.0, and I had a few really irritating problems. My connection didn't stay up well with freebsd, and freebsd-update was not behaving robustly in the face of that. And pkg was frequently having problems with upgrades to itself where you had to follow the lists to know when to do something carefully by hand rather than letting the tool do its thing.

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#119

Post by david-given »

floatboth wrote: post #112
davidgerard wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was ten years ago, I have no idea what it's like in 2015. It's a syscall emulator and a pile of libs from Red Hat. It was reasonably reliable. X font rendering was awful. But then, Linux at the time wasn't much better; Ubuntu had only just started on the process of making the Linux desktop less annoying.

It is maintained. epoll support is coming to the linuxulator in FreeBSD 11. But you don't need it really. All the usual desktop software is available natively. Firefox, Thunderbird, Chromium, LibreOffice, Transmission, VLC, GIMP, darktable, ioquake3 :-) You don't need to compile anything (if you don't want to, say, use LibreSSL everywhere), pkgng is excellent.

> But you don't need it really.

...games.

Is the syscall emulation layer good enough to run the Steam client and, to pick one at random, Kerbal Space Program?

Re: You should try FreeBSD (2014)

#120

Post by toast0 »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #91
dorfsmay wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there significant differences in usability between BSD jails and LXC?

There's little technical difference. Both BSD and Linux provide set of kernel-level mechanisms that allow you to run "containers", ie. process trees that are completely isolated from each other and from the host OS. They are roughly comparable, I believe, with mostly minor technical differences. The huge practical difference right now is that on Linux, Docker and LXC (as in linuxcontainers.org) provide a high-level ,…

I have a piece of software running in jails on our servers, I wrote a script to assemble the jail (although this could just be expanding a tar file, and copying in the service configuration file), and add to jail.conf, (maybe add to rc.conf.local if you want to autostart). I didn't need to sysctl, or rctl. I also wrote a small rc file (that just calls /usr/sbin/jail -c name to start, and jail -r name to stop)

in jail.conf i just have

  stud {
    path = "/usr/local/jails/jail_name";
    ip4 = "inherit";
    host.hostname = "jail_name.example.net";
    securelevel = 4;
    devfs_ruleset = 10;
    exec.start = "/bin/service --config=/etc/service.conf";
    mount.devfs;
    exec.system_jail_user;
    exec.jail_user=jail_name;
    exec.poststart="/usr/local/bin/jail_ipfw";
  }
(ok, i also setup a devfs rule, because i had issues with built in ones and various patch levels of FreeBSD -- and my service needs access to /dev/random)

The only non-obvious thing is you need /libexec/ld-elf.so.1 in order to run dynamically linked libraries.

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