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BSD vs. Linux (2005)

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Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#41

Post by icebraining »

corv wrote: post #36
nixos wrote: post #12

I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. I run a small site on a VPS, so: 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Except for an Application Firewall for nginx, what does ports have ov…

Linux is fine for ordinary computing and many specialized tasks but some areas are better served by BSDs. If you require the integrity guarantees offered by ZFS and still want the efficient resource allocation of containers you will not get around FreeBSD or a Solaris based distribution. If you need a system that is secure by default you will not get around OpenBSD. If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a…

If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD.

It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#42

Post by PeCaN »

nixos wrote: post #30
anexprogrammer wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ZFS only needs GBs if you need deduplication. 99% don't, almost everyone is better off with compression. 1GB is the min for ZFS though it can run in a little less.

Too much. I've got a 700-800 MB system. It's unfortunate, as I'd love to have a versioned FS

VMS could run a versioned FS in <128MB of RAM, so there's really nothing conceptually in the way. I bet with dedup off and some tweaking you can get ZFS to run in very little memory.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#43

Post by mjg59 »

corv wrote: post #36
nixos wrote: post #12

I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. I run a small site on a VPS, so: 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Except for an Application Firewall for nginx, what does ports have ov…

Linux is fine for ordinary computing and many specialized tasks but some areas are better served by BSDs. If you require the integrity guarantees offered by ZFS and still want the efficient resource allocation of containers you will not get around FreeBSD or a Solaris based distribution. If you need a system that is secure by default you will not get around OpenBSD. If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a…

NetBSD runs on a subset of the hardware that Linux runs on, other than supporting a very small number of systems built in the 90s that have never been supported by Linux. NetBSD's portability was a strong point in the past, but the massive industry acceptance of Linux means that there are giant numbers of shipped systems that came pre-installed with Linux and which have no support in the NetBSD kernel. There's a bunch of great reasons to choose NetBSD, but comparing its hardware support to Linux isn't one of them.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#44

Post by PeCaN »

smegel wrote: post #8

BSD has a wonderful, unified events system. That incorporates blocking disk IO. Linux has epoll. https://www.nginx.com/blog/why-netflix-chose-nginx-as-the-he...

BSD and Solaris (which also has kqueue, and something else IIRC) got this really right while Linux got this really wrong.

I still prefer NT's IOCP, but kqueue isn't bad. epoll… is what happens when you get someone who's never done asynchronous I/O to design a system for doing asynchronous I/O.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#45

Post by teacup50 »

icebraining wrote: post #41
corv wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux is fine for ordinary computing and many specialized tasks but some areas are better served by BSDs. If you require the integrity guarantees offered by ZFS and still want the efficient resource allocation of containers you will not get around FreeBSD or a Solaris based distribution. If you need a system that is secure by default you will not get around OpenBSD. If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a…

If you need the portability of Linux coupled with a license that lets you freely redistribute in order to sell an appliance you will be hard pressed to get around NetBSD. It's perfectly legal to sell an appliance with Linux, people do it all the time.

You can't "freely redistribute" it though. You have to comply with the viral decidedly non-freeing provisions.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#46

Post by teacup50 »

dkarapetyan wrote: post #38
merlincorey wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It isn't actually as nice and tidy as it would seem because you do not have a direct separation between system configuration and application configuration. It's a small, subtle detail that for many is less important today than it once was; however, if I have two FreeBSD systems of mostly equal versions and I want to migrate applications and/or users from one to the other, I know ALL I have to do is copy from /usr/loc…

I don't want that separation in a consistent and coherent system. User vs base is artificial. What I care about is the end result the overall system accomplishes and base vs non-base doesn't really factor into that. What does it matter to me if nginx is part of the base system or not? I need a web server. Arbitrarily choosing apache/httpd vs nginx to include as part of the base system is incidental complexity where I…

> User vs base is artificial.

No. It's not.

If nginx releases an update, do you also need to update your OS? No, because the user dependency graph isn't shared with the base OS.

If you update your OS, do you also need to update nginx? No, because there's backwards ABI compatibility.

The split is not artificial.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#47

Post by 746F7475 »

aaron-lebo wrote: post #18
dkarapetyan wrote: post #15

I tried freebsd. Gone back to ubuntu. In this day and age not having proper dependency resolution for packages is not acceptable. I've more than once had some tool based on ports just go into an infinite cycle when asked to upgrade some packages. The philosophy laid out in this article seems more like rationalization of historical accidents more than anything else. Linux file system layout is just as predictable as a…

It's really not just a rationalization. BSDs control the kernel and the userland, meaning that file system layout is coherent. Check any Ubuntu installation and packages are all over the place. This is perhaps unavoidable. Also, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, and FreeBSD can all be used as server or desktops without much fiddling. Their installers are better than anything in the Linux world. You can have one up and running w…

Whenever I hear "BSD" I always think: "if you want to use BSD you have to build a machine for it". This isn't really based on any real world experience, but whenever BSD comes up as a topic only thing that sticks with me is: "it only likes very specific hardware" which makes me very hesitant to ever consider trying it. I've had so many hardware incompatibility problems with Ubuntu, which is suppose to support almost everything, I don't even wanna think about trying to run BSD.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#48

Post by mjg59 »

merlincorey wrote: post #25
dkarapetyan wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think the layout is coherent at all. Ubuntu layout is much more coherent. If I need nginx configuration I look in /etc/nginx. Following the same pattern if I need mysql configuration I look in /etc/mysql. If I need to figure out the actual daemon configuration for each I look in /etc/init. It's all very nice and tidy. Actual binaries go in /usr/local/bin or /usr/bin or /bin. That's pretty much all I need to k…

It isn't actually as nice and tidy as it would seem because you do not have a direct separation between system configuration and application configuration. It's a small, subtle detail that for many is less important today than it once was; however, if I have two FreeBSD systems of mostly equal versions and I want to migrate applications and/or users from one to the other, I know ALL I have to do is copy from /usr/loc…

This is an increasingly solved problem in the post-systemd world - /etc contains local configuration, system configuration is in /usr. We (CoreOS) support you doing mkfs on / in order to return to a default configuration built from the /usr config.

Re: BSD vs. Linux (2005)

#50

Post by badsock »

nixos wrote: post #12

I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. I run a small site on a VPS, so: 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Except for an Application Firewall for nginx, what does ports have ov…

One big thing for me is that I trust the FreeBSD devs to not completely reinvent things unless they're sure it's an improvement.

I got sick of the churn in Linux, having to relearn things all the time and then find out when I'm done that it's not any better, just different.

Things I learned how to do in FreeBSD a decade ago still work. For example, to get a NIC configured I can either put one or two lines of text in rc.conf, (which I have pretty much memorized at this point), or stop and learn what RedHat thinks is the coolest way to do network config this year.

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