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Ask HN: Why are supercomputers all running Linux and not BSD?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are supercomputers all running Linux and not BSD?

#81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think netflix use BSD because they wanted to use BSD. Sure some flavours of BSD have ZFS built in, but thats a pretty rare corner case. Linux has two things that are extremely useful compared to BSD: 1) commercial backing (should one choose it) 2) first class support for inifinband, top end ethernet (should they use it) and storage controllers

Netflix uses BSD for OpenConnect because asynchronous disk I/O-which is critical for a CDN-remains a tire fire on Linux after more than 20 years. On Linux you basically have to use blocking threads to emulate async disk I/O, which means tons of threads and overhead when you’re handling 10k-100k concurrent connections per box.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: Why are supercomputers all running Linux and not BSD?

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think netflix use BSD because they wanted to use BSD. Sure some flavours of BSD have ZFS built in, but thats a pretty rare corner case. Linux has two things that are extremely useful compared to BSD: 1) commercial backing (should one choose it) 2) first class support for inifinband, top end ethernet (should they use it) and storage controllers

FreeBSD has commercial support from iXsystems. FreeBSD (and perhaps some other BSDs) support “top-end” Ethernet as well. There was a great post on the Netflix blog a couple of months ago (discussed on HN) about how Netflix optimized their systems to serve video at 100Gbps. FreeBSD does not support Infiniband, afaik.

FreeBSD has supported Infiniband for over a decade.
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