Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020) • Hacker News Board

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#161

Post by notabee » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

stiray wrote: post #62

I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server). Some more points: - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either. - FIBs, absolute miracle routing…

As someone who has just been tearing my hair out over v1 and v2 cgroups and containers for testing systemd services, I think I need to spend some time in FreeBSD land.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#162

Post by jsiepkes » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:19 PM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #138

jsiepkes wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ZFS has first-class support on Ubuntu and is compiled into the kernel. And Ubuntu is also the only distribution which has ZFS. Using ZFS on any other distribution (for example RHEL, Rocky Linux, etc.) is a pain. Every update is Russian roulette in which it can break. And everyone except Ubutunu thinks it's a violation of the CDDL. Keep in mind that Oracle is the copyright holder of ZFS. So you (and Ubuntu) are viol…

> Keep in mind that Oracle is the copyright holder of ZFS. So you (and Ubuntu) are violating Oracle's license terms. If anything IS a problem here it is violating the terms of the GPL, not the CDDL. So no, no one is violating Oracles licensing terms - and if they were, they’d have been sued in 2016 when this shipped. Do you really think ORACLE of all people is just holding back out the goodness of their hearts? Compl…

> If anything IS a problem here it is violating the terms of the GPL, not the CDDL.

The CDDL terms are violated because you can't re-license code that is under the CDDL (in contrast to for example the BSD licenses). The GPLv2 is a strong copy-left license that puts the CDDL files under GPLv2.

Even the creators of the CDDL themselves have stated that the CDDL is probably incompatible with the GPL [1].

[1] https://lwn.net/Articles/114840/

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#163

Post by GekkePrutser » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:26 PM UTC

ahepp wrote: post #149

_abox wrote: post #108

That link has been posted here many times already. I use FreeBSD as a daily driver on my desktop. Very happy with it. My reasons to choose it were more that I feel like Linux has become a toy of big tech. If you look at the kernel contributions, most of them are from people working for all the big names. Linux has become Big Business and each company is trying to safeguard their interests in it. Linus is still in cha…

> If you look at the kernel contributions, most of them are from people working for all the big names Like hardware manufacturers? I thought getting commercial users to contribute to the kernel was desirable? > For example, would these guys ever have approved the GPL-3? Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3? > And in fact it's the very BSD license that makes big business shun FreeBSD Now I'm really confused. Why would…

> Like hardware manufacturers? I thought getting commercial users to contribute to the kernel was desirable?

Contribute to drivers, yes. Steer development of the kernel, no, IMO. The more they contribute, the more influence they gain. And a lot of the contributions are not hardware related at all.

> Didn't Torvalds himself reject GPL-3?

I don't know, I didn't follow this as I don't follow Linux news that closely anymore. I thought it was mainly about the way that it was introduced. But I think it's a much better license than GPL-2.

> Now I'm really confused. Why would businesses not like the BSD license? And they don't like GPL-3 either? Is GPL-2 the goldilocks license for them?

Businesses hate the BSD license because any code derived does not have to be open at all. So that means anything they contribute can be taken by their competitors and used in closed-source software. That's totally OK. Because of this there's only a few companies involved in BSD. Notably Netflix, the former Skype (before it was acquired by MS), and some smaller orgs like Netapp and iX that makes freenas/truenas.

Companies hate GPL-3 because their license gets revoked if a company uses its patents to attack GPLd software. It also stipulates some other things like that devices running GPL-3 software must also be open (e.g. no locked bootloaders etc). Very good things IMO. A lot of GPL-3's stipulations were triggered by real-world exploitation of free software. Examples: By TiVo (hence the name "anti-TiVoisation clause" for the open hardware thing). And the anti-patent clause was a direct result of Microsoft's patent attacks on Linux. No wonder Steve Ballmer hated the GPL-3 so much.

This is why Microsoft and most of the others hate it so much, they love giving open source lip service, but are not really open source companies. The GPL-2 gives them enough loopholes to get away with this. Many companies avoid GPL-3 licensed software at all costs, it was the driving force for bash not being updated (and replaced by zsh) on macOS for example.

Personally I think it would be better if FreeBSD was GPL-3d but BSD is not bad for me as a use that doesn't want too much corporate influence. After all, if a company makes a closed-source fork it doesn't impact me in any way. I won't use it anyway.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#164

Post by Asdrubalini » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:34 PM UTC

rubyist5eva wrote: post #93

stjohnswarts wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but you can use ZFS on linux?

Yes but it’s clunky. ZFS on FreeBSD is smooth as silk. Ubuntu is the only distro that I would say has good integration with ZFS but I don’t like anything else about Ubuntu.

I think NixOS has an even better ZFS implementation, compared to Ubuntu.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#165

Post by heinrichhartman » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:36 PM UTC

GekkePrutser wrote: post #126

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> jails... docker? Really? Jails are 15+ years old implementation, kernel supported, that stood test of time, actually being a security feature. It runs circles around the docker in everything except how much it was adapted by community. I never understood why people rather used an inferior solution like docker. Docker has Dockerfiles, layers, and trivial push/pull of images. Compared to those workflow improvements,…

> Compared to those workflow improvements, nobody cares if the guts suck. Some people care, this is why FreeBSD is still around :) And it's not really relevant if you build your own images anyway. And in fact within the scope of FreeBSD jails offer very similar features, one of the things that's very common to do is make a base image with ZFS and then base all your jails off it. This means you just have to update you…

I would like to be on the jails train, but the build/deployment story always felt inferior.

I have never seen anyone build jail-images from CI and deploying them to fleets of FreeBSD hosts. This may be technically feasible with zfs send/recieve but in practice people I know distributed packages (not images) to 10s of FreeBSD jails/hosts.

I want to deploy container images to a cluster - not install a package in a zone/jail. Is anyone doing this with FreeBSD/Solaris? (Outside of Joyent)

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#166

Post by baskethead » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

The main reason to use Linux is because almost everyone else is. If you're only installing it on your own servers at home, then that's okay. But in a business environment, the minor differences or improvements with FreeBSD are simply not worth the lack of familiarity for most people over Linux.

I used FreeBSD starting in 1999-ish and I still have the original Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System on my shelf. I used FreeBSD exclusively for years, but it has completely lost to Linux and Linux frankly is good enough.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#167

Post by alexklarjr » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:37 PM UTC

djbusby wrote: post #60

RamRodification wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...or pick an operating system where you don't need to read the handbook to get working WiFi.

I'm on Linux and have to get a rtw8852 driver from some random-ish gitHub repo to get WiFi in a recent Lenovo. Does this mean WiFI is only for Win/Mac?

mostly, I can’t make both my usb wifi5 dongles work on ubuntu 22 as well as random Qualcomm wifi4 pcie. These chips must be decade old.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#168

Post by ooneeks » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:39 PM UTC

naikrovek wrote: post #120

jeffbee wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, the number of BSD CVEs just boils down to the fact that nobody cares about BSD. Since nobody cares about it, its performance is also very 20-years-ago and doesn't stand up to modern linux performance. You could expect database performance (e.g. postgresql) to be 2-4x higher on linux under a highly concurrent load. There are thousands of full-time professionals around the world focused on linux performance and t…

> the fact that nobody cares about BSD I am quite certain that you would be shocked if you learned how many people use it. I've worked at two companies where more than 95% of servers ran FreeBSD, and these are absolutely companies that you have heard of. 10s of thousands of servers at each when I worked at them, and likely 5x that amount, now. lots of people care about FreeBSD. they just aren't known for crapping on…

Well to be fair, most people using FreeBSD are also Linux users, save people indirectly using/'benefiting' from BSD, i.e in a work environment as you mentioned. Of course discounting Mac users (I honestly think that's a hilarious joke). It also strikes me that many companies use BSD simply to save money in an area where time =/= money, as BSD is very secure and very stable, there are some licensing issues with many big Linux distros, etc. I very much doubt that anyone in the year 2022 are using BSD servers or workstations to improve their performance yield unless you're working retail or construction or something and are looking to implement a RTOS platform based on BSD because your boss severely capped your department's budget lol

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#169

Post by ooneeks » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:42 PM UTC

jen20 wrote: post #134

naikrovek wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the fact that nobody cares about BSD I am quite certain that you would be shocked if you learned how many people use it. I've worked at two companies where more than 95% of servers ran FreeBSD, and these are absolutely companies that you have heard of. 10s of thousands of servers at each when I worked at them, and likely 5x that amount, now. lots of people care about FreeBSD. they just aren't known for crapping on…

So who are these companies? I hear references to them constantly, but pretty much the only ones willing to stick their head above the parapet are Netflix (in a single use case) and a few storage/network vendors using proprietary forks.

I would scream if I ever saw a dude in a suit give some 70's looking NEET permission to base their company's entire IT platform on FreeBSD specifically. It'd be like switching all your office workstations from MacOS to Ubuntu or Linux Mint.

Re: Technical reasons to choose FreeBSD over GNU/Linux (2020)

#170

Post by old-gregg » Sat, Aug 06, 2022, 9:46 PM UTC

stiray wrote: post #62

I am using freebsd since version 8 for all my server needs (was using linux, but got repelled by its chaos which I dont care about on my laptop, but it pisses me off on server). Some more points: - bhyve, developed by netapp, they ditched all old technologies support and it works faster on my i5 server than kvm on my i7 laptop. Snapshoting using ZFS is not a feature to discard either. - FIBs, absolute miracle routing…

Remember, you're comparing Linux and FreeBSD in 2022 but BSD lost to Linux much earlier, many years ago. Back when I was looking into them (long time ago, excuse me for not remembering the details), BSD felt more pleasant and coherent. But at the same time it had limitations on scalability, performance and compatibility with hardware and also with userland software. In every benchmark, especially on multi-core, multi-socket systems, Linux was ahead.

My theory at the time was this: GNOME won on developers' desktops, so most software was developed on Linux natively, with BSD compatibility (and performance) as an afterthought. IIRC Linus made a similar point on the mailing list that developers love servers that resemble their programming environments. TDLR: BSDs got stuck in CLI-only mode for too long.

The more common explanation was that Linux got a head start by a few years by being a clean-sheet implementation, while the BSD had to spend its early years purging itself off the AT&T copyrighted code, so it was untouchable from a commercial use perspective.