FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success • Hacker News Board

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#81

Post by chungy » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 11:40 PM UTC

vermaden wrote: post #70

tiffanyh wrote: post #24

Love FreeBSD but ... Really wish there wasn't a split between FreeBSD & Matt Dillon 20-years ago, since DragonflyBSD is so strong and yet FreeBSD hasn't benefited from it's innovations. They'd truly would be better together than apart. Can only imagine how much stronger the BSD ecosystem would be overall today, if the past 20-years these teams had been together. https://www.dragonflybsd.org Announcement: https://list…

I also would prefer that this split would not had place and that DragonflyBSD would never start ... but yet it happened ... so what? Recently (as a seasoned FreeBSD user/sysadmin) I tried DragonflyBSD to check how it went ... and it lacks a LOT of things that FreeBSD has - like for example the GEOM framework. On FreeBSD its quite easy to list block devices like: FreeBSD # geom disk list ... but on DragonflyBSD its no…

I think it's fair to say that DragonFlyBSD has diverged with vastly different goals to FreeBSD. It's a good thing it's able to do what it sets out to do. It's not trying to replace FreeBSD.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#82

Post by tiffanyh » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 11:45 PM UTC

philjohn wrote: post #58

tiffanyh wrote: post #24

Love FreeBSD but ... Really wish there wasn't a split between FreeBSD & Matt Dillon 20-years ago, since DragonflyBSD is so strong and yet FreeBSD hasn't benefited from it's innovations. They'd truly would be better together than apart. Can only imagine how much stronger the BSD ecosystem would be overall today, if the past 20-years these teams had been together. https://www.dragonflybsd.org Announcement: https://list…

That makes me feel old. I was running FreeBSD back when that split happened, I can't believe it's been 20 years. I think the BSD ecosystem was harmed more by the SCO lawsuit, and the rise of Linux than by the Dragonfly/FreeBSD split.

You might be confusing SCO and USL.

SCO brought lawsuits against IBM (Linux) in 2003.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO_Group,_Inc._v._Internati....

USL brought lawsuit against BSD in 1992.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_In....

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#83

Post by assimpleaspossi » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 11:46 PM UTC

redundantly wrote: post #78

mistrial9 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Odd that you felt it necessary to copy and paste the rules without fully reading them. > Don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. Frankly, your wall of text is less helpful to the discussion here than the comment you're replying to. Note: I have no opinion on what you and the other commenter are talking about.

The first sentence of my post is fact. The second is commentary. The third is a joke. Apparently he doesn't get the joke.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#84

Post by ggm » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 11:53 PM UTC

I would echo the "I wish the split hadn't happened" voices but I suspect that the magic number of variants of an OS are around 3-5 and thats kind-of where we sit.

It always was (to some extend) a set: Bell vs Berkely vs Digital vs Sun vs "the rest" with things taken from each, and added back. Getopt, NFS, mods to the TCP/IP stack, ideas about virtual disks and filestores.

I may misunderstand, but I think there are "more" variants of Linux, but probably close to this magic number of really significant distros.

I drove FreeBSD as a desktop on multiple machines for decades. I now live in OSX but I continue to operate FreeBSD for research nodes on Dell, but with more debian in the mix now than before.

I'd love to try FreeBSD on RPi4 but what i read suggests it still has some issues in the uBoot and install area. I drive a 4 disk ZFS node through a jmicron USB-SATA bridge card, I need to be sure that will work before I can move but having adopted ZFS on Ubuntu the good thing is, ZFS variants apart, I SHOULD be able to do this transition without dataloss, assuming the controller chip works.

Up in server land I've migrated between Debian and FreeBSD for ZFS filestores multiple times. Its really easy.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#85

Post by [deleted] » Wed, Jul 05, 2023, 11:59 PM UTC

ggm wrote: post #84

I would echo the "I wish the split hadn't happened" voices but I suspect that the magic number of variants of an OS are around 3-5 and thats kind-of where we sit. It always was (to some extend) a set: Bell vs Berkely vs Digital vs Sun vs "the rest" with things taken from each, and added back. Getopt, NFS, mods to the TCP/IP stack, ideas about virtual disks and filestores. I may misunderstand, but I think there are "m…

[deleted]

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#86

Post by ybloviator » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 12:14 AM UTC

tiffanyh wrote: post #41

SpaceInvader wrote: post #37

I'm using FreeBSD on my servers non stop for 20 years. It has some quirks, but it's rock solid.

> "but [FreeBSD's] rock solid" Curious to hear your feedback of FreeBSD v5-8. Since many consider those releases (years) very bumpy.

I thought 3.x was the bumpy one (first SMP, IIRC).

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#87

Post by throwawaylinux » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 12:18 AM UTC

readingnews wrote: post #4

Not to be mean, but I started using Linux in 1992 (yes that early on, from the usenet posting), and I seem to recall hearing a lot more about FreeBSD or the *BSDs about 30 years ago than I do now. In my UNIX circles that I run around in, no one talks about FreeBSD. Honestly asking (yes, I guess I did not read the article) is most of its success on the commercial side? I think it is used in NAS boxes and routers/switc…

Going by volumes of commits and posts on most mailing list, it has been in a long slow decline since probably early-mid 00's. I'll leave others to speculate on the reasons, but it is a pity. I'm a Linux user and developer and hardly meddled with the BSDs, but I think competition in the open source OS space is a great benefit. I certainly remember the competition used to spur ideas and development in days past.

One thing that has amazed me is that despite the weight of development and investment in Linux far outstripping FreeBSD since around that time if not earlier, FreeBSD still managed to hold its own in performance, at least in some workloads and situations. Is there something about the people, community, methodologies, or technology that provide advantages to help achieve this? It would have been nice to know what could have been with a more even split of resources.

Although I will say in my experience by far the most capable people have been those with passion who would have been working on a project as a hobby anyway (if not so many hours), and often the best results come from those people attacking problems that interest or concern them as opposed to ones that go through committees and executives and project managers, etc. The latter often serve to crapify things in the long run by being driven by short-term and selfish thinking (not necessarily by any one developer or person, just the nature of the whole beast). Linux kernel has been doing as well as can be expected in avoiding that corporate crapification, but it certainly is not immune. I could easily believe the average developer-hour invested in FreeBSD has a far greater value to the project in general than that in Linux (yes I'm aware many FreeBSD developers do get paid to work on it, and many Linux ones don't).

(References)

https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-commits-all https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-hackers https://marc.info/?l=freebsd-current

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#88

Post by jmmv » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 12:29 AM UTC

This is so nice to see. Glad that FreeBSD is still alive after all these years. I guess I can share my story :)

I played with some early versions of FreeBSD and OpenBSD but, at the time, I was still a Linux newbie so I wasn't comfortable with them. Disk I/O on FreeBSD 3.x was super-slow compared to Linux out of the box... because I didn't know what "soft updates" were and how enabling them would have resolved all my issues.

It wasn't until FreeBSD 4.0 that I had learned enough Unix to make the jump, and that became my primary desktop for a while. Soon after, I switched to NetBSD (1.5.2), which I used as my only OS for various years, and I became an avid contributor to the project. I ported and maintained Gnome 2.x, and then developed things like tmpfs and the NetBSD testing framework.

But... Mac OS X came along, I jumped ship to an iBook, and without being exposed to the BSDs on a daily basis via a desktop environment, I slowly lost the interest to continue using and contributing to them. I always said back then that having a strong desktop story was super-important to capture developers, and I think it still is. And I wasn't the only case. Mac OS X "stole" many BSD developers because it /was/ almost-BSD-but-with-a-great-UI.

So I had left, until recently. I had kept a VM around all these years mostly as a curiosity, but just over a year ago, I set up (again) a home server on a "bargain" ThinkStation I found, mostly to act as a NAS and to run VMs on. My obvious choice was FreeBSD (I still "believe in" the BSDs), and ZFS and bhyve have delivered rock-solid and extremely pleasant experiences. Every time I type some zfs or vm commands, I'm amazed by how well the thing works.

I used to favor NetBSD due to its minimalism and its portability, which in turn meant it had a neat internal design (which is what "wowed" me). But by then, it's true that FreeBSD was already the "easy to use" FreeBSD with the most active contributor base, although it was stuck on i386. I think this ease of use continues to this day, and FreeBSD has seen a lot of improvements to its internal design to make it portable. FreeBSD is less daunting to the beginner user _and_ developer, and I think the latter is also critical to run an open source projects these days because, to gain new contributors, you have to meet them where they are. FreeBSD's adoption of "common" tools, such as Git, Phabricator or Bugzilla (even if not "ideal" by some standards) has helped.

I guess I should spend the time to write a full retrospective, but that will do for today, hehe.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#89

Post by ybloviator » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 12:32 AM UTC

textread wrote: post #6

readingnews wrote: post #4

Not to be mean, but I started using Linux in 1992 (yes that early on, from the usenet posting), and I seem to recall hearing a lot more about FreeBSD or the *BSDs about 30 years ago than I do now. In my UNIX circles that I run around in, no one talks about FreeBSD. Honestly asking (yes, I guess I did not read the article) is most of its success on the commercial side? I think it is used in NAS boxes and routers/switc…

Its secret to 'survival' is more appropriate. This article has a lot of fluff. eg: Specifically, companies needing redundancy require more than one operating system, since any single operating system may fall victim to a failure that could take out the entire company’s infrastructure What sort of argument is this. We need multiple political parties. Therefore, our existence is important even if we secure insignifican…

monoculture is bad, especially for security

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#90

Post by ybloviator » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 12:38 AM UTC

CodeCompost wrote: post #10

> success Can somebody elaborate on FreeBSD's "success"?

With heavy use in Netflix's CDN resulting in something like more than 15% of internet traffic being delivered by FreeBSD, that's some kind of success I imagine.