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FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

issue.freebsdfoundation.org

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Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#101

Post by ChainOfFools »

ta47856857 wrote: post #65
tristor wrote: post #61

I love FreeBSD and have been running it as a primary OS in my home and in my work since the late 90s. Unfortunately, there's some long-standing bugs that seem to have no traction to be resolved around booting from USB storage that impacted me in my home and some systems had to be rebuilt on Linux, making me not Linux-free at home for the first time in over a decade. I love FreeBSD and I hope it has another 30 years o…

Personally I've had to ditch my opnsense APU2 recently, as its failing on USB3 boot media. Even tried USB2 CD-ROM and no dice.

what did you ditch it for?

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#102

Post by loeg »

tiffanyh wrote: post #82
philjohn wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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... .

Novell bought USL in 1993 and sold the corpse to SCO in 1995. They're related entities.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#103

Post by itsmartapuntocm »

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #11
glassfish wrote: post #7

I have been using FreeBSD for the last 2 years on a 2015 Intel MacBook Pro, and I have been a long-time Linux user. Things I appreciate about FreeBSD: - init system (with real PIDs). - FreeBSD documentation. - installation experience (fast and hassle-free). - stability, consistency and low memory usage. - DWM / XFCE works great. - ease of configuring PF However, there are some main impediments that prevents me from u…

> init system (with real PIDs). I like FreeBSD's init system too, but what do you mean about PIDs? > WiFi drivers don't work unless it's a ThinkPad I think That's not it; FreeBSD works fine with the wifi in my Dell. I grant that the driver coverage is probably more spotty than Linux, but it's just on a per-device (card/chipset) basis.

Even OpenBSD has better wifi support. I'm able to use the WLAN adapter in my Pi 3 with OpenBSD, but it doesn't work in FreeBSD.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#104

Post by muststopmyths »

tw04 wrote: post #8
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…

Netflix runs a massive fleet of FreeBSD servers. NetApp and Dell/EMC isilon are built on it. The previous Compellent product was based on NetBSD. You can infer others if you look at the historical sponsor pages: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/ There are plenty of companies that may not use the full BSD stack but pull bits and pieces of code as needed. Microsoft is known to have built off BSD networki…

>Microsoft is known to have built off BSD networking code for Windows.

30+ years ago, when everyone was basing their TCP stacks on the BSD implementation. That was one of the reasons that the infamous 64k+ "ping of death" affected more than just Windows in 1998.

The stack was re-written for Vista/Longhorn more than 20 years ago.

My point being that the GP question was about FreeBSD's success today and the Windows TCP stack is not a good candidate to illustrate that.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#105

Post by gonzo »

tiffanyh wrote: post #80
tw04 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a long time, but IIRC the split was due to direction on SMP. From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time. https://people.freebsd.org/~kris/scaling/dfly.html

> “ From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time.” I’m not so sure. Given how unstable FreeBSD 5 (intro of new SMP) was, until it finally stabilized multiple years later at v8.0 - I’m not sure others would have that same sentiment. And seeing how DragonflyBSD performance is standing up to FreeBSD (and best’ing it times) even though they have a radically smaller developer community (and no corp…

FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE was announced January 19, 2003.

Matt Dillon announced DragonFly BSD nearly 20 years ago on July,16 2003

FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE was announced Nov 25, 2009

You’re talking about events that took place over 13.5 years ago.

On the benchmarks:

Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks?

Where are the measurements of network performance?

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#106

Post by monocasa »

wkat4242 wrote: post #55
qbrass wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While it has a bunch of FreeBSD code stuffed into it, it's not actually based on it.

Yeah I hear this statement a lot too but macos is based on nextstep much more than it was on FreeBSD. Of course nextstep borrowed some userland from FreeBSD and I think this is where the confusion originates. The actual kernel is totally different though.

Eh, sort of. NextStep was more 4.4BSD based. MacOS trasitioned to FreeBSD elements.

And the kernel space for both absolutely have a lot of BSD code, more than the Mach or IO/Kit portions last time I checked.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#107

Post by monocasa »

throw0101c wrote: post #27
pseudonym0us wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Being used as foundation for PlayStation OS, Netflix and others. Isn't that thanks to its license? They literally can be used in closed source software without a word of credit.

Netflix gives back quite a lot. You'll see "Sponsored by: Netfix" quite often in commit messages: * https://www.freshsource.org/commits.php There isn't much special secret sauce that Netflix has at the OS layer of things, so there's not much reason for them to keep the patches in-house (and then have to maintain as the public source rolls forward). Other vendors that give back are Dell EMC Isilon (keeping their OneFS…

From what I've heard, they use FreeBSD pretty much just in their CDN appliances. Apparently their application servers are mainly Linux.

There's a lot of weird reasons why you'd use FreeBSD in storage appliances that I have mixed feelings about.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#108

Post by Sunspark »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #96
DeathArrow wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

macOS is based on FreeBSD.

> macOS is based on FreeBSD. Regarding OS-X/macOS: The fundamental services and primitives of the OS X kernel are based on Mach 3.0. Apple has modified and extended Mach to better meet OS X functional and performance goals. (source: https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da... ) Some portions of the OS-X/macOS kernel are based on FreeBSD however: The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primar…

A little more.. Apple hired Jordan K. Hubbard, the FreeBSD co-founder, back in 2001 to work in the Core OS Engineering Department. His role at that time was manager, BSD technology at Apple, overseeing the BSD Technology Base for Darwin, the UNIX-based core of Mac OS X.

I remember a very early release of Darwin, was interested at the time to see if it would eventually become a standalone product, but it never did. I assume there was a lack of corporate support, much like how Google is now trying to slowly close AOSP via removing core pieces like the dialer.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#109

Post by throwawaylinux »

throw0101c wrote: post #29
textread wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> What sort of argument is this. We need multiple political parties. Therefore, our existence is important even if we secure insignificant votes? Yes, it keeps userland code honest if you follow the published API and not a specific behaviour. See for example the fsync() saga on Linux: * https://lwn.net/Articles/752063/ * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19238121 * https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19119991 It'…

> It's the same reason why porting to obscure CPUs can be useful: DEC Alpha was never popular, but supporting it kind of forced Linux to be 64-bit clean in some ways, so when amd64 came along there was already a bunch of infrastructure in place.

Nitpick (and you didn't necessarily imply otherwise), but x86-64 was a latecomer to 64-bit ports in Linux. SPARC I think was next after Alpha, and MIPS, PARISC, IA64, PowerPC at least all came before x86-64 was merged.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#110

Post by canadianfella »

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…

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