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

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#121

Post by inferiorhuman » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 8:26 AM UTC

pxc wrote: post #111

loeg wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was also a clash of personalities.

Is there any (ideally charitable, historical) writing about this for the uninitiated?

You've gotta be careful giving vikings a commit bit.

Your best bet for information is probably the mailing list archives. To be a bit reductive, Matt had strong opinions about SMP and threading and got his commit bit yanked. As a result he forked FreeBSD (4?) to create DragonFlyBSD. It's not so far off of how we ended up with OpenBSD really. Or as Linus put it, Theo is… difficult.

Honestly, I think these forced forks are good. They're a a perfectly natural result of getting a bunch of smart, opinionated people in a group together. They've given some incredibly smart people a much bigger sandbox to play in. As a result we've got things like openssh and hammer.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#122

Post by agapon » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 9:40 AM UTC

IntelMiner wrote: post #118

gonzo wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

>Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks? >Where are the measurements of network performance? You'd have to ask Larabel about that. But given that Dragonfly can seemingly trade blows with FreeBSD * 18 years later* does seem to suggest there's some merits to their design

DragonflyBSD design is definitely not without merits.

But FreeBSD took the mainstream approach.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#123

Post by pseudonym0us » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 9:46 AM UTC

Zambyte wrote: post #51

pseudonym0us wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>See: the clauses saying "must reproduce/retain the above copyright". Yeah, you will see the copyright if you are working at the company. Outsiders would never know it's a fork.

Read the licenses more closely.

Work in a project with BSD-licensed stuff.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#124

Post by [deleted] » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 10:40 AM UTC

textread wrote: post #60

throw0101c wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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'…

Thanks a lot for the lwn article suggestion. Dave Cutler(Windows NT) too found the DEC support to be a safety test for cleanliness.

[deleted]

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#125

Post by throwawaylinux » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 11:37 AM UTC

IntelMiner wrote: post #120

throwawaylinux wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Wasn't the Alpha port the first chip it was ported to back in the 1990's? I know the Amiga people did their own thing but I don't think it was ever properly merged back upstream

First 64-bit CPU, second CPU of course after 386. Which I guess you mean.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#126

Post by Freaky » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 11:51 AM UTC

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…

https://freshbsd.org/freebsd?q=%22Sponsored+by+Netflix%22

3,975 commits.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#127

Post by Zambyte » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 11:55 AM UTC

pseudonym0us wrote: post #123

Zambyte wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Read the licenses more closely.

Work in a project with BSD-licensed stuff.

If you're fine with violating the license, then there is nothing stopping you from closing the source to GPL licensed software without a word of credit. I'm not sure what your point is.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#128

Post by kaashif » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 12:45 PM UTC

itsmartapuntocm wrote: post #103

yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

Didn't it used to be the case that a lot of FreeBSD devs used OSX while OpenBSD devs used OpenBSD and this dogfooding produced better device driver support on OpenBSD?

I heard that somewhere many years ago, but it may be false.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#129

Post by NexRebular » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 2:04 PM UTC

unmole wrote: post #99

NexRebular wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This downgrade is quite sad. Too many of the enterprise grade network devices rely on linux. At least the FreeBSD Junos still runs on the devices on top of KVM. I just can't understand why they didn't go for jails/bhyve or illumos zones instead.

> This downgrade is quite sad. Too many of the enterprise grade network devices rely on linux. This is in no way a downgrade. Juniper just read the writing on the wall. Arista boxes ran Linux from day one and have a much better reputation for stability than virtually any other vendor.

I know of Arista (and the rest) all too well.

It still doesn't change the fact that putting all eggs to one penguin-shaped basket give me the heebie-jeebies. Monoculturization is never a good thing, yet everyone seems to run towards it with a glee on linux.

At least I can put money where my mouth is and continue budgeting for Juniper as long as they support FreeBSD.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#130

Post by olgeni » Thu, Jul 06, 2023, 5:09 PM UTC

JoeBtfsplk wrote: post #116

FreeBSD is so damn self-congratulatory. Leadership ugh culture argh. Makes me want to retch. How about get some users?

Here, I asked GPT to fix it for you:

"I find FreeBSD's self-congratulatory nature quite off-putting, as well as the issues with its leadership and culture. It makes me feel nauseated. Perhaps focusing on attracting more users should be a priority."

Save it on disk, fsync twice :D and use it next time.