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Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

it-notes.dragas.net

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Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#71

Post by draga79 »

cyberax wrote: post #9

> As an experiment, I decided to migrate two hosts (each with about 10 VMs) of a client — where I had full control—without telling them, over a weekend. Yeah. That guy should not be allowed anywhere near the production workloads. "I solve problems", my ass.

I've a contract with those clients, and I can move the VMs, change the services, etc. freely as long as it doesn't cost more than the amount we've previously set.

Otherwise, I'd never dare to do something like that.

And I'm not so crazy as to do such an operation without the appropriate tests and foundations. Of course, when I started, I had all the conditions to be able to do it, and I had already conducted all possible tests. :-)

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#72

Post by Tor3 »

jdboyd wrote: post #64
lotharcable wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hard to know the timeline with his data loss, but I am assuming it was a long time ago. XFS is originally from SGI Irix and was designed to run on higher end hardware. SGI donated it to Linux in 1999 and it carried a lot of its assumptions over. For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that…

> For example on SGI boxes you had "hardware raid" with cache, which essentially is a sort of embedded computer with it's own memory. That cache had a battery backup so that if the machine had a crash or sudden power loss the hardware raid would live on long enough to finish its writes. SGI had tight control over the type of hardware you could use and it was usually good quality stuff. Most of the SGI machine I've us…

Yep. The Octanes and the Challenge servers we used at work didn't have hardware raid, and, contrary to grandparent we did have regular issues on SGI with XFS (loss of data after power cycling, always), while we never had that on Linux, which surprised me. After all, it was so easily reproduced (on SGI): Write regularly to a file, power cycle, file empty afterwards. Did that on Linux, everything fine. Every time. Never ever had losses on Linux. NB: I did not test this immediately after XFS was ported to Linux, it's very likely that things were improved on shortly after, before we started testing XFS at work.

(As for hardware raid - I didn't start to see hardware raid regularly until HP started shipping rackmount servers with Compaq raid hardware, way back. Linux boxes..)

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#73

Post by draga79 »

roydivision wrote: post #69
DeathArrow wrote: post #59

All is fine and dandy and BSDs can solve many use cases. Unfortunately for the solution we are working on, which imply many microservices we need Kubernetes and no BSD equivalent to Kubernetes exists.

Same here, otherwise I'd be considering the BSDs.

Things are improving...stay tuned :-)

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#75

Post by shiroiushi »

jbverschoor wrote: post #57
kopirgan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a long time they didn't have any. I recall from mid 90s version 4+? They were still trying to port.. or was it early 2000s lol either way it's ancient history

Yeah I started around 4.something until 6 I believe. After that it was all Debian. My lesson was to just use what moet people use. But then again, I always used PostgreSQL even though most were on MySQL

You don't have to use what "most people use" if what you're using is fully compatible, or at least compatible enough that it does everything you need it to do. PostgreSQL and MySQL are both SQL databases, so depending on what exactly you're doing, there's likely not that much difference in use. (Plus, these days, PostgreSQL seems to have become more popular.)

So if you're just editing text, it doesn't matter if most people are using emacs, because you can use vim too. But I guess for running an OS, FreeBSD has had too many pain points for many people compared to just going with the Linux crowd.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#76

Post by INTPenis »

DeathArrow wrote: post #59

All is fine and dandy and BSDs can solve many use cases. Unfortunately for the solution we are working on, which imply many microservices we need Kubernetes and no BSD equivalent to Kubernetes exists.

Can't you just run k8s on bsd? You might have to build and maintain your own release of it, but I'm sure someone has done it already.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#78

Post by Rediscover »

globular-toast wrote: post #58
binkHN wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is more than one Linux distribution that's designed to work without systemd.

Notably Gentoo. Any others?

Slackware. It has always had a bit of *BSD flavoring in it, too.

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#79

Post by kev009 »

I use Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all for fun, learning, and profit(the first two).

At the very least it is nice to make acquaintance with at least one BSD because it will probably expand your knowledge on Linux in ways you wont be able to anticipate.

For example, FreeBSD got me into kernel development, full system debugging, network stack development, driver development, and understanding how the whole kit fits together. Those skills transferred back and forth with reasonable fidelity to Linux, and for me jumping into Linux development cold would have been too big a leap.. especially in confidence and developing a mental model.

For my personal infrastructure, I tend to use FreeBSD because in many ways it is simpler and less surprising, especially when accounting for the passage of time. ifconfig is still ifconfig, and it works great. rc.d is all I need for my own stuff. I like the systematic effects of things like tunables and sysctl for managing hardware and kernel configuration. The man pages are forever useful to new and old users. The kernel APIs and userland APIs are extremely stable akin to commercial operating systems and unlike Linux.

There are warts. There are community frictions. The desktop story and some developer experiences will be perpetually behind Linux due to the size of the contributor base and user base. The job market for BSD is very limited compared to Linux. But I don't think it's an all or nothing affair, and ideally in a high stakes operation you would dual stack for availability and zero-day mitigation (Verisign once gave a great talk on this).

Re: Why and how we’re migrating many of our servers from Linux to the BSDs

#80

Post by linuxandrew »

I've recently discovered systemd-nspawn which is an alternative to LXC, builtin and integrated into systemd. Much lighter than full VMs and it's quite similar to Solaris Zones and FreeBSD jails. One way to use it is to extract an OCI (Docker) image to a path, that way you can reuse the container tooling provided by Docker, Podman et al.

I've barely touched the BSDs and it's been a few years since I last used Solaris so I can't make much of a comparison as a user myself.

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