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Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

theregister.com

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Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#71

Post by lproven »

nxicvyvy wrote: post #29
Ygg2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever topic of FS arises, I always hear anecdata that btrfs/ext4 lost data and ZFS was smooth sailing.

Yes and not a single one of them can quote someone from this decade because it's a shitty internet myth that won't die.

Hi. Article author here.

I worked for SUSE from 2017 to 2021. Because of that, I ran openSUSE on my work computer. Btrfs self-destructed on me, on 3 different PCs, about twice a year in that 4-year period.

Not myth. Not from t'Internet. Direct personal experience.

Btrfs `df` lies. You, and programs, can't get an accurate estimate of free space. OS snapshots fill the volume, volume corrupts, new install time. Over and over again.

I do not trust Btrfs and since the Btrfs zealots are in denial and will not confront the very real problems, I don't think it will ever get fixed.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#72

Post by mst »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #14
squarefoot wrote: post #10

A server whose uptime goes to X years is a server that wasn't updated in X years. I'm proud of my old XigmaNAS (FreeBSD) ~15 months uptime years ago that only a blackout did interrupt (yep, I had no UPS), and I write this as a mostly Linux user, but I'm not sure it's a good thing to aim for in production or in anything connected to the Internet.

Yeah, the article links another post which talks about a machine with a 9 year uptime as if it's a good thing. 9 years without a NetBSD release update (or kernel upgrade) is not something to be proud of.

The fact that the system accidentally got neglected isn't, no.

The fact having having been neglected nobody realised because it Just Kept Working for close to a decade is still a testament to the software running on it.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#73

Post by mst »

appendix-rock wrote: post #24

I don’t buy this article. > Clients are often influenced by hype. A few years ago, it was "Linux is a toy." Now, it's "Why bhyve and not Proxmox?" They ask, "How can they sell FreeBSD? There's no AI, there's no Cloud, there's no Kubernetes, there's no blockchain – there's nothing!" I am very confident that this is more ‘fan fiction’ than the author would like to admit. The sort of hypothetical that someone cooks up o…

The vast majority of the comments on this article are people being religious about Linux.

I'll be over here running a mixture of Debian Stable and FreeBSD and wondering why everybody insists on getting so angry about these things.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#74

Post by matrss »

nxicvyvy wrote: post #29
Ygg2 wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever topic of FS arises, I always hear anecdata that btrfs/ext4 lost data and ZFS was smooth sailing.

Yes and not a single one of them can quote someone from this decade because it's a shitty internet myth that won't die.

I've had btrfs loose my laptops root filesystem, it just wouldn't mount anymore for no apparent reason. This was ~6 or 7 years ago. Reading the fs with some rescue command worked fine, the ssd continued to work for a few more years after formatting.

I've also had a weird situation after that where a micro SD formatted with btrfs on my desktop PC wouldn't mount on a raspberry pi, and vice-versa the same micro SD formatted on the pi wouldn't mount on the desktop. This was apparently caused by a difference in the used block sizes, which were mutually incompatible.

So I'll quote myself on this.

But also, my server is running a btrfs raid 1 due to the flexibility for resizing and that has been just fine for a few years now. It's not black and white and with backups I am not really worried.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#75

Post by sph »

parkcedar wrote: post #67
sph wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one really cares about the kernel internals, its origin or the license of it. What is prominent is the user-space components (i.e. shell and other binaries). macOS is closer to other BSDs than Linux is, as Linux usually ships with GNU libs and utilities.

You hardly notice the binaries though, especially since gnu cmd line utils are so similar anyway. You’d expect the c libs to be similar, but they’re not really (about as different as Mac to Linux anyway).

GNU utils are not similar to BSD utils. My hardest time adjusting to macOS was learning that some command line options I was so used to didn't exist or didn't work the same way.

Sure, you have ls and df, but they behave similarly only on the surface.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#76

Post by jmclnx »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #12

Switching your customers from Linux to BSD sounds like the opposite of the "boring" choice to me. The boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes. But I guess that wouldn't make an interesting conference talk.

>he boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes

Depends upon the distro, Slackware is boring, others not so much. With the churn with systemd, Wayland on Linux, things are far from boring.

On NetBSD, things cannot get any more boring. Plus I now believe Linux is owned by fortune 500 corporations and to me it is slowly heading down the same path as Microsoft Windows.

NetBSD has long support time lines for their releases. Configuration (admin) has not changed much at all. I think pkgsrc is great, I wish this could become a standard across various OSs :) All you need to do is find supported hardware. Thinkpads tend to be good, NetBSD on my T430 has no problems at all.

The only NetBSD complaint I have is I cannot yet figure out how to get wireguard working correctly as a client. But wg is still considered experimental so hoping the issues are resolved in 10.1. The existing docs I do not understand at all, but I always had a block in my head when it came to network admin.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#77

Post by aeadio »

parkcedar wrote: post #50
kstenerud wrote: post #37

I've also read the original blog that this article spawns from. The gist of it is: "I switched to BSD during Linux's bad period, and now I'm comfortable with it so I'll stick with it". And hey, more power to you. But the thing is, the world has moved on. Linux is stable now. Linux containerization and VM tech is good now. The storage technologies are cross-platform now (I've had zero data loss since using zfs). The m…

Mac isn’t really BSD, it’s a common misconception. It shares some of the userland code, but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). The userland has diverged quite significantly now too. Though, I guess it probably is closer to BSD than Linux

Not a misconception at all.

Mac OS X was essentially a continuation of NeXTSTEP, which is BSD with a new novel kernel. In fact, if you look into the research history of the Mach kernel at the core of XNU, it was intended as a novel kernel _for_ BSD. NeXT went and hired one of the key people behind Mach (Avie Tevanian), and he became one of the core systems guy that designed NeXTSTEP as a full OS around Mach.

Early in the proliferation of the Unix family, member systems went in one of two directions -- they based their OS on upstream AT&T Unix, or they based it on Berkley's BSD, and added their own features on top. NeXT was one of the latter. Famously, the original SunOS also was.

While Sun would eventually work closely with AT&T to unify their codebase with upstream, NeXT made no such change. NeXTSTEP stayed BSD-based.

The other extant BSDs like FreeBSD and NetBSD were also based directly on the original BSD code, through 386BSD.

If I have my history correct, Apple would later bring in code improvements from both NetBSD and FreeBSD, including some kernel code, and newer parts of the FreeBSD userland, to replace their older NeXT userland which was based on now-outdated 4.3BSD code. I think this is where the confusion comes in. People assume MacOS is a only "technically" a Unix by way of having borrowed some code from NetBSD and FreeBSD. They don't realize that it's fully and truly a BSD and Unix by way of having been built from NeXT and tracing its lineage directly through the original Berkeley Software Distribution. That code they borrowed was replacing older code, also BSD-derived.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#78

Post by aeadio »

parkcedar wrote: post #66
BSDobelix wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>but it’s a vastly different kernel (derived from the Mach microkernel). XNU is a combination of a FreeBSD-Kernel (Networking, Filesystem, etc) and a Mach-Kernel (scheduling, ipc, virtual-memory etc): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7GMHB3Plc8

Yes, but since it was initially created I believe a lot of it has been rewritten. Eg, the filesystem. I suspect the memory system is different these days too, since macOS handles compressed memory quite differently (though not sure how that gets implemented under the hood). FreeBSD is like a great grandparent, related but still very different.

Every extant Unix has been rewritten since the original AT&T code, Ship of Theseus style. We still consider them members of the Unix family, because they can trace their lineage directly. One could built a Git repo showing every code change from the original Unix release through modern day BSDs, if only we had granular commit info going back that far.

In fact, it's been partially done for FreeBSD, https://github.com/dspinellis/unix-history-repo

We could in principle do something similar for Darwin (if we had enough of the historical code), which is the core of MacOS, which is based on NeXT, which was based on BSD with a new kernel. That makes MacOS every bit as much a member of the Unix/BSD family as FreeBSD is.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#79

Post by hk1337 »

lproven wrote: post #8
hk1337 wrote: post #5

> One of Stefano Marinelli's NetBSD boxes sat quietly serving for a decade, because everyone forgot about it. This is how Unix is meant to be. I remember someone mentioning they did this with Linux back in 1994 or 1995. Not for a decade obviously but it had been running for at least a year with no reboots or needing maintenance

There's an order of magnitude difference between running for a year and a decade... That's a lot.

Well, yeah but also at this time Linux had not even been around half a decade.

My thought was more that maybe a lot of the issues people are having with Linux to push them to BSD is what we, developers collectively, have done to Linux over the last 2-3 decades.

Re: Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good

#80

Post by mardifoufs »

HL33tibCe7 wrote: post #12

Switching your customers from Linux to BSD sounds like the opposite of the "boring" choice to me. The boring choice would be to leave them on their functioning Linux boxes. But I guess that wouldn't make an interesting conference talk.

The term "boring" just means "stuff I'm familiar with" 99% of the time in online technical conversations. That's how stuff like PHP gets bundled with "boring tech" but node or similar are somehow seen as a complicated mess by some. It's just familiarity disguised as sound technical analysis lol.
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