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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#81

Post by c0balt »

atmosx wrote: post #75
krylon wrote: post #18

My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is t…

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart. The ZFS implementation is less buggy. [^1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet

That is not really accurate? Linux traffic control (tc, [0]) exists since Kernel 2.2. It can introduce traffic latency and a few other network conditions, like packet loss.

[0]: https://www.man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/tc.8.html

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#82

Post by frumplestlatz »

whizzter wrote: post #53
BirAdam wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just use podman.

Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container) since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal handling defaults. And this is part of the situation that's going to get worse, io_uring will become more popular in language runtimes…

Indeed, ideally we could get docker on FreeBSD using the same approach as is used on macOS — automatically run (one or more) Linux VMs under bhyve.

I wonder if FreeBSD ought to consider a WSL2-style approach to Linux binary compatibility, too.

Keeping the Linux syscall compatibility layer up-to-date has always been a resource problem, especially when syscalls depend on large, complex Linux kernel subsystems that just don’t map cleanly to FreeBSD kernel facilities.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#83

Post by allreduce »

atmosx wrote: post #75
krylon wrote: post #18

My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is t…

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? Yes. Emulate traffic latency using IPFW and dummynet[^1]. There is no Linux (or OpenBSD, NetBSD) counterpart. The ZFS implementation is less buggy. [^1]: https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?dummynet

You can emulate latency, packet errors, etc using netem tc [0] on Linux.

[0]: https://man.archlinux.org/man/tc-netem.8.en

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#84

Post by frumplestlatz »

pjmlp wrote: post #30
frumplestlatz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD. Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace. The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit,…

A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.

I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that — if we weren’t, we’d be using a different license.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#85

Post by frumplestlatz »

hideout_berlin wrote: post #62
frumplestlatz wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We weren’t abandoned by Apple — Apple never contributed to upstream. Darwin and OpenDarwin were APSL projects and never fed code back into FreeBSD. Using macOS meant we got laptop hardware that worked reliably, including Wi-Fi, running a more or less BSD-derived userspace. The lack of graphics and Wi-Fi driver support on the *BSDs is not Apple’s fault. It has always been a resource issue. Thanks to the AT&T lawsuit,…

do you remember opendarwin? i was also at puredarwin but the project seams death

Yes, and Apple did kill it, unfortunately — but it was never an effort to push code upstream into the BSDs.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#86

Post by kev009 »

commandersaki wrote: post #65

Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligen…

Intel has had a somewhat awkward relationship with FreeBSD forever. While they are forced to support it (for $reasons) they never have properly covered it.

I would say as of FreeBSD 12-13 most major issues are addressed from 1gig up to current 100g. There is an odd bug in 2.5g igc where some users have interface stalls whilst others like Netgate are shipping large numbers without issue, waiting to hear if this is firmware or not.

Source: I maintain several of the Intel drivers on a volunteer basis and used to send several Tbit/s to the Internet over them professionally.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#87

Post by bitwize »

freeopinion wrote: post #20
amadeuspagel wrote: post #8

> Over the years, FreeBSD has served me well. At a certain point it stepped down as my primary desktop - partly because I switched to Mac, partly because of unsupported hardware - but it never stopped being one of my first choices for servers and any serious workload. Not my idea of love. Maybe that hardware was supported on Linux. Switch from Linux to FreeBSD so that you can later switch to Mac when you get frustrat…

FreeBSD supports a much larger range of hardware than MacOS. It's a bit strange to bemoan hardware support, then switch OS and buy very specific hardware for that OS. Imagine quitting MacOS because it doesn't support Realtek RTL8188CUS.

Well it just so happens that the best hardware in the world for desktop use—literally years ahead of any competition—is made by the makers of macOS and is totally supported by macOS.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#88

Post by adrian_b »

commandersaki wrote: post #65

Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligen…

I do not believe that your problems are typical for FreeBSD servers.

I have been using FreeBSD servers for around 30 years. Most of them had Intel NICs and I have used at least 5 or 6 different kinds of Supermicro motherboards, both with Xeon and with Epyc.

Most servers have worked 24/7, without being rebooted for years and without having any minute of downtime except when I did some hardware upgrade or kernel upgrade.

I do not doubt that you had the problems described, but there must be some very unusual circumstances that have caused this. I would not be surprised if there was some problem with the version of Supermicro BIOS of your motherboards, and not with FreeBSD, because I have seen many bugs in Supermicro firmware. Or perhaps you had some buggy version of Intel NICs.

There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the bugs.

Like any other operating system, FreeBSD also implements workarounds for peripheral interfaces with known bugs, but because it has a much smaller user base also its database of bugs includes much fewer bugs, typically only those that had been reported by FreeBSD users. Because of this, I have seen cases when some hardware devices did not work well in FreeBSD, while they worked well in Linux, and the reason was always because Linux knew that they must not be used in the standard way, but it applied the corresponding workaround for their bugs.

Only Windows is shielded from the problems caused by bugs, because the hardware vendors write themselves the Windows device drivers and include in them any required workarounds for their bugs.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#89

Post by pjmlp »

frumplestlatz wrote: post #84
pjmlp wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A consequence of the license, which allows Apple and Sony to do exactly that.

I and other FreeBSD developers are okay with that — if we weren’t, we’d be using a different license.

Looking to some complaints doesn't feel like everyone is.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#90

Post by Gud »

crdrost wrote: post #11
SanjayMehta wrote: post #7

I used to but driver support for wireless devices was so inconsistent I had to move to Linux.

That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)

Linux had better WiFi 20 years ago than FreeBSD has today.

I still prefer FreeBSD.

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