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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#111

Post by irishcoffee »

adrian_b wrote: post #106
irishcoffee wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Some years ago I was using a surveillance camera that was much easier to use in FreeBSD than in Linux, if you wanted to record good quality video and audio. I have not tried more recently to use such cameras in Linux, to see if now the recording quality is better. This example seems very hand-wavy. What camera?

A Logitech FullHD camera on USB, but I doubt that the problem was camera-specific. I believe that I would have seen the same behavior on any high-resolution USB camera. In FreeBSD, the command required for recording was very simple and it worked flawlessly. In Linux, it was more complex and there were various stuttering problems at maximum resolution. I am still using those cameras, but I have not tried them again in…

I am sorry, I have a hard time accepting this level of detail, acknowledging it was half a decade ago.

In a nutshell, you content that FreeBSD running on the same hardware as "a linux" performed better with camera operations. However, you did not specify even a specific camera model, or the interface(s) used to interact with the camera.

I have zero issue accepting that a BSD is better than a linux at things, pretending otherwise is foolish. However, this specific example isn't tracking.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#112

Post by c-c-c-c-c »

aap_ wrote: post #100

I was using FreeBSD (after NetBSD) as my primary system for a while in school (no, i can't watch this youtube video, flash doesn't run on FreeBSD). i still use it for my home server, it's just cozy.

that makes no sense, youtube hasn’t used flash in ages. If you use any modern browser on freebsd you’d be able to play the video.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#113

Post by c-c-c-c-c »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #50
ComputerGuru wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that no longer necessary? Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice?

> Doesn't linuxulator + podman suffice? No it is not reliable enough. Some syscalls not implemented, there are edge case issues with procfs etc. Best to execute in a Linux VM.

it’s exceedingly rare that programs dont work with linuxulator, i use vivado daily and you can play games through linux steam and proton that way.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#114

Post by dwrodri »

Serious FreeBSD question: I like a lot of what FreeBSD promises, but have been hesitant to make the leap for my home server as I enjoy hosting game servers via steamcmd. I know FreeBSD has Linux binary compatibility, but I am unsure how this would play out for all of my hosting needs. Also, I have some old Nvidia GPUs in this machine, which I might get rid of as they are no longer supported by the latest releases of ML packages, but I also might keep them around for self-teaching CUDA.

How do FreeBSD users get around the inconveniences associated with the "the rest of the world" running on Linux?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#115

Post by HackerThemAll »

atmosx wrote: post #77
zenoprax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it…

Lack of docker support? Docker is available on macOS through emulation yes but bhyve is a thing… so why not? :-)

Docker is a concept resembling FreeBSD's jails that were introduced in year 2000, having much better isolation, much better security than Docker has had for a long time (perhaps even now jails are still superior to Docker).

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#116

Post by atmosx »

c0balt wrote: post #81
atmosx wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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

Hmm kind of... I was referring to the fact that dummynet models pipes with a fixed bandwidth and centralized scheduler. Packets are released according to very high precision transmission timing. This means that serialization delay, queue buildup, and link behavior are simulated in a way that resembles real network conditions. Dummynet can provide a highly deterministic timing and queue behavior, which made it popular in networking research and WAN emulation experiments. TC cannot do that with the same accuracy.

I think much like other tools, think SELinux vs OpenBSD (unveil, etc) TC is more flexible (does more things) but there are _some things_ that can't do, and even for things both can do *BSD solutions are much simpler.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#117

Post by HackerThemAll »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #93
shrubble wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The btrfs code quality seems less than ZFS, based on the reports I have read.

btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID. But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However: - It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on fedora) - Gets a lot of testing - Sees a lot of bug fixes - Has a lot of features I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular file sy…

btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no, thanks.

https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#118

Post by hedora »

Hey; Linux refugee here.

I want to have a bunch (5-10) of freebsd cattle-style servers to run a service on.

What’s the preferred infrastructure as code style approach to setting them up?

Some will be bare metal with kvm console access. Some will be VMs. They will be heterogeneous and not in one DC.

I probably don’t need zfs for this application (raw iops matter more than snapshots, etc).

I have previous experience with kubernetes, and am not interested in using it again.

Monitoring, logging, deterministic “zero to working” install and updates are probably the main requirements.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#119

Post by MarkusWandel »

adrian_b wrote: post #101
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…

There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD. For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has. I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server. Some years…

Cameras? I suppose the world still has some weird cameras that need proprietary/weird drivers, but for all intents and purposes: USB cameras are UVC and work with a generic driver, and IP cameras are OnVIF and work with ffmpeg. I can't imagine the latter having any OS dependencies as far as Linux/BSD/Mac/Windows is concerned. Quality is fine - I have a bunch recording 24/7 with high quality audio and video.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#120

Post by commandersaki »

dewarrn1 wrote: post #69
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…

Hail u/cperciva.

Or rather all hail u/cperciva for freebsd-update.
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