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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#121

Post by overfeed »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #115
atmosx wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Better isolation, better security, but far fewer gists and shared config-files shared ok the Internet for common tasks. Docker comprehensively wkn thr popularity contest, and is often the more convenient solution because of it, in a worse is better way.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#122

Post by ijustlovemath »

hedora wrote: post #118

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 wi…

how about ansible?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#123

Post by hedora »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #122
hedora wrote: post #118

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 wi…

how about ansible?

I don’t have any experience with it, but it sounds plausible. What about FreeBSD / Unix native things, like syslog or jails?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#124

Post by GuestFAUniverse »

HackerThemAll wrote: post #117
sidkshatriya wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In real world scenarios, where file based backups fail, one needs to add at least lvm.

And only than those benchmarks would be more interesting to me.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#125

Post by favorited »

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

> The ZFS implementation is less buggy.

FreeBSD and Linux have been using the same implementation of ZFS for years.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#126

Post by QuantumNoodle »

I ran a TrueNAS server that was based on BSD, loved jails. Then TrueNAS started using debian so more application can run on it. Selfishly I like getting more utility from my server so this was a welcomed change. What industry is BSD used in now a days?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#127

Post by commandersaki »

adrian_b wrote: post #88
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 upgrad…

This looks to be a theme in FreeBSD, specifically tweaking mbuf numbers because of exhaustion [1], [2], [3], [4] (and not to mention any posted on the freebsd bug tracker). The fact that you have options to tweak mbufs and limits in the first place just doesn't seem like a well thought out design -- in Linux you never have to specify skbuff (Linux's mbuf equivalent) numbers for any reason. I don't even know if my issue was hardware specific or just a FreeBSD-ism to do with mbufs, but it is a class of issue that just doesn't exist in Linux.

[1] https://serverfault.com/questions/335461/pfsense-mbuf-full-w...

[2] https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/394876/how-to-fix-m...

[3] https://redmine.pfsense.org/issues/5553

[4] https://docs.netgate.com/pfsense/en/latest/hardware/tune.htm...

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#128

Post by joshstrange »

zenoprax wrote: post #67
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? 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 good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu).

Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparently being better than containers, it doesn't really matter, there isn't the ecosystem there.

FreeBSD might be as good as this blog author makes it out to be, and maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong possibility) but I can't help but feel it causes more friction than I'd like, it's just "slightly" harder to do anything. In the age of LLMs I have to tell it (or put it in my system prompt) "I'm using FreeBSD" or it will be give me Linux advice. It just feels like death by a thousand papercuts.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#129

Post by gsich »

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

What I really want is the Windows tool for that. Can't call it equivalent, because clunsy is way superior.

https://jagt.github.io/clumsy/index.html

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#130

Post by assimpleaspossi »

joshstrange wrote: post #128
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 good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu). Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparentl…

>>maybe I'm "holding it wrong" (always a strong possibility)

Yes. You are holding it wrong. And it's obvious from your comment.

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