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FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

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Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#51

Post by GalacticDomin8r »

deno wrote: post #40
kbenson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I really had to use a BSD (OpenBSD) system for more than some simple tasks, I was blown away. There's a definite feel of design , as opposed to a large set of features and interfaces that happen to work together to varying degrees as in Linux. And the man pages. Oh, how wondrous they were. This first thing I had to do was learn to NOT google for how to accomplish something, but just read the man page.…

> Note: One the reasons the OpenBSD ifconfig man page is so big is because on OpenBSD ifconfig does the job of multiple Linux utils, because it makes sense to have ifconfig control all the interface state. https://linux.die.net/man/8/ip https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iproute2

More addon tools simply proves the point.

Task / BSD / Linux

set ip / ifconfig / ifconfig or now "ip" which is extremely confusing

wifi / ifconfig / iwconfig

speed / ifconfig / miitool or ethtool

duplex / ifconfig / miitool or ethtool

vlan / ifconfig / vlan

wol / ifconfig / miitool or ethtool

bridge / ifconfig / brctl

link aggregation / ifconfig / flags while loading module OR use distro network config scripts and restart all networking or reboot server

Want find out which nic is occupying ethX perhaps for tuning or scripting etc?

Linux = complicated, by distro/version

FreeBSD = nic by device eg em0

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#53

Post by lsc »

kostya-kow wrote: post #38
joshbaptiste wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Two reasons I recently switched to FreeBSD on my home servers, Dtrace and ZFS. In GNU/Linux I would need sort combination of strace,mpstat,ltrace,vmstat,iostat etc.. to find out the the things that a simple Dtrace script can tell me and also without dramatically affecting a running daemon process as the ptrace* system calls do.

Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. Also Dtrace & ZFS originally come from Solaries, so they are not FreeBSD projects. The only reason they do not work on Linux is because of license problems which Sun created.

>Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS.

btrfs does not even try to solve the problem I want zfs for; snapshots over the network.

You see, when you deal with a large amount of storage (especially if you deal with that storage as block devices that run arbitrary filesystems, and not just files on a filesystem) the bottleneck for backups becomes disk bandwidth, not network bandwidth, so things like rsync don't help much.

ZFS snapshots over the network? those help rather a lot. Unlike rsync and stuff, it saves me disk bandwidth, not just network bandwidth. Unlike inotify-based systems, I don't need to have knowledge of the filesystems I'm replicating.

(I know I harp on this a lot... I just want to point out that btrfs, no matter how good it is for the problems it attempts to solve, isn't even trying to solve the problem I need ZFS for.)

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#54

Post by GalacticDomin8r »

profquail wrote: post #44
kostya-kow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. Also Dtrace & ZFS originally come from Solaries, so they are not FreeBSD projects. The only reason they do not work on Linux is because of license problems which Sun created.

"license problems" ∈ "problems" One thing I like about FreeBSD, and the BSDs in general, is that they don't suffer from such problems. It's odd that Oracle (who now own Sun's IP) paid to develop a whole new filesystem (btrfs) for Linux instead of just changing the licensing terms for ZFS. It would be nice to have a really good, Apache-licensed filesystem that could run across Linux, OS X, BSD, and Solaris.

Actually there is HammerFS. Porters welcome, I'd love to see it more widespread.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#55

Post by cperciva »

emaste wrote: post #41
ejdyksen wrote: post #28

The one place I'd like to see FreeBSD run better is on Amazon EC2. Last I looked at the effort, it was subverting the VM mode used for Windows EC2 instances to boot FreeBSD. Unfortunately, this means paying the Windows price for instances.

Yes - the Foundation is interested in ensuring FreeBSD works well in both virtualization guest and host capacities. Newer EC2 instance types don't tie the Windows license fee to HVM mode and FreeBSD can be run on those, for no additional cost: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00AA25MLK . The Foundation would like to see FreeBSD available on the other EC2 tiers without additional fees and is investigating altern…

FWIW, while the AWS Marketplace only lists cc1.4xlarge, cg1.4xlarge, cc2.8xlarge, and hi1.4xlarge, my native-HVM AMIs also run on cr1.8xlarge, hs1.8xlarge, m3.xlarge, and m3.2xlarge.

The only instance types where you need to pay the Windows tax are m1., m2., c1.*, and t1.micro (although in some regions the Windows tax for t1.micro is free). Unfortunately, this set includes all of the smallest/cheapest instance types, and thus the ones people want to use most often...

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#56

Post by inopinatus »

ejdyksen wrote: post #28

The one place I'd like to see FreeBSD run better is on Amazon EC2. Last I looked at the effort, it was subverting the VM mode used for Windows EC2 instances to boot FreeBSD. Unfortunately, this means paying the Windows price for instances.

This is the only reason I'm still developing for a Linux target. Unfortunately it is a compelling reason.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#57

Post by inopinatus »

emaste wrote: post #42
trippy_biscuits wrote: post #39

I absolutely adore FreeBSD. I work in linux these days because it's easier to bundle and distribute an upgradeable (binary distribution) linux appliance. I will run back to FreeBSD as soon as possible.

Once pkgng is available in a release pkgng will really improve the binary upgrade case, and the multiple repository support will also be of interest to anyone deploying an appliance using a number of stock packages and a few custom ones.

This, plus compatibility for the low-cost non-defenestrated EC2 instances will finally provide a realistic alternative to the huge farms of Ubuntu currently haunting AWS.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#58

Post by rodgerd »

bitwize wrote: post #30
GalacticDomin8r wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC"

"BSD people do what they do because they love Unix. Linux people do what they do because they hate Microsoft." --Theo de Raadt

And right here we see why BSD mindshare is a fraction of Linux mindshare: managing to outperform Linux in the "arrogant, condescending nerd" factor.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#59

Post by runlevel1 »

286c8cb04bda wrote: post #47
kostya-kow wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. Also Dtrace & ZFS originally come from Solaries, so they are not FreeBSD projects. The only reason they do not work on Linux is because of license problems which Sun created.

> Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. It may be awesome, but I'd say "soon" is a pretty optimistic timeline. Our testing pretty conclusively demonstrated that btrfs was still a long way from production-ready; We've seen numerous problems with deadlocks; Filling up a filesystem pretty much ruins it forever -- And these are not new problems.

Indeed, "soon" is taking a little longer than expected:

http://lwn.net/Articles/238655/

As far as I can tell, those forecasts have almost always come from outside the project. I don't recall Chris Mason ever saying that it's right around the corner.

In fact, searching for "soon" on the Btrfs wiki produces 0 results.

It's still a very active project, but there's still a lot of work to be done.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#60

Post by justin66 »

self wrote: post #37
kbenson wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first time I really had to use a BSD (OpenBSD) system for more than some simple tasks, I was blown away. There's a definite feel of design , as opposed to a large set of features and interfaces that happen to work together to varying degrees as in Linux. And the man pages. Oh, how wondrous they were. This first thing I had to do was learn to NOT google for how to accomplish something, but just read the man page.…

"Linux doesn't have man pages. It has boy pages." -- Glen Pritchett.

I've always had the strong preference for BSD documentation as well. But you know what's crazy? The guy who coordinates the Linux man-pages project, Michael Kerrisk, is definitely one of the greatest technical writers out there. His book "The Linux Programming Interface" is fantastic.

It'd be interesting to know why the BSD man pages are so much better.

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