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FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

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Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#61
post #53

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. 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, s…

At we use ZFS for exactly this. Functional, always 'on' backups to the hosting center next door (we have some nice single-mode fiber running to our cabinet there.)

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#62
post #41

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…

We have a preliminary version of pfSense running on EC2 (mostly to front Amazon's VPC offering.)

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#63
post #58
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

I don't see the problem.

Linux mindshare is smaller that Microsoft mindshare, too

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#64
post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That analogy doesn't really hold, since Python is more popular than Ruby, while FreeBSD is much less popular than Linux.

I'm surprised. I see more Ruby these days (all the online learning courses i.e.: codeacademy, etc). Where I live, you won't have trouble finding Rails developers but not so much when it comes to Python. Github is filled with probably more Ruby than Python.

Python is more popular, Ruby is more trendy and visible.

http://www.langpop.com/

http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index....

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

At this point, the amount of complete data losses I've seen on the LKML makes me wonder why anyone wants to promote BTRFS as being better than anything I would want to use for things approaching production.

I may be an old Solaris hand now but ZFS works. Now, not in the future, my home fileservers on FreeBSD have worked for ages and had no issues. Unlike the many complete losses on BTRFS on Linux that I see happening time and time again. SuSE might be promoting BTRFS, but objectively I can't agree with their decision.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#66
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

For OpenBSD at least, I'm pretty sure the practice of only accepting code patches that have accompanying man page patches when it changes behavior has something to do with it.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#67

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.

People who compare zfs and btrfs and even put them on the same level, are usually people who have no idea about neither of them.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#68

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.

Runs wonderfully on Rackspace Cloud. Their default images are legit too.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#69

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.

You can run FreeBSD in PV mode as well. Well, it will require installing in HVM mode, recompiling kernel (commands in terminal, commands not lines) and rebooting. FreeBSD 10.0 has better support of DomU and KVM Guest.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#70
post #53

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. 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, s…

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

This a recent Ubuntu system (ie not using development trees etc)

    $ btrfs send --help
    usage: btrfs send  

        btrfs send [-v] [-i ] [-p ] 
            Send the subvolume to stdout.

    $ btrfs receive --help
    usage: btrfs receive  

        btrfs receive [-v] [-i ] 
            Receive subvolumes from stdin.
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