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Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

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Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#81

Post by cturner »

yellow_and_gray wrote: post #39
near wrote: post #27

Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…

What stopped me from using FreeBSD a year ago was lack of automatic tab completion on the shell. I would like to try FreeBSD again. Does anyone know if this works now? edit: clarified the reason I ask is because I want to know.

You can change the shell for a user in /etc/passwd, or with the command chsh.

It's funny how little things like this affect where you go with systems. On the uni systems, emacs was set up to reformat your code by default (as you typed it in). This drove me bananas, and I didn't realise it was configurable. So I went off and found another editor, and I'm still using it.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#83

Post by malandrew »

near wrote: post #27

Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…

This is OT, but since you seem to know a fair bit about filesystem types and their trades and have an opinion on sane patching behavior, I have a question you might be able to answer:

Why aren't modern filesystems based on a content-addressable-store where the content is 100% separated from the organization of the filesystem itself? It seems to me like it would make more sense to have only one copy of a file ever saved and when modifications are made you get a new pointer to the changed file. Obviously it wouldn't make sense to do full copy on modifications for files over a certain size, but in this situation the filesystem could offer an abstraction over a patch and pointer to the original file until the system is idling and a full copy could be made.

The reason I ask about this is because it would make updating anything and rolling things back trivial since it would simply be a pointer change in the file hierarchy hash map from the new file to the old file and back again. Furthermore, such a system would give you dedupe for free and files could be marked for deletion only once the last pointer to the file in the CAS has been deleted.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#84

Post by Freaky »

sergiosgc wrote: post #52

A side question somewhat related to the theme: What features of ZFS can't be achieved with ext4 on top of LVM? I see lots of people longing for full disk encryption, mirroring, snapshots or foreign hard disk consolidation, all of which seem doable with ext4+LVM.

Snapshots with LVM still imply a relatively costly(?) quiescing of the filesystem for however long it takes to complete pending writes and perform the snapshot. This is certainly my experience with snapshots on UFS2 - they're supported, but you're not going to be too pleased performing them automatically from a cronjob every 15 minutes.

Snapshots can also be promoted to fully-fledged filesystems using cloning, which is very handy for spawning off fully-featured jail environments and for setting up boot environments for a host.

Filesystem replication. My primary backups involve using `zfs send` to maintain remote copies of my snapshots on another machine with minimal cost in bandwidth and disk IO.

Filesystem compression. My root pool is just 0.63x the size it would have been thanks to lz4, basically for free.

As X-Isence says, end-to-end data protection. Every bit of data and metadata are checksummed so any errors are detected, and if possible automatically repaired. Crucial metadata is duplicated even on single-disk configurations.

Copy-on-write semantics make for more robustness in face of problems - active data is never overwritten in-place. This also makes for much safer parity RAID than traditional approaches.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#85

Post by tw04 »

near wrote: post #27

Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…

Your post is self-contradicting. You tell people not to use PC-BSD if they "want to know how stuff works". You then complain that to get a desktop working on plain old FreeBSD... you have to actually configure it... and know how it works.

"I just apt-get install xfce and I'm done" isn't learning how anything works.

If you want a ready-made desktop, use PC-BSD. If you want to learn to install a desktop from scratch, use vanilla FreeBSD. However, don't claim you want to know how it works, then whine when you have to gasp actually configure it to work.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#86

Post by tedunangst »

near wrote: post #27

Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…

The Firefox issue is because gtk is brain damaged and sends the image to the x server, then reads it back, but it gets broken up into tiny chunks and causes a billion syscalls. You can fix it by recompiling x with larger socket buffers.

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#87

Post by robert_nsu »

ilolu wrote: post #16

I wanted to know about hosting solutions if I want to use FreeBSD. Linode, Digital Ocean don't support it. AWS and GCE have support, but it seems the kernel is provided by a FreeBSD maintainer rather than AWS or GCE. How stable is FreeBSD on AWS or GCE ?. And are there any companies using FreeBSD on AWS / GCE ?.

FYI- Azure also supports FreeBSD.

http://azure.microsoft.com/blog/2014/05/22/running-freebsd-i...

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#88

Post by _paulc »

spash wrote: post #76
mattzito wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The default shell in freebsd is probably still sh, which does not have tab completion. The Linuxes long ago moved to bash, which does. However, in the FreeBSD ports tree, I guarantee you there is a bash package you can install, and then you can just switch your shell to be bash instead of sh.

Few minor corrections as several posts in this thread suggest outright installing bash just to achieve tab completion in FreeBSD. The default root shell on FreeBSD is csh (tcsh) [1] and has been that way for at least 21 years (at least if I read the revision history [2] correctly, my own memories only go back about some 15 years). As per Wikipedia article, tcsh natively supports tab completion since about 1983 [3] (w…

...and /bin/sh has tab completion anyway (set -o emacs)!

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#89

Post by rob »

ilolu wrote: post #16

I wanted to know about hosting solutions if I want to use FreeBSD. Linode, Digital Ocean don't support it. AWS and GCE have support, but it seems the kernel is provided by a FreeBSD maintainer rather than AWS or GCE. How stable is FreeBSD on AWS or GCE ?. And are there any companies using FreeBSD on AWS / GCE ?.

I use Panix (panix.com) who also offers NetBSD and OpenBSD. They've been around for a long time.

http://www.panix.com/v-colo/plans.html

Re: Ask HN: Can we talk about FreeBSD vs. Linux?

#90

Post by ClashTheBunny »

malandrew wrote: post #83
near wrote: post #27

Like others have said, being unbiased is difficult, but I'll try. First, Linux v FreeBSD is really tough, so I will instead approach this from Debian v FreeBSD. I really like how easy Debian on the desktop is: install it, apt-get install xfce, and I have a nice desktop. It's very easy to add Adobe Flash, Steam, Skype, etc. The FreeBSD desktop isn't as nice. You can add things like Flash and Skype on FreeBSD, but you…

This is OT, but since you seem to know a fair bit about filesystem types and their trades and have an opinion on sane patching behavior, I have a question you might be able to answer: Why aren't modern filesystems based on a content-addressable-store where the content is 100% separated from the organization of the filesystem itself? It seems to me like it would make more sense to have only one copy of a file ever sav…

Plan 9 was designed this way. Except it's designed to never delete anything, so you don't have to worry about the garbage collection.

Camlistore and TahoeLAFS are both designed this way. But they are more of a content store than a file system.

In fact, BTRFS is implemented this way. The content and the metadata can be separately treated with mirrors vs raid. You can balance just the metadata or both data and metadata. When you convert an ext2/3/4 file system to BTRFS, it just sets up it's own metadata pointing to the same blocks that the ext used. You get a free snapshot of your data pre-conversion and it's all COW from then on. I believe the B-Tree of BTRFS is the metadata and the content never changes on disk until no more pointers exist. If you decide to go back, it just restores the superblock and the old data is still in the same spot. You would only regain that space after you delete the snapshot and the last pointers to the data are gone.

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