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DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

digitalocean.com

161–170 of 204 posts

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#161
post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If DO users don't need the ability to upload their own images, why is this a problem?

Read the link. There are over a thousand votes and six pages of comments of people saying "this is a problem for me".

The one that's for custom images, not just kernels, is actually even higher up at over 3k votes and second highest on the list currently: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea...

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#162

The fact that DO had to make this announcement at all is a sign that things have gotten worse for VPSs. Before, when a company provided Xen or Kvm, you generally would get to have low-level access such as the ability to virtually connect to a serial port or vnc session of your box as it booted. You also, typically, could provide your own ISO images. Even if you couldn't provide your own iso, being able to interact wi…

You can select the kernel your droplet uses via their admin interface. Just remember to update the VM first.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#163

The fact that DO had to make this announcement at all is a sign that things have gotten worse for VPSs. Before, when a company provided Xen or Kvm, you generally would get to have low-level access such as the ability to virtually connect to a serial port or vnc session of your box as it booted. You also, typically, could provide your own ISO images. Even if you couldn't provide your own iso, being able to interact wi…

> Before, when a company provided Xen or Kvm, you generally would get to have low-level access such as the ability to virtually connect to a serial port or vnc session of your box as it booted. You also, typically, could provide your own ISO images.

It's remarkable that you start your sentence with "before". As a prgmr.com user, I can still get an out-of-the-band console and run my own kernel without any fanfare. (no affiliation at all, just a happy user)

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#164
post #111
post #56

Just deployed a FreeBSD droplet and I'm not sure if it's just because the host network is busier than my other droplets, but I seem to be getting about half the network performance that I can in a default linux droplet. They are using Virtio, which is good since it doesn't require hardware emulation like the E1XXX devices on KVM. I should probably use a better test than cachefly but just wondering if theres any known…

It's not only DO. I had to create a Linux VPS in order to run a Sinatra application because when deployed on FreeBSD it took more than 60 seconds to send a response to the remote API and the connection was timed out! After performing some tests[2] I figure out that the problem was not FreeBSD per se, but the FreeBSD deployment on the specific virtual server... I think that *BSDs should be avoided because they tend to…

FreeBSD often has better performance than Linux when both are properly hosted. I think the lesson is more like "when a provider is new to a particular system, there will be problems; for production systems use a provider that's experienced at supporting the kind of system you want to use".

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+ Dtrace + Jails + Capsicum [1] + Netmap [2] + Most performing network stack + Resource Management (pretty low memory usage) + The userspace tools come with the source (no GNU/Linux duality) + Clang/LLVM as default compiler stack [1] - https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=capsicum&sektion=4 [2] - https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=netmap&sektion=4

I never understood the main differences between jails and chroots. Would you be willing to explain?

FreeBSD jails are like a really mature, full-featured version of LXC as opposed to "just a chroot". In addition to being chroot that provides real filesystem isolation without many of the security issues of a Linux chroot, it also has CPU and memory limits, disk quotas, network isolation, root privilege isolation, all the magical ZFS goodness (provided you're running the jail on ZFS). It's really, really nice.

This is a pretty good overview: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operating-system-level_virtual...

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#166

The fact that DO had to make this announcement at all is a sign that things have gotten worse for VPSs. Before, when a company provided Xen or Kvm, you generally would get to have low-level access such as the ability to virtually connect to a serial port or vnc session of your box as it booted. You also, typically, could provide your own ISO images. Even if you couldn't provide your own iso, being able to interact wi…

This is the reason why I no longer have VPSes at DigitalOcean, sometimes I couldn't update my CentOS kernels when important updates were available because DO lagged for a few days in making them available.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#167
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some DO users will want this, others who aren't DO customers will also want this. As a growing company DO want to attract as many new customers as possible. They're still in early stages though, I'm sure this is in the pipeline.

Why would a growing company want to attract as many new customers as possible? This seems to be a fast lane to default. Growing company wants as many profitable customers which can be served as possible. Or should growing companies try to offer everything for all?

Growing companies generally want to attract as many new customers as feasible because it generates buzz, and gives them a shot at becoming the go-to place for their kind of service.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#168

The fact that DO had to make this announcement at all is a sign that things have gotten worse for VPSs. Before, when a company provided Xen or Kvm, you generally would get to have low-level access such as the ability to virtually connect to a serial port or vnc session of your box as it booted. You also, typically, could provide your own ISO images. Even if you couldn't provide your own iso, being able to interact wi…

There are plenty of companies that will let you upload your own images. It's not very convenient. Provider's images are somewhat easier to use.

The best solution is to have maintainers of the OS prepare cloud distributions. Many already do for AWS or OpenStack. Our own 'cperciva is responsible for EC2-compatible version of FreeBSD.

Until this becomes a standard, there's nothing wrong with partial solutions. I created a FreeBSD droplet right away.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn't you do a bootstrapped install if you really wanted it? https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Install_from_existing_L...

Someone wrote a script to do just that: https://github.com/gh2o/digitalocean-debian-to-arch

Tried it, works really well.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am also seeing really poor write speeds when comparing to my Linux droplets. 11MB/sec vs. 216MB/sec on Linux

With FreeBSD, in order to be able to have automatic backups work, we were required to disable journaling on the disk. This will cause the disk speed to be much slower than our Linux distributions. If you wish to have higher disk speeds, but not use backups, we recommend for you to remount your disk with journaling. https://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/articles/gjournal-desktop/con...

> required to disable journaling on the disk

Shouldn't this make it much faster as the FS no longer maintains a journal?

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