Live data from Hacker News

FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

issue.freebsdfoundation.org

131–139 of 139 posts

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#131
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> “ From what I recall, the FreeBSD team made the right call at the time.” I’m not so sure. Given how unstable FreeBSD 5 (intro of new SMP) was, until it finally stabilized multiple years later at v8.0 - I’m not sure others would have that same sentiment. And seeing how DragonflyBSD performance is standing up to FreeBSD (and best’ing it times) even though they have a radically smaller developer community (and no corp…

FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE was announced January 19, 2003. Matt Dillon announced DragonFly BSD nearly 20 years ago on July,16 2003 FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE was announced Nov 25, 2009 You’re talking about events that took place over 13.5 years ago. On the benchmarks: Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks? Where are the measurements of network performance?

Here are some benchmarks,

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Complexity management is key in any project. Lots of successful forks reduce total complexity. NetBSD and OpenBSD are excellent examples — one could argue that their goals and innovations (in portability and security) would also be useful in the «mainline» FreeBSD, but that would explode complexity. The FreeBSD community is carefully watching progress across many forks and cherry-picking / importing a lot of the crea…

As an outsider, I've actually seen the most engagement between OpenBSD & DragonflyBSD. E.g., there's active exploration of bringing the Hammer2 filesystem from DragonflyBSD to OpenBSD. https://github.com/kusumi/openbsd_hammer2

I’m not sure what to make of it, but amusingly your link says “OpenBSD version of netbsd_hammer2”, which itself says “NetBSD version of freebsd_hammer2”, which in turn says “FreeBSD version of openbsd_hammer2”.

They’re all under the same profile so I think everyone is sharing?

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Work in a project with BSD-licensed stuff.

If you're fine with violating the license, then there is nothing stopping you from closing the source to GPL licensed software without a word of credit. I'm not sure what your point is.

No need to violate the license, just close the source and no outsider would know it's a fork.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#134

direct pdf link to avoid this obscure reader tool https://cdn.coverstand.com/33057/794483/9a09afdf5fb325213a55...

Thank you -- that is very handy!

The viewer is emblematic of FreeBSD itself, in a way.

"The major browsers have implemented rich native viewers for this industry-standard format now, that work on any OS, including ours. So what we will do is this: we will invent our own format and our own reader, done differently, with different controls. We will only have the time and manpower to implement, oh, maybe 10% of the features, but that doesn't matter."

"Hey! Why are people complaining about it? It works for us!"

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#135
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE was announced January 19, 2003. Matt Dillon announced DragonFly BSD nearly 20 years ago on July,16 2003 FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE was announced Nov 25, 2009 You’re talking about events that took place over 13.5 years ago. On the benchmarks: Where are the Apache, NginX, PostgreSQL and Redis benchmarks? Where are the measurements of network performance?

Here are some benchmarks, https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/

Which are a decade old?

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#136
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here are some benchmarks, https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/

Which are a decade old?

Oops, I was actually replying to the parent post about benchmarks from 2008.

https://www.dragonflybsd.org/performance/ Has one from 2012 and an update 2018 with a Threadripper 2990WX, though there is no comparison chart..

Oh.. here is a benchmark [0] from 2021, Dragonfly performs comparably with Ubuntu and FreeBSD 13 on an intel core i9 of some type. I have no idea whether these benchmarks reflect real world performance. I also don't know where and how much Dragonfly is used in 'production'.

[0] https://www.phoronix.com/review/corei9-freebsd13-dfly6

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're fine with violating the license, then there is nothing stopping you from closing the source to GPL licensed software without a word of credit. I'm not sure what your point is.

No need to violate the license, just close the source and no outsider would know it's a fork.

See clause 2 of both BSD licenses.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even OpenBSD has better wifi support. I'm able to use the WLAN adapter in my Pi 3 with OpenBSD, but it doesn't work in FreeBSD.

Didn't it used to be the case that a lot of FreeBSD devs used OSX while OpenBSD devs used OpenBSD and this dogfooding produced better device driver support on OpenBSD? I heard that somewhere many years ago, but it may be false.

Yes that's absolutely true. And sad. What did FreeBSD do now? They are trying to create an environment to run Linux WiFi drivers. It's so hard to get documentation and support to develop a WiFi driver, less and less people want to do it.

Re: FreeBSD at 30: Its secrets to success

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't the Alpha port the first chip it was ported to back in the 1990's? I know the Amiga people did their own thing but I don't think it was ever properly merged back upstream

First 64-bit CPU, second CPU of course after 386. Which I guess you mean.

I mean you can't "port" something to its first CPU. You'd be writing it for that CPU initially
Post reply on HN