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DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

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Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#131

Post by felixgallo »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #85
xenophonf wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My reasons for using FreeBSD are a little more philosophical: - I want to have a stable base O/S to which I can always easily return. - I want to be able to customize installed packages in an easily scalable way. - I want a server O/S to be simple to maintain, relative to Windows or Solaris. - I want the goddamned documentation installed. During development it's difficult to get RHEL or Ubuntu back to a known-good se…

> I cut my teeth on NeXTSTEP, SunOS 4, and Slackware Linux That's the real reason. Everything else is rationalization added later. (Don't get me wrong, I've also started on Slackware. But sometimes you need to break old habits to learn something new.)

by this logic, everyone should move all software to node.js, and any complaints are rationalization, because it's newer than C.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#132

Post by alberth »

andrewthetechie wrote: post #127
sullrich wrote: post #62

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...

DO disabling journaling is a big deal.

What else has DO disabled and/or modified from a vanilla install?

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#133

Post by mst »

atmosx wrote: post #111
czk wrote: 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…

> I think that *BSDs should be avoided because they tend to be a lot slower than linux deployments on virtual machines.

Many virtualisation providers don't support it properly, but "should be avoided because my suppliers are stupid" is a terrible plan.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#134

Post by mst »

andrewthetechie wrote: post #127
sullrich wrote: post #62

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...

That deserves an explanation - you can backup non-ext2 linux partitions, surely? What have I misunderstood?

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#135

Post by caf »

woodman wrote: post #107
icebraining wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Linux has sysctl as well, and other parameters can be set by writing to the right files in /sys. For example, the maximum c-state can be set by writing to /sys/module/processor/parameters/max_cstate (if you have support enabled in the kernel).

The linux sysctl is a wrapper for kernel state represented in the file system, freebsd sysctl is direct to kernel. So that is nice, everything in one place. Before my switch to freebsd, I had been a linux user since 2000 - and while I was aware of the existence of sysctl, I don't remember seeing it used very often. It was much more common to see direct interaction with stuff in /proc (rockectraid, never again). Why i…

The /proc/sys/ and sysctl(2) methods are really just down to which syscall is used to talk to the kernel - either way it's just reading or writing a kernel-side data structure, there's no fundamental difference there.

The /proc/sys/ pseudo-filesystem interface has the advantage that it's discoverable. The sysctl(2) interface requires userspace to have knowledge of a swag of hardcoded ID numbers identifying each node in the sysctl tree.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#136

Post by shiftpgdn »

alberth wrote: post #132
andrewthetechie wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

DO disabling journaling is a big deal. What else has DO disabled and/or modified from a vanilla install?

DO modifies a lot of stuff on vanillas installs. They're one of the only providers I know of that removes the swap partition.

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#137

Post by oscargrouch »

atmosx wrote: post #112
xhrpost wrote: post #28

As a web developer who knows enough Linux to do minimum dev-ops, could anyone recommend some things worth playing around with in FreeBSD? Like "do this and see how easy it is vs Ubuntu!". Or are the gains more long term like better stability?

Yes. From my experience: * PF (default on OpenBSD, a fork exists on FreeBSD) configuration is way more human-readable than iptables. Makes a lot easier to create custom complex rulesets. * Documentation is much cleaner on FreeBSD (or OpenBSD) compared to GNU/Linux. Again helps you deploy complex solutions easily. * The upgrade process (using ports or pkg) is well documented, easy to execute[1]. * ZFS makes FreeBSD a…

+ 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

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#138

Post by woodman »

caf wrote: post #135
woodman wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The linux sysctl is a wrapper for kernel state represented in the file system, freebsd sysctl is direct to kernel. So that is nice, everything in one place. Before my switch to freebsd, I had been a linux user since 2000 - and while I was aware of the existence of sysctl, I don't remember seeing it used very often. It was much more common to see direct interaction with stuff in /proc (rockectraid, never again). Why i…

The /proc/sys/ and sysctl(2) methods are really just down to which syscall is used to talk to the kernel - either way it's just reading or writing a kernel-side data structure, there's no fundamental difference there. The /proc/sys/ pseudo-filesystem interface has the advantage that it's discoverable. The sysctl(2) interface requires userspace to have knowledge of a swag of hardcoded ID numbers identifying each node…

I haven't poked through the code, but the linux man page isn't encouraging: "use the /proc/sys interface instead" [0]

Compare that to the freebsd man page [1]

[0] http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man2/sysctl.2.html#NOTES

[1] https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=sysctl&sektion=3&m...

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#139

Post by TheDong »

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 with the VPS in the above way would allow you to use one of the provided disks and then bootstrap the install of another (this is how I installed gentoo on many providers that didn't "support" it)

DO's stance that you must use one of their images, you can't upload your own, and you can't even use your own kernel (I'm not kidding! If you "sudo apt-get update" to get a new kernel security update and reboot, DO will IGNORE your shiny new kernel because they hardcode the kernel as one they control. See [0]).

This is terrible. We shouldn't be happy that they're adding FreeBSD to the list of images they allow you to use, we should be showing, with our wallets, that their restrictive setup that doesn't allow you to touch anything outside of their tiny garden and exposes you to security issues is unacceptable. We should be using other providers, like Linode, AWS, and GCE, all of which allow bringing your own image in some form.

[0]: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digital-oce...

Re: DigitalOcean now supports FreeBSD

#140

Post by dhaivatpandya »

TheDong wrote: post #139

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…

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