Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD?
How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? It's notably absent from all the job listings.
Why I love FreeBSD
141–150 of 270 posts
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#142Can we say FreeBSD is more secure than Linux, because it’s smaller and less of a target? Not clear!
Rule of thumb, its not. Common stuff like address randomization is a recent default, afaik still doesnt have random process ids, and the base permissions arent stellar. However I would prefer jails any day of the week vs the clusterf** that are namespaces and cgroups.
How many remotely exploitable zero days has FreeBSD had in its init system this decade?
SystemD has to be in the dozens at this point.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#143Earlier quoted context omitted.
A Logitech FullHD camera on USB, but I doubt that the problem was camera-specific. I believe that I would have seen the same behavior on any high-resolution USB camera. In FreeBSD, the command required for recording was very simple and it worked flawlessly. In Linux, it was more complex and there were various stuttering problems at maximum resolution. I am still using those cameras, but I have not tried them again in…
I am sorry, I have a hard time accepting this level of detail, acknowledging it was half a decade ago. In a nutshell, you content that FreeBSD running on the same hardware as "a linux" performed better with camera operations. However, you did not specify even a specific camera model, or the interface(s) used to interact with the camera. I have zero issue accepting that a BSD is better than a linux at things, pretendi…
I have already said that it was an USB camera, using the UVC protocol, and that it had FullHD resolution. Nothing else really matters about the interface.
FreeBSD has a dedicated service for USB cameras, webcamd, and it worked very well for capturing video and audio at maximum resolution, and without interference from any other programs that were running concurrently on the server. As I have said, in Linux not only the required configuration was more complex, but I tried several programs and all had stutter problems at FullHD resolution (while other programs were also running on the computer). That was the status at that time. Now, many kernel versions later, I assume that such problems no longer exist, at least not with old cameras.
I do not see what is not tracking for you in this example. It is not an isolated example, for many years FreeBSD was known to have less problems than Linux in handling video streams and audio streams with low latency and constant throughput. More recently, Linux has also improved, but in the past unreliable performance with certain video/audio devices was not unusual (i.e. where other programs running concurrently caused video/audio drops or delays).
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#144Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD? How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? It's notably absent from all the job listings.
Well, I mean... Netflix is the example I think most people have heard of:
https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-...
But it's still a pretty small market share.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#145Earlier quoted context omitted.
I do not believe that your problems are typical for FreeBSD servers. I have been using FreeBSD servers for around 30 years. Most of them had Intel NICs and I have used at least 5 or 6 different kinds of Supermicro motherboards, both with Xeon and with Epyc. Most servers have worked 24/7, without being rebooted for years and without having any minute of downtime except when I did some hardware upgrade or kernel upgrad…
This looks to be a theme in FreeBSD, specifically tweaking mbuf numbers because of exhaustion [1], [2], [3], [4] (and not to mention any posted on the freebsd bug tracker). The fact that you have options to tweak mbufs and limits in the first place just doesn't seem like a well thought out design -- in Linux you never have to specify skbuff (Linux's mbuf equivalent) numbers for any reason. I don't even know if my iss…
While you are right that it would be better to never need tweaking the number of buffers, all your links show such a problem caused by the same application, the firewall pf.
I assume that for some reason pf consumes more buffers than other applications, so it is likely to cause such problems. So pf users should preemptively change the default configuration.
I have never used pf, because I prefer the native FreeBSD firewall, both to pf and to the Linux firewall.
With the native firewall and with the many other networking applications that I have run, I have never seen buffer exhaustion, and like I have said, the mean time between reboots was well above a year.
FreeBSD and the other *BSDs have always been famous for not needing reboots, even after years of continuous operation. For this goal, avoiding memory fragmentation caused by dynamic allocation is essential. Thus static allocation for various kinds of resources might be necessary.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#146My home server has been running FreeBSD for ten years now, and it has never let me down. Except for one time I got fresh with /dev/speaker and triggered a spontaneous reboot (I don't know if it's FreeBSD's fault or the hardware, though). I delayed upgrading to 15.0 after it was released, but last weekend I finally did it, and it left me wondering why I hadn't done it sooner, because it went quickly and smoothly. Is t…
I think the main difference is that Linux simply has more hardware support than FreeBSD.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#147Ok, where are the companies using FreeBSD? How do you get hired if you do happen to have proper FreeBSD skills? It's notably absent from all the job listings.
Well, I mean... Netflix is the example I think most people have heard of: https://freebsdfoundation.org/end-user-stories/netflix-case-... But it's still a pretty small market share.
Word is that NetApp and Juniper are using FreeBSD.
What these have in common is that they rely heavily on FreeBSD's I/O performannce and capabilities which is said to be head and shoulders above Linux.
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#148Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are various niche applications where Debian or any Linux are worse than FreeBSD. For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD. The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has. I have a tape drive, and to be able to use it like I want I had to move it to a FreeBSD server. Some years…
> I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years, and they have worked 24/7 with no downtime and no rebooting, and this includes servers connected directly to the Internet, which implement firewalls, routers and various services, like NTP, DNS servers and proxies, e-mail servers, web servers and proxies etc. Same. We've got qmail config files with 2006 as the mtime
"with no downtime and no rebooting"
So, no patching. I used to boast about my NetWare server uptimes but that is so noughties 8)
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#149Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am sorry, I have a hard time accepting this level of detail, acknowledging it was half a decade ago. In a nutshell, you content that FreeBSD running on the same hardware as "a linux" performed better with camera operations. However, you did not specify even a specific camera model, or the interface(s) used to interact with the camera. I have zero issue accepting that a BSD is better than a linux at things, pretendi…
I have already said that it was an USB camera, using the UVC protocol, and that it had FullHD resolution. Nothing else really matters about the interface. FreeBSD has a dedicated service for USB cameras, webcamd, and it worked very well for capturing video and audio at maximum resolution, and without interference from any other programs that were running concurrently on the server. As I have said, in Linux not only t…
That’s fair. I’m struggling to understand how Linux had a harder time interfacing with a USB byte stream than a bsd would. A model for the camera would be great!
Re: Why I love FreeBSD
#150Earlier quoted context omitted.
btrfs is suffering from a lot of old bad publicity and some poor design decisions around RAID. But by now it is a great file system if you don't go near RAID5/6. btrfs has its flaws (ZFS has its own flaws!). However: - It's used a lot, especially by facebook and Redhat (on fedora) - Gets a lot of testing - Sees a lot of bug fixes - Has a lot of features I haven't read btrfs code but given that it is a popular file sy…
btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no, thanks. https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems
Last I tried zfs was far far worse on reads arc couldn't satisfy, and all writes