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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#151

Post by MarkusWandel »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #56
MarkusWandel wrote: post #49

Early in my Unix-ish at home journey (26-ish years ago) I tried FreeBSD. It was so Unix because, well, it is. An operating system, not a collection of parts. I found at the time in Linux land Debian felt similar. But there is always pressure for more features, more bloat. In Linux, on the plus side, I can plug in some random gadget and in most cases it just works. And any laptop that's a few years old, you can just i…

> But the downside is enormous bloat If you think Linux can have "enormous bloat" then Windows bloat by the same standards is terrifyingly humongous (and slow!).

Well, all those years ago, my testbed for installing and trying out FreeBSD was a 486 with 8MB of memory. That was a heck of a machine compared to the ones BSD grew up on, and it ran great. No GUI on that setup of course, but all the Unixy stuff... vi editor, C toolchain, NFS etc.

I don't know what's the minimum system to run no-GUI mainline Linux on these days. I'm sure BSD has gotten bloated too, but I'll bet not as much.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#152

Post by veegee »

adrian_b wrote: post #101
krylon wrote: post #18

My 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…

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…

[dead]

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#153

Post by estebank »

c-c-c-c-c wrote: post #112
aap_ wrote: post #100

I was using FreeBSD (after NetBSD) as my primary system for a while in school (no, i can't watch this youtube video, flash doesn't run on FreeBSD). i still use it for my home server, it's just cozy.

that makes no sense, youtube hasn’t used flash in ages. If you use any modern browser on freebsd you’d be able to play the video.

I'd infer that the GP is talking about some time back and they are no longer in school.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#154

Post by olivierestsage »

Around 10 years ago, I picked up an old Thinkpad T42, put FreeBSD on it, and had an amazing experience. Actually used it as a daily driver for a while, which seems crazy in retrospect, but I enjoy trying to work within that kind of constraint sometimes. I miss it! This post rekindles the flame...

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#155

Post by adiabatichottub »

aforwardslash wrote: post #135
aborsy wrote: post #110

Can 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.

  sysctl kern.randompid=1
Oddly enough, not in the sysctl(3) manual

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#156

Post by TacticalCoder »

jbverschoor wrote: post #80
whizzter wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My current home server passed 10 years in the autnum, but I've been running FreeBSD on servers since around 2000. The main gripe is probably Docker and/or software depending on Linux-isms that can't be run natively without resorting to bhyve or smth alike that.

Exactly the reason why I switched from FreeBSD to Debian, 25 years ago

The difference compared to a quarter of a century ago is that hardware virtualization is an ubiquitous thing now and that machines go so much faster that you don't even realize you're running in a VM anymore: it's pretty much transparent. I run Docker on my Linux servers inside a VM. There's no way I let Docker touch the bare metal, not with a ten foot pole.

If people want or need to run Docker on FreeBSD, they can run a Linux VM under bhyve.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#157

Post by TacticalCoder »

righthand wrote: post #105
krylon wrote: post #18

My 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…

FreeBsd is Systemd free.

I'm using Linux since the Slackware-on-a-CDRom days and systemd is a lost cause: it only got worse and worse and only kept meddling more and more into the Linux ecosystem.

The XZ "I only work on systemd distro" backdoor was the final straw (people are going to say it's unrelated but the fact is there: non-systemd Linux distro weren't affected).

I've been gradually switching my workflow to VMs and containers and my idea is to, eventually, run the VMs under FreeBSD's bhyve instead of running them from a systemd Linux distro (Proxmox in my case).

At long last I should soon be, once again, totally free of systemd (last time it was before it existed).

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#158

Post by adrian_b »

irishcoffee wrote: post #149
adrian_b wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

I think that it was the Logitech C920, which is still available.

But like I have said, I do not think that the model mattered much. IIRC the camera had an internal video encoder, because otherwise uncompressed FullHD video would not pass through USB 2.0.

The differences between FreeBSD and Linux at that time were at 2 levels. Regarding the user interface, FreeBSD happened to include in the base system programs dedicated for using such a camera, so their use was very simple. On Linux I had to search and install a suitable package, and those that were available were more general video applications and because of that their configuration to do the specific thing that I needed was more complex.

Besides the simpler interface, there was the stuttering problem on Linux, which was caused by the scheduling policies of the kernel. Perhaps it would have been possible on Linux to find a way to ensure a higher priority for the video and audio handling, to not be preempted by the concurrent programs running on the server, but since on FreeBSD everything worked fine out of the box there was no reason for me to investigate how that could be done on Linux.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#159

Post by waynesonfire »

I just hope FreeBSD dosen't get bit by the Rust in the kernel initative. Maybe it'll have to deal with it eventually, when, for example, expanding the compatiblity layer to support interoperability with Linux. But, maybe by then, at least Rust will have gone through its hype test gauntlet and we can see it for what it is instead of being tainted by a polticial power grab.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#160

Post by adrian_b »

joshstrange wrote: post #128
zenoprax wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot? If you asked the opposite (what can Debian do that FreeBSD cannot) I would have more to say and it would mostly be preceded by "I know FreeBSD is not Linux but ...". Whenever I need to do any sort of maintenance or inspection I have to look up the equivalent commands for things like `lsblk` and something nested in `/usr/etc/...` when I'm used to finding it…

Lack of good NFS support? When we benchmarked it last it was 10x+ slower than running on linux (ubuntu). Also lack of collective mindshare. I use FreeBSD at work every since day and while I don't hate it, I do wish we just used Linux. There are more guides, tools, etc for Linux than for FreeBSD. Yes, as a comment in this sub-thread stated, jails exist but everyone knows docker, not jails. So even with jails apparentl…

I would not be surprised if FreeBSD NFS is slower than Linux NFS, but 10x slower is too weird to be correct. Have you used the same NFS version, e.g. NFSv4, on both FreeBSD and Linux?

I have used for many years file servers on FreeBSD, servicing a great number of users and they certainly were not slower than Linux and they had perfect reliability. It is true however, that I have used Samba, not NFS.

I have also used NFS in a few cases, but I have not run benchmarks. I mean that I have not tested intensive random accesses, but I have just copied entire disks through NFS and that worked at the speed limit imposed by a 1 Gb/s Ethernet link, so at least for sequential transfers NFS did not seem to have any speed problems.

The speed of NFS also depends on the speed of the file system used on the server. If you have tested a FreeBSD with ZFS versus a Linux with XFS or EXT4, than your benchmark might not reflect anything about FreeBSD vs. Linux, but only about ZFS. ZFS is significantly slower than XFS or EXT4, regardless if it is used by FreeBSD or by Linux.

Nobody uses ZFS for speed, but only when the extra features provided by ZFS are desired. ZFS is still faster than BTRFS, but not by so much as XFS/EXT4 are faster than ZFS.

On FreeBSD, its older file system, UFS, is faster than ZFS, though not as fast as XFS/EXT4. But if you use NVMe SSDs on the file server, the speed of NFS should be mostly limited by Ethernet, not by the file system of the server.

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