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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#191

Post by kalleboo »

commandersaki wrote: post #65

Ran a FreeBSD colocated server for about a decade that went through generations of hardware. I really want to like the OS, except it's most touted feature, the network stack, was consistently unreliable for me using Intel NICs on Supermicro servers. They would go offline usually after some load due to mbuf resource exhaustion. I never got to the bottom of it even though I posted to the bugs database and would diligen…

I haven't had reliability issues but I could never get decent performance out of the FreeBSD network stack. Across Intel and Mellanox 10 Gbps NIC, it always ended up capping out at around 5 Gbps. Using TrueNAS CORE and OpnSense. Switch to Linux (SCALE and OpenWRT) and I can max out 9 Gbps.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#192

Post by waynesonfire »

grahamjperrin wrote: post #187
waynesonfire wrote: post #159

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.

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Rust for Rust seems to be stale, but not yet categorised as such – https://wiki.freebsd.org/CategoryStale In https://lists.freebsd.org/archives/freebsd-hackers/2025-Augu... > (August 2025), Konstantin Belousov (kib@) write: > There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. … Unfortunately, the list archives are not suitably indexed by popular search engines, so, for example, ht…

>> There was a long and hot thread about 'Rust in base' recently. …

Maybe this,

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/the-case-for-rust-in-the-...

?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#193

Post by atmosx »

grahamjperrin wrote: post #182
atmosx wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK the most common is ARC but there are other areas as well. On Linux, ARC memory is reclaimed using the kernel shrinker API which has historically been a problem. There has been several bugs leading to OOMs or system freeze due to high memory usage on systems that use ARC heavily. On FreeBSD ARC is integrated directly with the VM subsystem. The stack is simpler, less bug-prone. Now this is not a ZFS algo/whatever…

> … the kernel shrinker API which has historically been a problem. … Is that still a problem? A few weeks ago I noted a change in ARC-related documentation for OpenZFS on Linux. I can't remember the details (I can find them, if necessary) but I do remember that it was a significant improvement for Linux users.

Historically yes, is it still today? I am not sure.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#195

Post by adiabatichottub »

grahamjperrin wrote: post #176
adiabatichottub wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, my experience on the stable release branches is that there aren't all that many kernel updates, so if you keep your services patched then you really only need to reboot about every 6 months.

> … stable … about every 6 months. Maybe slightly optimistic. https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/13 https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/14 https://bokut.in/freebsd-patch-level-table/#stable/15

Fair, but to my point none of those security patches for 14.2 or 14.3 that required a reboot were critical for our use case. I'm more worried about people's crappy Wordpress blogs getting hacked.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#196

Post by adiabatichottub »

grahamjperrin wrote: post #180
adiabatichottub wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right. On my development workstation I use Arch and I'm always worried a kernel upgrade is going to break the ZFS module. For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). On FreeBSD I know its always going to work.

> … For those that aren't familiar, ZFS isn't part of mainline Linux because of licensing incompatibility (and general distrust of Oracle). … It's probably fair to say that trust in Oracle is irrelevant to OpenZFS. Where Linux does use ZFS: to the best of my knowledge, it's typically OpenZFS – https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47407937 is my own use case.

I was mainly referring to statements made by Linus Torvalds that got a lot of press. Canonical seems undeterred by any such arguments.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#198

Post by andxor »

AdieuToLogic wrote: post #188
grahamjperrin wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Regarding guides specifically, FreeBSD has exceptional resources: FreeBSD Handbook … Ahem. https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1rpnd05/comment/o9... > for the ZFS chapter "… telling people to do the WRONG thing, …" https://www.reddit.com/r/freebsd/comments/1ru0k9u/comment/oa... > for the ports chapter "… misleading, it was wrongly updated: …" – and so on. > … the project's documentation is a gold standard IMH…

> Documentation certainly is not gold standard. I'm a former doc tree committer, familiar with many of the bugs … As "a former doc tree committer", I am sure you are aware that no set of documentation artifacts are without error of some sort. To be exact, you provided two examples of your identifying what you believe to be same. I stand by my statement that the cited FreeBSD resources are "a gold standard" while ackn…

Arch Linux wiki is the gold standard and better than FreeBSD.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#199

Post by chillfox »

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…

I started out running FreeBSD on my home servers, then moved to Alpine Linux because all server software that I wanted to run was provided in Docker docker containers and with docker compose examples, so it was just easier. Moving the ZFS pools over to Linux was effortlessly.

And now I am looking at moving over to k3s (still on Alpine) because everyone is providing Helm charts, so it seems easier.

I really like FreeBSD, but it's just easier to go with the flow.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#200

Post by jandrewrogers »

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 narrow things for which FreeBSD is just lovely but it hasn’t been as powerful as Linux for decades. It was one of the best server OS back in the 1990s though. Just a very clean implementation. I used it a lot back in the day and am very fond of it. But I can no longer recommend it.
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