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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#221

Post by j16sdiz »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #201
HackerThemAll wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no, thanks. https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems

ZFS is worse than btrfs in performance. Check out https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-617-filesystems/5 "Geometric Mean of all test results". You will find that OpenZFS is ~35% slower than btrfs. I love ZFS but I am aware about the performance it delivers.

but real life workload are not "Geometric Mean".

When I use firefox, sqlite performance matter more than any random benchmark. The same benchmark shows sqlite is 3x faster on zfs.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#222

Post by tosti »

sauercrowd wrote: post #220
tosti wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure they're different. They all download blobs and can then execute them. Exactly how, when and why is completely different but they still get you blobs.

In the same way s3 is different to a dropbox, and a car being different to a bike. Can't tell if you're ragebaiting here, but I'm very confused by this question because they support an entirely different set of features, and if you use both it's painfully obvious how they're different. Docker is built for running services, distribution is part of that, but it's core is that you can pull an image and run random servic…

Exactly. Yes, I've used them and it was horrible.

For me, the difference is in do I get to compile this from sources myself or do I get someone elses compiler output?

IOW it's not comparing vastly different vehicles, but rather a vehicle with its blueprint.

Also, a long time ago it was commonly accepted that spaghetti code is awful. Docker replaces all that with spaghetti services and debugging gets much worse.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#224

Post by lproven »

GuestFAUniverse wrote: post #124
HackerThemAll wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

btrfs is pathetic when it comes to performance. So no, thanks. https://www.phoronix.com/review/linux-70-filesystems

In real world scenarios, where file based backups fail, one needs to add at least lvm. And only than those benchmarks would be more interesting to me.

Be specific. Why do you need LVM? What for, what do you do with it?

Secondly: are you aware that ZFS includes what LVM does on Linux, and so you don't need a separate tool for it? This makes the comparison tricky but it's important to consider.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#225

Post by lproven »

jandrewrogers wrote: post #200
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.

> as powerful as Linux

Can you explain what you mean by that? Can you give some examples?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#226

Post by lproven »

SanjayMehta wrote: post #161
crdrost wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's unintentionally hilarious -- some of us remember 15-20 years ago when flaky support for wireless devices was the biggest reason people would decide Linux wasn't ready for desktop yet and avoid switching from Windows to Linux. (Well, Windows to dual-boot -- Windows users were never fully willing to let go of the video games angle at the time.)

It is hilarious. When I installed SLS 1.0 I had to assemble the machine to match the drivers available. 92 or 93. I vaguely remember I needed a SCSI hard disk. Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi. First wifi device I used was a PCMCIA card from Lucent, claimed 2mbps speeds. Still have it somewhere. I don't think I ever got Linux or BSD to work.

> Remember that most machines back then were Ethernet, not WiFi.

Not "most" -- all.

802.11 networking was standardised in 1997.

The first versions to really see significant mass adoption were 802.11b and then 802.11a in 1999.

https://hewlettpackard.github.io/wireless-tools/Linux.Wirele...

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#227

Post by lproven »

wang_pp8 wrote: post #197

These days I prefer to run small systems and basic services. I don't want webguis or docker images anymore.

FWIW, agreed.

It is very odd to me that I often read people asking about alternative OSes -- Linux compared to Windows, or FreeBSD compared to Linux, or OpenBSD compared to FreeBSD -- and they say that they want to move except that they desperately need to keep {something arcane}...

And often that arcane thing is why I am interested in getting off the original system under discussion.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#228

Post by debian3 »

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…

> Is there anything FreeBSD can do that, say, Debian cannot?

Docker containers is a big one.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#229

Post by idoubtit »

adrian_b wrote: post #160
joshstrange wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All this would be true if Linux and FreeBSD had similar exposition. But there's obviously less users and less hardware in the BSD world, so we must expect a higher variance.

For instance, searching in recent FreeBSD issues, some hardware is compatible but 3× slower, as in "NFS is much too slow at 10GbaseT"[^1]. Or a FreeBSD upgrade to v14 could sink the NFS performance, as in "Write performance to NFS share is ~4x slower than on 13.2". Of course, these bugs happen with Linux, but there are vastly more resources to detect and fix these problems in the Linux world.

[^1]: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=277197

[^2]: https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=276299

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#230

Post by pseudohadamard »

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 actually really nice as an OS, but Linux gets pretty much all of the application support. For example compare XigmaNAS with OMV, I'd really prefer to run my NAS on FreeBSD but Xigma has more or less stalled while OMV is being actively worked on.
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