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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#231

Post by LeonenTheDK »

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…

When my company was briefly running FreeBSD on new (5 years ago) Lenovo servers with Intel NICs, we too had some issues. I don't remember the exact details, but our sysadmin at the time had to do a bunch of work to get it fixed.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#232

Post by jdefr89 »

johng wrote: post #146
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 think the main difference is that Linux simply has more hardware support than FreeBSD.

That’s all it came down to with me.. FreeBSD doing WiFi circa 2002 was a remote dream. Shit even Linux you had to use ndiswrapper and it still prob wouldn’t work

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#233

Post by akdev1l »

whizzter wrote: post #53
BirAdam wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You could just use podman.

Theoretically yes, however still limited by how well the FreeBSD Linux layer handles syscalls. A year or so back I tried running .NET (just binaries, not via a container) since the port wasn't as far along as today and it crashed due to what I suspect was slight differences in signal handling defaults. And this is part of the situation that's going to get worse, io_uring will become more popular in language runtimes…

I’m confused because can already do this on MacOS, Windows and Linux

Does `podman machine init` not work in FreeBSD? In those other platforms it will spin a small Linux VM to run containers on.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#234

Post by evanjrowley »

aforwardslash wrote: post #133
evanjrowley wrote: post #43

One of my favorite FreeBSD features is first-class support for ZFS boot environments. These have been working in FreeBSD/Solaris since 2008[0]. Having each boot environment available as a ZFS snapshot capable of being managed the same way as any other dataset, capable of being sent and received, is such a powerful feature. I dilligently watch the immutable / atomic Linux space to see when something implements this in…

I don't want to be that guy, but zfs on freebsd was kind-of-experimental until around 2012;AFAIK in 2012 (Freebsd 9) root on zfs was a manual process, and not that easy to upgrade. Root on zfs is somewhat "recent"- it took years to get to the installer. My company at the time was basically a bsd shop (openbsd and freebsd), and the opensolaris(12?) version was still quite ahead. Still have my opensolaris tshirt of "fi…

Would love to know more about your history with BSD.

You're totally right and I appreciate calling this out. I realized the 2008 date was wrong some time after the HN comment became un-editable.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#235

Post by endsandmeans »

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…

> But I appreciate the reliability, the good documentation, the community

These were big reasons for me. Cannot overstate the documentation angle.

> Ports. Packages. > DEB/APT/RPM (particularily for a C programmer.

> Licensing more friendly to integrating into your appliances (I did this) or code

Before ZFS it was still better for the afformentioned reasons but ZFS was a game changer.

I started Linux with Slackware and writing my own ppp up/down scripts while dual booting from windows, which took 2 weeks to get online the first time, then I went to redhat/debian/mandrake for a few years... then I found FreeBSD at it was like a breath of 'clear' air.

Started using it for my daily desktop in 2002 and I still use it on several converted Macs at home and my main 'office' server which is a VPS these days.

Production wise I would always have to reboot my fbsd servers for EOL never any issues and many uptimes north of 1000 days over the years. That builds trust.

I trust FreeBSD project to be conservative and consistent for the most part -- THE PRINCIPLE OF LEAST SURPRISE -- another thing I have not seen enough of with Linux distros.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#236

Post by indigodaddy »

I recently put it on an OVH VPS and was very surprised how easy it is to do anything. Firewall. A few ipfw rules/script (pf I think is even easier). Caddy. Just install it and then it very clearly tells you the commands to run as not root. Follow the instructions. Easy. Everything is meant to be simple. I like that. And it seems so much more memory efficient than Linux. Do processes just run better on bsd? Anyway it's been a pleasure. It's my only bsd VPS but I'm glad I've got one.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#237

Post by guenthert »

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…

> For example the support for magnetic tapes and for a few other SCSI peripherals is better in FreeBSD.

Could you give us another hint?

> The Linux utility for controlling a LTO tape drive lacks some important options that the corresponding FreeBSD utility has.

That should be easy to list, no? It's been a while since I used a LTO drive, but I don't know what I missed.

> I have FreeBSD servers that I have not touched for years

Are you sure, they are still "yours"?

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#238

Post by bombcar »

adrian_b wrote: post #103
sidkshatriya wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There is one advantage of Linux over FreeBSD, which is not widely known. Linux has a huge database of known bugs in various peripheral devices, including Ethernet NICs, and when one of those is recognized it applies workarounds for the bugs. Almost universal hardware support and workarounds for quirks is precisely the reason why everyone uses Linux even if they might want to use FreeBSD or something else. In other…

It is widely known that Linux has "better" hardware support for many peripheral devices, but few know what "better" means, i.e. that a lot of devices that you can buy have various bugs and in most cases their vendors do not document the bugs in any way, because they provide Windows drivers that contain workarounds for the bugs, and they do not care about other operating systems. The users of other operating systems m…

If such a workaround exists, an enterprising *BSD user can look at the code and determine what it is and apply a similar workaround in their BSD.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#239

Post by bombcar »

Arch-TK wrote: post #217

FreeBSD and OpenBSD docs are great, but let's not say they're the pinnacle of docs. I like them a lot more than docs for the average Linux distribution. They're even more polished than Arch Linux wiki. But they still have room for improvement. And improving the Arch wiki is easier in my experience.

There's three kinds of documentation:

* Wiki-style "HOWTO"-based that helps you solve a particular problem (Arch and Gentoo wikis showcase this style well)

* Reference documentation that reminds you how you solved a problem (man pages are great examples here)

* Comprehensive documentation that truly documents the system, but can be a bit more obscure if you're not reading it "cover to cover" - textbook style (This is the older "original" software documentation type, which the BSD docs are an example of)

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#240

Post by bombcar »

QuantumNoodle wrote: post #126

I ran a TrueNAS server that was based on BSD, loved jails. Then TrueNAS started using debian so more application can run on it. Selfishly I like getting more utility from my server so this was a welcomed change. What industry is BSD used in now a days?

firewalls are a common example (many Linux houses have a BSD-based firewall at the edge) but any "single application" setup may run on BSD - Netflix, for example.
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