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Why I love FreeBSD

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Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#251

Post by anthk »

debian3 wrote: post #228
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.

Docker it's a solution for a big Linux problem. FreeBSD would just resort to compatNx libraries (to run older binaries) and/or a jail.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#252

Post by Fnoord »

george916a wrote: post #178
adrian_b wrote: post #101

Earlier 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…

Magnetic tapes? Super cool! What are you using them for if one may ask? Very curious.

Standardization [1] for backups. A tape with 2.5 TB (uncompressed) goes for 30 EUR. The LTO-6 (affordable current iteration) drive itself goes for 300-500 EUR if you buy it second hand. Cheaper if you grab one without casing and FC, but you'd need a FC switch and a FC HBA. I went for a SAS HBA instead, although since I already for fiber through the whole house, FC would've been suffice.

[1] https://github.com/LinearTapeFileSystem/ltfs

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#253

Post by throwaway270925 »

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…

> but 10x slower is too weird to be correct.

It is though. Had the same experience, dog slow transfers in FreeBSD on brandnew servers with 10/25G+ cards, hovering at 1-2G speeds. Only switching to Linux helped, and now easily saturates the links.

> speed limit imposed by a 1 Gb/s Ethernet link

FreeBSD might be slow, but its not that slow that it cant saturate a 1G link ;)

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#254

Post by miladyincontrol »

anthk wrote: post #12
shevy-java wrote: post #4

> had trained me to hunt for documentation in fragments: often incomplete, often outdated, sometimes already stale after barely a year. This is indeed a problem now that google search is next to useless. And AI further degrading the quality. I work around it to some extent by keeping my local knowledge base up to date, as much as that is possible; and using a ton of scripts that help me do things. That works. I am al…

[flagged]

> The Arch Wiki it's a joke as it gets obsolete with every major upgrade

I find this claim hilarious because well, arch doesnt have the concept of major upgrades. And rather their documentation is some of the fastest to cover relevant changes with regards to users' needs in software.

Can you find some obsolete bits here or there? Sure, but they're almost always visually flagged as OoD and disputed until consensus is certain rather than immediately yeeted.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#255

Post by anthk »

miladyincontrol wrote: post #254
anthk wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

> The Arch Wiki it's a joke as it gets obsolete with every major upgrade I find this claim hilarious because well, arch doesnt have the concept of major upgrades. And rather their documentation is some of the fastest to cover relevant changes with regards to users' needs in software. Can you find some obsolete bits here or there? Sure, but they're almost always visually flagged as OoD and disputed until consensus is…

>major upgrade

Arch stepped over broken upgrades.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#256

Post by ZWoz »

grahamjperrin wrote: post #173
AdieuToLogic wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Regarding guides specifically, FreeBSD has exceptional resources: FreeBSD Handbook[0] FreeBSD Porter's Handbook[1] FreeBSD Developers' Handbook[2] The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System[3] Not to mention that the FreeBSD man pages are qui…

> 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…

I don't agree about that ZFS issue. Using whole disk isn't inheritantly wrong. When you have data pool separated from boot disks, using whole disks is better. No need to create partition table, when replacing disk. No worring over block alignment.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#257

Post by sidkshatriya »

j16sdiz wrote: post #221
sidkshatriya wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> but real life workload are not "Geometric Mean".

A good benchmark suite consists of good benchmarks chosen carefully. These benchmarks are not chosen randomly. They represent diverse ways to "stress" or exercise the system. Real life workloads are indeed closer to "Geometric Mean" of various benchmarks by definition because real life workloads are diverse. Not everything would be like sqlite3 which is single pattern of file system usage.

Geekbench, Cinebench, 3DMark etc. are all averages or geometric means of various benchmarks also.

> When I use firefox, sqlite performance matter more than any random benchmark.

You've selected a single benchmark (sqlite) and said it's so important to you that it overrides everything else when you are comparing ZFS vs btrfs.

If you feel that a single benchmark like sqlite is good enough then that is fine -- your decision. I am hesitant to do the same and prefer geometric mean.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#258

Post by sidkshatriya »

bombcar wrote: post #238
adrian_b wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Usually workarounds/quirks need the highest level understanding of the device driver and the device. There are few people in the world with such mastery and fewer people capable of translating this to another operating system. In concept this is simple but in most cases it is difficult.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#259

Post by koverstreet »

gzread wrote: post #165
krylon wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Last I heard (~8 years ago), the RAID-like functionality in btrfs was very unstable and crash-prone. The impression I got was that there was not a lot of interest in fixing this. Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT. The non-RAID part of btrfs appears to be stable. It's the default filesystem on openSUSE and SLES. But I don't think it's ever going to reach feature parity with ZFS.

> Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT. I heard the developer got sidetracked into writing himself an AI girlfriend. (Not sarcasm)

People love to imagine all sorts of salacious things.

Re: Why I love FreeBSD

#260

Post by evanjrowley »

koverstreet wrote: post #259
gzread wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then bcachefs came and ... appears to have gone nowhere AFAICT. I heard the developer got sidetracked into writing himself an AI girlfriend. (Not sarcasm)

People love to imagine all sorts of salacious things.

Thank you for Bcachefs. Truly an amazing project.
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