51–60 of 67 posts
OT. Can we ban "may" and "could" from submission titles ? It will greatly increase the quality of articles on HN.
FreeBSD 4.x was considered by many as the most stable FreeBSD ever. Mainly because there were 11 point releases of fixes and enhancements (4.11), as opposed to today where FreeBSD major version only have 3-4 point releases. https://www.freebsd.org/releases/
Likely also by comparison to FreeBSD 5 directly after it, which introduced concurrent kernel entry (instead of a single giant lock) and was considered somewhat buggy for a while. Or so I am told.
5.x wasn't just the removal of Giant Lock, but also:
- GEOM - Kernel Scheduled Entities
There weren't any reasons to switch from 4.x to 5.x until 5.x got stable. Even with Giant Lock given the hardware at the time (Pentium with hyper threading) it wasn't that bad.
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It was not only the most stable, but for many applications, especially in networking, it was also the fastest single-threaded operating system, beating easily Linux and Windows XP or 2000. Unfortunately for FreeBSD, the launch of the Intel Pentium 4 with hyper-threading in 2003, then of the AMD dual-core CPUs in 2005 have made quickly FreeBSD 4 completely obsolete. The smaller FreeBSD team has required many years unt…
> but for many applications, especially in networking, it was also the fastest single-threaded operating system If it is single threaded, how does this relates to PS4 and PS5 ?
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I've only ever lost data on Linux ext* filesystems, never on FreeBSD UFS or ZFS. 20 years ago it was unfortunately not unusual to experience the Linux "nuclear fsck" where it scrolls by so fast and for so long you know it's toast.
I've 100% had issues with UFS, it's a simple filesystem and subsceptible to corruption. ZFS meanwhile is a different beast altogether which is designed to ensure data integrity at all costs.
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Hell no. I worked in an ISP in late 90s. NTFS was absolutely rock reliable, then (much worse)ext2, then (slightly worse) UFS, and then FAT.
> ISP in late 90s. NTFS was absolutely rock reliable, then Well, i stayed away from NTFS in the Win2000 era because crashes would make your system unusable.
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I've only ever lost data on Linux ext* filesystems, never on FreeBSD UFS or ZFS. 20 years ago it was unfortunately not unusual to experience the Linux "nuclear fsck" where it scrolls by so fast and for so long you know it's toast.
Hell no. I worked in an ISP in late 90s. NTFS was absolutely rock reliable, then (much worse)ext2, then (slightly worse) UFS, and then FAT.
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> ISP in late 90s. NTFS was absolutely rock reliable, then Well, i stayed away from NTFS in the Win2000 era because crashes would make your system unusable.
In 90s it was NT4. Excellent OS.
Windows XP was more stable than 98SE, but it did crash more, because it was a general purpose OS used by people playing games. Still can't recall any major NTFS issues with it.
Windows 2000 with XP drivers (edit the INI file to allow it to install) was the way to go ;)
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Hell no. I worked in an ISP in late 90s. NTFS was absolutely rock reliable, then (much worse)ext2, then (slightly worse) UFS, and then FAT.
For me, in the 90s ext2 was much, much reliable than ntfs. After a power failure ext2 will just run fsck and fix the filesystem while ntfs will sometimes give up.
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UFS without soft updates is easily susceptible to corruption. The "soft updates" option must be chosen when the disk is formatted for good reliability. As I have said, 20 years ago "soft updates" in UFS worked better than journaling in the other contemporaneous file systems. Nowadays it is likely that this is no longer true. I am still using FreeBSD in servers, but unlike 20 years ago I can afford UPSes so I no longe…
OpenBSD recently decided to turn OFF soft update, by default. https://undeadly.org/cgi?action=article;sid=20230706044554
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For me, in the 90s ext2 was much, much reliable than ntfs. After a power failure ext2 will just run fsck and fix the filesystem while ntfs will sometimes give up.
I don't know if it was a file system related thing but you could bet on the Windows registry being borked beyond repair after just a handful of unexpected power cycles.