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FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

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Re: FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

#61

Post by sidkshatriya »

rsync wrote: post #50
sidkshatriya wrote: post #4

14.4 is a maintenance release. If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0 Why FreeBSD ? - Well manicured OS, excellent docs. More performant than OpenBSD in every way and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking) - FreeBSD tends to have fewer features in almost all areas compared to Linux which makes it more approachable and more difficult to mess up. - Though it has fewer features, it still has…

"14.4 is a maintenance release. If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0" Translation: whatever investments in time, tooling, training and documentation you made for 14.x, they were useful for about 18 months. x.0 shouldn't be deployed in production because it is brand new ... ... but x.4 is too old to be deployed because the cool kids stopped working on the 'x' branch 6 months ago.

> Translation: whatever investments in time, tooling, training and documentation you made for 14.x, they were useful for about 18 months.

Don't agree. Not too many differences between 15.0 and 14.x -- there are some changes -- mostly improvements and enhancements, many just internal but nothing that voids your pre-existing knowledge of FreeBSD or changes your approach drastically.

> x.0 shouldn't be deployed in production because it is brand new ...

Is that true ? Could depend on how conservative you are. 15.0 came out in ~Dec 2025 and we're now in March 2026... I'd say 15.0+latest security fixes/errata should be OK for _most_ people ? 15.1 should be out in June 2026 for those who absolutely insist on waiting...

Re: FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

#62

Post by sidkshatriya »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #8
drewg123 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0 Or just run -current in production, like we do. See https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf Or https://papers.freebsd.org/2019/fosdem/looney-netflix_and_fr...

Yes, FreeBSD current is quite usable. It's fun to start using the new features as they are added to kernel and userland immediately !

P.S. As -current is essentially running the latest master branch commit it should be evident that FreeBSD will be unstable, liable to break at any point and may have horrible bugs.

So -current is good for experimentation but probably not too much more than that (unless you're Netflix with team of FreeBSD experts who famously like to run -current -- see https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47322830 ).

Re: FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

#64

Post by jasomill »

rsync wrote: post #51
craftkiller wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I also use -current, I don't think this is good advice to the kinds of people who don't know if they should be running 14.4 or 15.0. There are caveats to running -current (for example, you need to disable the built-in debugging stuff on -current to get decent performance but the debugging stuff is already disabled on actual releases), so I think for new people it's best to recommend they use the latest release…

"I don't think this is good advice to the kinds of people who don't know if they should be running 14.4 or 15.0." You don't need to wonder about this because FreeBSD has an official, documented position on this topic[1]: "... include work in progress, experimental changes and transitional mechanisms that may or may not be present in the next official release ..." "... whether or not FreeBSD-CURRENT sources bring disa…

GP works for Netflix. The team that maintains their FreeBSD stack includes FreeBSD committers, as noted in the linked presentation. Bit of a special case.

With that said, I've quickly upgraded to every production release, including .0 releases, on my personal infrastructure boxes for decades and have never been bitten in the ass or spent more than a few minutes making required configuration changes, and have run -CURRENT on development boxes, where it usually works fine.

As a rough analogy, -CURRENT is a bit like Debian Sid. You probably wouldn't run it directly in production, but it's not an unreasonable option if you have the resources to maintain an internal fork (or, for that matter, as the upstream for a downstream distro).

Side note: Netflix support for FreeBSD is one reason I've continued to subscribe through price increases and periods of low use. Keep up the good work!

Re: FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

#66

Post by alwillis »

sidkshatriya wrote: post #37
alwillis wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking) FreeBSD has been the gold standard for networking features and performance for decades; not sure I'd agree. > FreeBSD tends to have fewer features in almost all areas compared to Linux I'm not sure FreeBSD has fewer features in total but on a new install, many of them are turned off; it doesn’t mandate what should be running. There's a lot beneath the…

>> and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking) > FreeBSD has been the gold standard for networking features and performance for decades; not sure I'd agree. This is the accepted wisdom. But reality on the ground is that Linux has probably surpassed FreeBSD in this domain too. With bpf programs making dynamic packet steering decisions in kernel space, io_uring, support for every hardware networkin…

> I doubt a highly tuned Linux box will be slower than the equivalent FreeBSD one.

That tracks but there's been a lot of work being done on FreeBSD's stack as well.

Most people are aware about the contributions Netflix has made to FreeBSD; they say their FreeBSD-based CDN streams terabytes per second [1].

In addition to the basic network stack, FreeBSD can load additional stacks like RACK TCP [2] stack (using Recent ACK, PRR, etc.) that can be loaded as a module and selected per-socket or as the system default. This is the re-written stack that Netflix uses after they helped develop it.

It seems that FreeBSD is kind of a testbed for new network implementations like Netgraph [3], a graph-based networking subsystem that enables modular, real-time packet processing inside the kernel and Network Offload and Socket Splicing (SO_SPLICE) [4] that enables kernel-level TCP proxying, resulting in reduced CPU overhead and eliminating unnecessary data copies.

I'm not usually into networking but this stuff sounds very interesting.

[1]: "Case Study: Maintaining the World’s Fastest Content Delivery Network at Netflix on FreeBSD" - https://freebsdfoundation.org/netflix-case-study/ (PDF).

[2]: "The RACK-TLP Loss Detection Algorithm for TCP" - https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8985

[3]: "Inside FreeBSD Netgraph: Behind the Curtain of Advanced Networking" - https://klarasystems.com/articles/inside-freebsd-netgraph-ad...

[4]: https://klarasystems.com/articles/network-offload-and-socket...

Re: FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

#67

Post by hxorr »

pisikesipelgas wrote: post #5
sidkshatriya wrote: post #4

14.4 is a maintenance release. If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0 Why FreeBSD ? - Well manicured OS, excellent docs. More performant than OpenBSD in every way and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking) - FreeBSD tends to have fewer features in almost all areas compared to Linux which makes it more approachable and more difficult to mess up. - Though it has fewer features, it still has…

I heard, that BSD is dying...

Not until Netcraft confirms.

Re: FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

#68

Post by vermaden »

vermaden wrote: post #59
cperciva wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

14.4 is a maintenance release. If you're installing FreeBSD today, use 15.0 This is not the recommendation of the FreeBSD project. (I would know, because I'm the person in the project who makes that recommendation where appropriate.) Once X.1-RELEASE ships, (X-1).* is considered "legacy" and we recommend that it is used primarily for maintaining existing systems and that new systems are deployed with the newer major…

By the way - does 32bit packages 'problem' for WINE has been resolved on 15.x series? On 14.x and older versions WINE brings `/usr/local/share/wine/pkg32.sh` to keep 32bit packages for WINE32 ... but 15.x does not build 32bit packages anymore ...

For the record - just tested it on 15.x and `/usr/local/share/wine/pkg32.sh` works well.

Re: FreeBSD 14.4-Release Announcement

#69

Post by sidkshatriya »

alwillis wrote: post #66
sidkshatriya wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> and approaches Linux performance in some areas (e.g. Networking) > FreeBSD has been the gold standard for networking features and performance for decades; not sure I'd agree. This is the accepted wisdom. But reality on the ground is that Linux has probably surpassed FreeBSD in this domain too. With bpf programs making dynamic packet steering decisions in kernel space, io_uring, support for every hardware networkin…

> I doubt a highly tuned Linux box will be slower than the equivalent FreeBSD one. That tracks but there's been a lot of work being done on FreeBSD's stack as well. Most people are aware about the contributions Netflix has made to FreeBSD; they say their FreeBSD-based CDN streams terabytes per second [1]. In addition to the basic network stack, FreeBSD can load additional stacks like RACK TCP [2] stack (using Recent…

Thanks for the detailed response. Gives me a list of some cool things to explore and learn about !

Every year in various conferences and every new major Linux cycle there are new innovations in the Linux network stack too. To do a true comparison it would be fair to see what innovations exist in the Linux networking stack that have not yet been implemented in FreeBSD. Yes, networking is FreeBSD's pride and joy but Google, Intel and others have done a lot of work on the Linux network stack too (which should not be underestimated).

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