4 ms·

BSD and Linux Differences

14 points by liangzan 17y ago

Zev 17y ago
The article is comaring FreeBSD to Linux in general (not BSD-in-general vs Linux-in-general as I had thought from the title).
Zarathu 17y ago
As an avid FreeBSD user, I must say that the article didn't really provide an unbiased comparison of Linux to FreeBSD. It didn't offer any of the advantages Linux may have over BSD. Linux has an amazing community with better application support. Linux also has an optimized C library. For example, you should take a look at BSD's strlen() versus GNU's strlen().
- dchest 17y ago
  BSD implementation of strlen() is handwritten in assembler for most architectures, and is optimized. The misunderstanding about it not being optimized is probably because someone read the fall-back non-optimized C implementation and missed architecture-specific directories. This was discussed in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510832 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510832 Edit: glibc also doesn't use the generic optimized version in C on some architectures, see for example: http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/sysdeps/i386/strlen.c?rev=1.8&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=glibc http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/sysdeps/i3...
thingie 17y ago
In the first part, they are comparing apples and oranges, and in a very meaningless way. Compare FreeBSD to Debian or Redhat or Suse or Ubuntu or anything, if you want to. What sense does this make? If you were going to use Linux, you would use some distro, so compare FreeBSD to that distro. Performance part doesn't really say anything. It's far too vague and incomplete. And ports could be easily compared to, say, Gentoo system, or something similar. Just describing them doesn't make much sense, given that you are targeting mostly current FreeBSD users. I wouldn't even rule out a possibility that there is some Linux system using NetBSD pkgsrc, as it should be quite portable (and comparable to the ports). In summary, the article is quite bad :-)
- nailer 17y ago
  There's some technical inaccuracies too - eg, FreeBSD has ACLs, implying that Linux doesn't in Linux-based OSs. RHEL/CentOS and Fedora have had ACLs by default for years now and they're easily enabled on Ubuntu/Debian if you need them. 'Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library incompatibilities. ' is just as true of Linux OSs too.
keyist 17y ago
Strange article -- half polemic half unnecessary (anyone who spends 5 minutes reading up on BSD would have heard of ports). For a more detailed take on BSD vis-a-vis Linux: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4lin... . BSD user's point of view, target audience Linux users.

14 points by liangzan 17y ago

Zev 17y ago

The article is comaring FreeBSD to Linux in general (not BSD-in-general vs Linux-in-general as I had thought from the title).

Zarathu 17y ago

As an avid FreeBSD user, I must say that the article didn't really provide an unbiased comparison of Linux to FreeBSD. It didn't offer any of the advantages Linux may have over BSD. Linux has an amazing community with better application support. Linux also has an optimized C library. For example, you should take a look at BSD's strlen() versus GNU's strlen().

dchest 17y ago
BSD implementation of strlen() is handwritten in assembler for most architectures, and is optimized. The misunderstanding about it not being optimized is probably because someone read the fall-back non-optimized C implementation and missed architecture-specific directories. This was discussed in this thread: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510832 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=510832 Edit: glibc also doesn't use the generic optimized version in C on some architectures, see for example: http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/sysdeps/i386/strlen.c?rev=1.8&content-type=text/x-cvsweb-markup&cvsroot=glibc http://sources.redhat.com/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/libc/sysdeps/i3...

thingie 17y ago

In the first part, they are comparing apples and oranges, and in a very meaningless way. Compare FreeBSD to Debian or Redhat or Suse or Ubuntu or anything, if you want to. What sense does this make? If you were going to use Linux, you would use some distro, so compare FreeBSD to that distro. Performance part doesn't really say anything. It's far too vague and incomplete. And ports could be easily compared to, say, Gentoo system, or something similar. Just describing them doesn't make much sense, given that you are targeting mostly current FreeBSD users. I wouldn't even rule out a possibility that there is some Linux system using NetBSD pkgsrc, as it should be quite portable (and comparable to the ports). In summary, the article is quite bad :-)

nailer 17y ago
There's some technical inaccuracies too - eg, FreeBSD has ACLs, implying that Linux doesn't in Linux-based OSs. RHEL/CentOS and Fedora have had ACLs by default for years now and they're easily enabled on Ubuntu/Debian if you need them. 'Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library incompatibilities. ' is just as true of Linux OSs too.

keyist 17y ago

Strange article -- half polemic half unnecessary (anyone who spends 5 minutes reading up on BSD would have heard of ports). For a more detailed take on BSD vis-a-vis Linux: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4lin... . BSD user's point of view, target audience Linux users.