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As a FreeBSD user, I agree with this article. Virtualization, which is one of my main use cases, works but is far from perfect. FreeBSD 11 improved things - i

As a FreeBSD user, I agree with this article. Virtualization, which is one of my main use cases, works but is far from perfect. FreeBSD 11 improved things - in particular, UEFI graphics exposed over VNC makes installing Windows less painful (however, I couldn’t get networking working in the guest so it wasn’t terribly useful). One huge miss is that UEFI variables aren’t persisted across guest reboots, so it’s entirely possible to install a system and not be able to boot it without issuing UEFI commands. I really like the clean split between base system and 3rd-party software. However, I whole heartedly agree that managing 3rd-party software is a mess. Plus, thanks to the ABI issues, doing major version upgrades is kind of scary. I’ve never had an issue with a major version upgrade, but doing it scares me every time. Finally, there’s one huge issue that FreeBSD finally fixed in 11.1. The kernel was not compiled with IPSEC in 10.x, and in 11.0 they compiled it with IPSEC but not IPSEC_NAT_T. It took until 11.1 for IPSec VPNs to finally be usable out of the box.

mastax 9y ago
>Finally, there’s one huge issue that FreeBSD finally fixed in 11.1. The kernel was not compiled with IPSEC in 10.x, and in 11.0 they compiled it with IPSEC but not IPSEC_NAT_T. It took until 11.1 for IPSec VPNs to finally be usable out of the box. Thank you! I wouldn't have known about this without your comment. I need to revisit my VPN configuration, getting it to work on FreeNAS 10.1 was a huge hack.
rsync 9y ago
"Virtualization, which is one of my main use cases, works but is far from perfect." There was a brief period of time when the current, linux release of vmware workstation (v3.0, IIRC) was fully supported under the linux binary compat functionality of FreeBSD. What this meant was that circa 2002/2003 you could run vmware workstation on FreeBSD and it worked perfectly. I ran all manner of Windows and Linux VMs under it. I currently use vmware fusion on OSX so I haven't given it a try lately, but my impression is that spinning up a windows VM on a FreeBSD workstation is still not as painless as it was back then ...
_paulc 9y ago
> I couldn’t get networking working Try using the e1000 network adapter emulation - Win10/Server 2016 work fine with this.

mastax 9y ago

>Finally, there’s one huge issue that FreeBSD finally fixed in 11.1. The kernel was not compiled with IPSEC in 10.x, and in 11.0 they compiled it with IPSEC but not IPSEC_NAT_T. It took until 11.1 for IPSec VPNs to finally be usable out of the box. Thank you! I wouldn't have known about this without your comment. I need to revisit my VPN configuration, getting it to work on FreeNAS 10.1 was a huge hack.

rsync 9y ago

"Virtualization, which is one of my main use cases, works but is far from perfect." There was a brief period of time when the current, linux release of vmware workstation (v3.0, IIRC) was fully supported under the linux binary compat functionality of FreeBSD. What this meant was that circa 2002/2003 you could run vmware workstation on FreeBSD and it worked perfectly. I ran all manner of Windows and Linux VMs under it. I currently use vmware fusion on OSX so I haven't given it a try lately, but my impression is that spinning up a windows VM on a FreeBSD workstation is still not as painless as it was back then ...

_paulc 9y ago

> I couldn’t get networking working Try using the e1000 network adapter emulation - Win10/Server 2016 work fine with this.