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I think the case for running FreeBSD in some of those cases is dwindling a bit. There are a few advantages freebsd has historically had, one being ZFS. Recentl

I think the case for running FreeBSD in some of those cases is dwindling a bit. There are a few advantages freebsd has historically had, one being ZFS. Recently, though, freebsd switched their ZFS sources from the upstream Illumos to linux's version of ZFS. Not to say this negates freebsd's integration advantage, but I think it shows how linux's ZFS has grown really good over time. Another one I've heard is FreeBSD handles really heavy TCP/IP traffic better than Linux. Not sure about this one since I've never had heavy enough workloads to test and don't know the theoretical basis of it, although Netflix seems very happy with FreeBSD for this reason. Also, as you say, BSDs are just nice to use sometimes. And sometimes all you need is something just good enough to run x/y/z. Maybe the pleasure of using it can offset the performance losses for some people.

eredengrin 6y ago
As long as linux has to hack zfs into the kernel with all their shims to avoid breaking license terms, I'm going to consider zfs a FreeBSD advantage. I've heard too many people complaining about issues with zfs on linux, so as someone who likes to configure once and then forget about it for a few years, that's not for me. I don't want to update my system one day and then find I can't mount my filesystem anymore (or worse). For networking performance, I doubt it makes a noticeable difference in personal use. Firewalls are pretty nice on FreeBSD though, at least for my uses. Of course, it's not like FreeBSD doesn't have problems of its own - I've had multiple times where I boot into my machine and find that I don't have graphics until I build the drivers from ports because their binary packages were compiled against an earlier release, leading to kernel incompatibilities (also can't figure out how to get hdmi audio out of my current card, not a deal breaker but wasn't what I was hoping for either). Pick your poison I guess, but until linux gets a comparably featured and stable filesystem I have a tough time seeing myself move away from FreeBSD. I've definitely considered various linux distros due to certain applications missing in FreeBSD or just general pain points though. Just very hard to leave zfs, and also most linux distros either seem to be stable with ancient packages, or always changing and often breaking things in the process. Stable base with latest packages is very nice.
- spijdar 6y ago
  I haven't used ZFS myself, but the people I know who have have never mentioned problems with it. This is on pretty exotic configurations, too, like POWER hardware. Obviously distros trying to be especially kosher like Debian and Fedora will never include it by default, and Canonical is maybe stepping on thin licensing ice by including it with Ubuntu, but I get the impression it's pretty stable, especially if Canonical put it in a LTS release. Something else I learned that might be relevant, iXsystems of FreeNAS/TrueNAS fame appear to be moving their development to Linux with "TrueNAS SCALE". Make of that what you will, I guess.
  - paulmd 6y ago
    Due to the licensing issues FreeBSD is never going to be a first-class citizen in the kernel source tree, and that's the most optimistic possible view of the situation. Linus and Greg K-H have both made statements and actions that make it clear that they are philosophically opposed to ZFS as an implementation ("more of a buzzword than anything else"), regardless of licensing issues. They want you to use BTRFS instead, and are going to throw up arbitrary barriers to make ZFS usage and development as painful as possible (like re-licensing non-GPL symbols that they notice ZFS using out from underneath it into GPL). https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-s... Like, people make a huge racket about how NVIDIA's driver isn't in the kernel and how that means it will never be suitable for day to day use in a desktop environment, because it's out-of-tree and thus will always be in a place of reacting to changes in the kernel as an external team rather than being supported by the kernel team itself. And that's exactly the same situation ZFS is in and will always be in on Linux. And in fact the situation is actually worse than that, while CDDL is open-source it is incompatible with copyleft licenses, by design and by selection when Sun licensed the code. And then you've got the fact that the kernel team is stacked with BTRFS fanboys who are thinking and acting with their loyalties. I get the desire to improve ZFS on Linux support but the FreeBSD version probably should have remained the repository of record so that ZFS could have been a first-class-citizen in at least one distro. The Linux team is legally and personally opposed to ZFS, it's ZFS choosing to place their focus on improving an abusive relationship.
tannhaeuser 6y ago
Idk Linux on desktop has regressed lately: OOM crashes/OOM killer kicking in (which maybe wasn't so great an idea to begin with), gnome3, snaps and other crap (that doesn't work well IME) littering mount points and other places with info used for internal purposes, systemd creating complexity for it's own sake (or rather monopolizing know-how at RedHat), wayland, bash/getline with vi editing mode broken more than it used to be ... All the while I'm not doing things differently from a decade or two ago ): While Docker is working well for me, I'm not sure last decade's push towards containers and dockerizing everything is actual progress. Or rather, declaring defeat in front of self-inflicted problems with shared libs (which btw seems also to a large degree a problem with glibc's insistence on shared libs), language/platform ecosystems, and a false separation of concerns story mixing permission and lib versioning issues.
macksd 6y ago
Yeah I'd love to see an update on this benchmark re: network syscall performance: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/. FreeBSD has very good results in some of those, but even then Linux was showing some truly impressive strengths of its own. And which kernel has gotten even more attention since then, and become even more (that is to say, completely) dominant in the Top 500? (happens to matter for me, even though it's a strong data point anyway). I will say that performance aside, the UX of BSD firewalls is SO nice. Clear configuration files, features exposed simply, just wonderful.

eredengrin 6y ago

As long as linux has to hack zfs into the kernel with all their shims to avoid breaking license terms, I'm going to consider zfs a FreeBSD advantage. I've heard too many people complaining about issues with zfs on linux, so as someone who likes to configure once and then forget about it for a few years, that's not for me. I don't want to update my system one day and then find I can't mount my filesystem anymore (or worse). For networking performance, I doubt it makes a noticeable difference in personal use. Firewalls are pretty nice on FreeBSD though, at least for my uses. Of course, it's not like FreeBSD doesn't have problems of its own - I've had multiple times where I boot into my machine and find that I don't have graphics until I build the drivers from ports because their binary packages were compiled against an earlier release, leading to kernel incompatibilities (also can't figure out how to get hdmi audio out of my current card, not a deal breaker but wasn't what I was hoping for either). Pick your poison I guess, but until linux gets a comparably featured and stable filesystem I have a tough time seeing myself move away from FreeBSD. I've definitely considered various linux distros due to certain applications missing in FreeBSD or just general pain points though. Just very hard to leave zfs, and also most linux distros either seem to be stable with ancient packages, or always changing and often breaking things in the process. Stable base with latest packages is very nice.

spijdar 6y ago
I haven't used ZFS myself, but the people I know who have have never mentioned problems with it. This is on pretty exotic configurations, too, like POWER hardware. Obviously distros trying to be especially kosher like Debian and Fedora will never include it by default, and Canonical is maybe stepping on thin licensing ice by including it with Ubuntu, but I get the impression it's pretty stable, especially if Canonical put it in a LTS release. Something else I learned that might be relevant, iXsystems of FreeNAS/TrueNAS fame appear to be moving their development to Linux with "TrueNAS SCALE". Make of that what you will, I guess.
- paulmd 6y ago
  Due to the licensing issues FreeBSD is never going to be a first-class citizen in the kernel source tree, and that's the most optimistic possible view of the situation. Linus and Greg K-H have both made statements and actions that make it clear that they are philosophically opposed to ZFS as an implementation ("more of a buzzword than anything else"), regardless of licensing issues. They want you to use BTRFS instead, and are going to throw up arbitrary barriers to make ZFS usage and development as painful as possible (like re-licensing non-GPL symbols that they notice ZFS using out from underneath it into GPL). https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-statements-arent-right-heres-the-straight-dope/ https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2020/01/linus-torvalds-zfs-s... Like, people make a huge racket about how NVIDIA's driver isn't in the kernel and how that means it will never be suitable for day to day use in a desktop environment, because it's out-of-tree and thus will always be in a place of reacting to changes in the kernel as an external team rather than being supported by the kernel team itself. And that's exactly the same situation ZFS is in and will always be in on Linux. And in fact the situation is actually worse than that, while CDDL is open-source it is incompatible with copyleft licenses, by design and by selection when Sun licensed the code. And then you've got the fact that the kernel team is stacked with BTRFS fanboys who are thinking and acting with their loyalties. I get the desire to improve ZFS on Linux support but the FreeBSD version probably should have remained the repository of record so that ZFS could have been a first-class-citizen in at least one distro. The Linux team is legally and personally opposed to ZFS, it's ZFS choosing to place their focus on improving an abusive relationship.

tannhaeuser 6y ago

Idk Linux on desktop has regressed lately: OOM crashes/OOM killer kicking in (which maybe wasn't so great an idea to begin with), gnome3, snaps and other crap (that doesn't work well IME) littering mount points and other places with info used for internal purposes, systemd creating complexity for it's own sake (or rather monopolizing know-how at RedHat), wayland, bash/getline with vi editing mode broken more than it used to be ... All the while I'm not doing things differently from a decade or two ago ): While Docker is working well for me, I'm not sure last decade's push towards containers and dockerizing everything is actual progress. Or rather, declaring defeat in front of self-inflicted problems with shared libs (which btw seems also to a large degree a problem with glibc's insistence on shared libs), language/platform ecosystems, and a false separation of concerns story mixing permission and lib versioning issues.

macksd 6y ago

Yeah I'd love to see an update on this benchmark re: network syscall performance: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/. FreeBSD has very good results in some of those, but even then Linux was showing some truly impressive strengths of its own. And which kernel has gotten even more attention since then, and become even more (that is to say, completely) dominant in the Top 500? (happens to matter for me, even though it's a strong data point anyway). I will say that performance aside, the UX of BSD firewalls is SO nice. Clear configuration files, features exposed simply, just wonderful.