39 ms·

FreeBSD has serious problems with focus, longevity and lifecycle (2012)

151 points by rsync 5y ago

rsync 5y ago
I wrote this in 2012 - almost exactly ten years ago - and it remains true. Looking at freebsd.org right now I see that my options for production, release systems are 12.3 and 13.0 ... ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with: "That's fixed in current ..." The 4.x nostalgia is justified: it was polished and polished and polished over many years and many organizations were incentivized to invest in that branch
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  Just because you think it's still true doesn't mean you're justified in not putting (2012) in the title.
  - freedomben 5y ago
    That's harsh and definitely not the benefit of the doubt. Seems more likely to me that OP didn't think about putting (2012) in there.
- themerone 5y ago
  What is "The Rift" you mention?
  - rsync 5y ago
    The transition from the 4.x branch of FreeBSD to 5.x. 5.x had all kinds of problems and then 6.x was the first release that barely got out into public use before 7.x undercut it ... and that is the cycle we have been in ever since. 4.x had minor releases going all the way to 4.11. Nowadays, major versions generally stop at X.3 (for instance, 11.3).
    - rjsw 5y ago
      I switched to NetBSD instead of completely wiping 4.11 and installing 5.x.
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
  - Lammy 5y ago
    5.x was the start of "Giant lock" elimination: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-November/022368.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-Nov... There wasn't a "STABLE" release of it until FreeBSD 5.3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBSD_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBS... FreeBSD may not be a perfectly-run project but I honestly can't imagine using anything else :)
- akulbe 5y ago
  It also seems like 10 years ago folks were a lot more willing to have discourse, where today… if you have difference(s) of opinion, it's not received as well. Discourse used to be a thing.
  - edgyquant 5y ago
    Is this true? When I was a kid using the internet to learn to code on the 2000s people seemed a lot meaner in general than they are now. It was hard to ask a question on a forum without being made to feel like an idiot.
    - philliphaydon 5y ago
      I would like you to meet stackoverflow. When I was learning to code in the late 90s early 2000s people seemed much nicer and more patient then than they do now… I try to avoid asking questions on SO because of the negativity there.
      - bee_rider 5y ago
        StackOverflow isn't really for beginner questions/"help me learn" kind of stuff. In the course of trying to come up with answers to most questions, they knocked out the easy/fundamental ones early. I used to answer question on the askprogramming subreddit sometimes, I generally didn't see a ton of negativity there.
      - teh_klev 5y ago
        You could learn how to write a better question. I've got ~140 questions on SO and none of them ever had hostile responses. Usually questions are downvoted because they're: * vague * no code example * pretty basic that a google search could answer your question * same old, same old repetitive questions answered many times over Back in the days of usenet there would be a FAQ and likely a set of HOWTO's, you had to read this so as not to fall foul of pushback from the group (probably considered hostile). If you are asking what might be a repeat question but didn't find a solution either on SO or elsewhere, then quote the sources that came close but didn't help. That shows you at least did some research. Both usenet and forums from the 1990/2000's were no different. I quit answering questions on SO because I felt people were lazy and wasting my time, and I was done with that, mostly for the reasons above. I still monitor the same tags I was active in, see the same old crap, and really cannot be arsed because it's clear the OP's did no research. Also when you do assist some users become quite indignant that you must solve their exact use-case. Many users never even say thank you for an answer that might take 30-45mins to produce. So feck that shite. I don't have the time or energy to be hostile, I just went dark. And sadly many early enthusiastic answerers that helped bootstrap the site in the early years did the same.
- throw0101a 5y ago
  > ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with: So basically the same as Debian and Ubuntu LTS? Debian releases every ~2 years with 5 years of Security+LTS support, which is the same as Ubuntu (LTS): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases From "Changes to the FreeBSD Support Model": - Resolving our arbitrary (and unofficial) 5-year branch lifetime guarantee. The support policy is that the stable/X branch will be supported for 5 years (minimum) from the point X.0-RELEASE is released. We now guarantee a 5-year lifetime on the branch, regardless of how many releases are built from the branch. Additionally, a "last minute" release from the stable/X branch does not constitute expanding the support lifetime for the branch as a whole for an additional two years. […] - A new stable/ branch release will not occur before two years after the X.0-RELEASE from the prior branch. This limits the number of simultaneous supported branches, which will greatly reduce the overall number of branches that must be maintained and build-tested for Security Advisories and Errata Notices, reducing turnaround time. * https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-February/001624.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-Fe... * https://www.freebsd.org/security/ https://www.freebsd.org/security/
  - ianai 5y ago
    Two thoughts: 1. GP makes me wonder whether the FreeBSD definition of LTS is less than people expect. 2. Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. i.e. Make the actual OS files changing have no effect upon hosted system/application stability.
    - toast0 5y ago
      > Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. This is how things worked at Yahoo and WhatsApp. For the most part, a server kept whatever version of FreeBSD it was installed with, and the application logic lived in /usr/local/ or /home/y/ or /home/whatsapp/ Keep your 'build' machine to compile production executables on the oldest OS release of your fleet, and everything should run everywhere. (You'll need to use the compat-X stuff so your FreeBSD X+1 machines can run FreeBSD X binaries, but that's easy) You can use stuff from the base system, but not if you expect recent changes. I don't remember ever doing an OS upgrade at Yahoo, although it must have happened. In my group, we only got updates with new hardware; which was fine, hardware was changing rapidly. At WhatsApp, I drove the OS updates towards the end of WhatsApp's use of FreeBSD. A fair amount was just not wanting to have 4 different major versions out there, but there were also forced updates to get important network bugfixes or performance improvements. Sometimes it was easier to find the handful of boxes that were too old to use something nice in a script and update them, rather than fixing the script to not use the nice feature. When we ran into bugs on older versions, upgrading to a version that already had it fixed was sometimes an option, but sometimes it'd need to be backported, and sometimes the bug was still in -current. We didn't run into too many of those though, our local patch set was never more than about 10 patches.
- alberth 5y ago
  As someone who loves BSD, and really respects your opinion, a few questions given your long history with: - if you could start all over fresh, what OS (and why) would you run your business on? - what’s your opinion about Dragonfly? Any experience with it? - what are the things you love about FreeBSD, as well as what still needs improvement (besides release cycle topic)?
  - rsync 5y ago
    I would still have built rsync.net on FreeBSD because of how familiar I was with it and how much I had personally (and institutionally) invested in it from JohnCompanies. Since ZFS is now so core to what we do, it was a very natural evolution. I have zero experience with Dragonfly BSD. I love that FreeBSD is still a very simple UNIX without complications like systemd. I was recently tinkering with a raspberry pi and had to work out wifi connectivity and had to interface with ... what is that weird wifi subsystem that linux uses ? Supplicant ? Wow. I just want to pipeline commands and edit config files. I don't care that it's inefficient or doesn't scale. It has scaled just fine for me.
    - dijit 5y ago
      I believe wpa_supplicant is still needed for wifi access on freebsd (or, it was in 2017 when I was last using freebsd on my laptop). OpenBSD has better integrations with ifconfig and wpa though, it’s possible they are ported over now, but wifi config is the same as in Linux (or had been for quite a significant amount of time) on freebsd. Completely agree about the opaque and incidental complexity of the systemd ecosystem though, I’m glad people love it but it’s not for me.
- trasz 5y ago
  If you have a large installation, why depend on FreeBSD releases at all instead of choosing (arbitrarily) a newer STABLE snapshot, testing it and eventually rolling into production same way you’d do with a release?
- akkartik 5y ago
  As someone without skin in this particular game, I'm curious to hear your view of the OS landscape today. Have you considered (or perhaps even tried) migrating rsync.net out of FreeBSD given these issues?
- lmm 5y ago
  > ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch A worst-case 16 months sounds like an absurdly long support window by the standards of most actively developed projects; anything but the largest and most corporate of projects is unlikely to do better than that. And it seems contradictory to complain that stable releases aren't supported long enough but you're waiting too long for new functionality. Of course everyone wants daily releases that are supported forever, but realistically with finite development effort most projects have to settle on something equivalent to "you can run -CURRENT or you can run LTS, pick your poison".
  - smaudet 5y ago
    As others have pointed out LTS exists elsewhere - the truth is LTS is minimum level of support necessary for most users. Everything else is essentially bleeding edge - too much work to maintain, constantly bugged, etc. The previous model where a major change could have support last for decades, where the system was modular in that patches could apply to any major version - that was gold. Unfortunately today we have this "yesterday's tech is garbage" attitude, and honeslty it is mostly making all software garbage.
  - r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
    This has not been my experience over the last 20 years across multiple industries. Generally I'd expect (and have written into an SLA) a minimum of 2 years support for anything even vaguely critical. If using Open Source I'd be buying from a vendor who would guarantee that level of support. I acknowledge it's different if you're working for an early stage startup designing the next tinder for marmosets or whatever in which case you probably don't care about support windows because you're likely to crash and burn within your support window.
    - lmm 5y ago
      I've worked across industries in everything from a 2-person startup to an F500 investment bank, and I've very rarely seen a 2 year SLA for anything. (Rolling 6 months was the standard at the investment bank). Buying all your open source frameworks is an expensive luxury (and rarely worth anything), at least if you're in a position where you actually need to deliver.
- benschulz 5y ago
  > It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. I'm curious: Why _shouldn't_ it be an OS primarily for its developers? Why should they focus on others when they're the one building it?
  - beowulfey 5y ago
    Well, it’s fine if you aren’t a FreeBSD developer yourself and don’t want to use FreeBSD. How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder?
    - nix23 5y ago
      >How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder? Probably more then ever ;)
  - throwawaylinux 5y ago
    We could quibble about what exactly "primarily" means, but that's not the phrase he used which is "by, and for" without the qualifier. So here's two reasons to make FreeBSD for others as well: - They use a lot of code that they don't develop. If FreeBSD is not for others then those external projects and developers would be disinclined to make their stuff work on FreeBSD. - Every new FreeBSD developer comes from a non-FreeBSD developer who is interested in FreeBSD and probably uses it. More developers ~= better FreeBSD for FreeBSD developers. - More users (very roughly) means more money. Whether that's money to pay for more FreeBSD developers, or incentive to make your hardware work with FreeBSD or port your software to it, there are some positive effects on the system and possibly your wallet. - Personal satisfaction to develop software lots of people use. Also the recognition that comes with that can get you a job or help you meet people and go places. So lots of reasons. Even being purely selfish and hoping to extract the most from it, there are plausible reasons why some amount of focus on others might be the best way to go about developing a the project.
- rsecora 5y ago
  Either there is a code contributor pushing for functionality (Example sendfile/nginx) or a donor suggesting a path forward or a volunteer given free time. Every foundation goals can be driven via sponsorship. At the end everything is simplify as who pays the bills at the end of the month? This raises the old question: Who pays for the free in free software? https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYear=2019 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...
  - MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
    > "It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers." I don't know how many FreeBSD devs are paid full time and how much of it is voluntary, but this is the outcome that I would expect absent a traditional customer-vendor relationship. This is basically every open source project ever where most of the work being done is non-commercial.
- r3trohack3r 5y ago
  I’m curious, this response seemed fairly reasonable and proposed it start at 8.3: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037401.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan... Did anything come of it?
VWWHFSfQ 5y ago
Is this partly because there is no (or very little) commercial support for FreeBSD and therefore nobody is all that interested in the boring bits like long-term stability releases such as the 5 year release, 5 years of support suggestion in that thread? The volunteers want to do new and interesting things. They don't want to backport fixes for 5 year old bugs anymore when most likely the subsystem that contained that bug has already been replaced in current anyway, so "what's the point?". And if nobody is being paid to do it, if there's nobody _to pay_ to do it, then nobody is going to do it. This has always been the problem with FreeBSD. Despite some great technology the operating system itself has mostly fallen by the wayside in the grand scheme of things. There's way too much FreeBSD "religion" in that community IMO.
- jlcoff 5y ago
  There is plenty of commercial support, though, nobody publish anything publicly thanks to the BSD license, thus everybody re-invent the wheel internally. Btw, I'm an ex proprietary-solution-based-on-FreeBSD developer.
shimont 5y ago
Who uses FreeBSD those days? As a company that runs on the cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure you run windows/linux, and on desktop people mainly run MacOS/Windows/Linux. I am really asking as for what is the main use case of FreeBSD in 2022?
- LeoPanthera 5y ago
  Domain-specific derivatives of FreeBSD are still very popular, such as TrueNAS, pfSense, OPNsense, and so on.
- rsync 5y ago
  We[1] have our entire infrastructure on FreeBSD - and always have. That's why this has been frustrating - we have a history of committing real money[2][3] to the project in an attempt to make investments ... but there is never a fixed target to make those investments in. It is a matter of fact that our own use of FreeBSD - in live production for a business - is completely divorced from the experience and day to day usage of FreeBSD developers. [1] rsync.net and, previously, JohnCompanies [2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/2007cb.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/2007cb.html [3] USD 50k donation offered - https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037369.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan...
  - bojo 5y ago
    Whoa, I recall spinning a box up on JohnCompanies back when you guys first popped onto the scene. Cool to see people still building on FreeBSD, sad to see that it's an uphill battle to stay relevant with it.
    - rsync 5y ago
      Did you learn about us from our kuro5hin ads ? That was 21 years ago ...
      - bojo 5y ago
        That must have been it, used kuro5hin quite a bit back then.
KindOne 5y ago
Needs (2012) in the title.
- bigiain 5y ago
  I dunno, the whole point is that it’s just as true in 2022…
  - KindOne 5y ago
    From my observations content from previous years tend to get the (YEAR) appended at the end of the title unless its from the current year.
    - froh 5y ago
      which makes perfect sense because this is hacker NEWS, indeed :-)
jl6 5y ago
Differentiation from Linux is a hot topic whenever FreeBSD is discussed. I could get behind “converge to a fixed scope, and polish relentlessly” as the primary ethos. Wouldn’t it be great for FreeBSD to be the first OS to have a release that was actually, truly finished? At the moment, all OS releases are just waymarkers on an endless, goalless roadmap of perpetual development.
- burrows 5y ago
  > I could get behind “converge to a fixed scope, and polish relentlessly” as the primary ethos. > Wouldn’t it be great for FreeBSD to be the first OS to have a release that was actually, truly finished? By OS do you mean just the kernel or also the userspace? Then I think the challenge is to determine what gets included under the purview of relentless polishing. Assuming you mean just the kernel, then probably bug fixes are included. But what about drivers for new hardware? And when researchers at Stanford develop a new file system algorithm with foo bar baz properties? Or a new scheme for sandboxing user programs?
  - djbusby 5y ago
    Maybe all new features in new Major version? New FS=Next. But drivers should be buildable by the HW vendor right? And shouldn't the next kernel version be not crazy-hard to port the driver?
    - burrows 5y ago
      > Maybe all new features in new Major version? I don’t think I understand the (many) purpose(s) of OS versioning. Vendors use them to make specific maintenance commitments? “We will continue to make bug fixes for version XYZ until 2025.” And if end users care about a particular program, “Okay, version XZY of my favorite OS supports programs A and B.”? > But drivers should be buildable by the HW vendor right? The vendor may not create a driver for this OS. “Only 10k people use this OS, therefore it’s likely not profitable for us to make a driver for it.”
- stragies 5y ago
toolcombinator 5y ago
Sounds like you might want to give Dragonfly a try!
csdreamer7 5y ago
Am I understanding this correctly? FreeBSD y releases (x.y) are not snapshots of CURRENT, but rather are backports that are maintained separately from the really LTS x release? I always assumed FreeBSD had a major release and then minor releases that were snapshots of CURRENT like Ubuntu's non-LTS releases were of Debian Unstable.
- loeg 5y ago
  Ubuntu's numbering scheme is year.month, not major.minor. FreeBSD's major releases are branches of CURRENT. Minor releases are branches from the stable branch. This chart attempts to draw the relationship in ASCII: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/share/misc/bsd-family-tree#L395 https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/share/misc/...
- phicoh 5y ago
  FreeBSD creates a branch off current very close to a major release. So work for a new major release happens on current. At some point current blocks new features and focusses on fixing bugs. Then a branch for the major version is created and current can work on the next major release. After that, minor releases mostly contain backported material.
queuebert 5y ago
It's not just FreeBSD. It's everything. Do you ever think about your toaster? No of course you don't. It turns on when you need it, toasts the bread, and then turns off. It doesn't require your attention. Ever. Then you look at your computer and wonder what buggy hell you'll end up with if you roll the dice with the latest updates. Something is fundamentally wrong about how we are using computers.
- alrs 5y ago
  If you're running Debian Stable or RHEL, updates aren't buggy hell. If you're running Arch, Gentoo, or Alpine: of course updates are buggy hell, that's what you signed up for.
  - errantmind 5y ago
    Anecdotal, but I haven't had problems with Arch updates, even with a lot of Aur packages.. yet. Maybe I've been lucky.
    - alrs 5y ago
      "Arch on my laptop" != "Arch on 2000 production systems."
  - nicce 5y ago
    Arch at least is super stable in terms of bugs. The problem comes with changes in software versions. Too often people think that stability means only bugs. I would even argue that Arch has even less bugs than Debian.
    - vaylian 5y ago
      Arch and Debian user here. I find that hard to believe. I love using Arch and I am fine with the occasional (though rare) update problem, because I'm the only user of my system and I'm learning something when something stops working. But Debian stable is really stable, because other Distros ironed out the bugs before the version came into stable.
isoblvck 5y ago
this is from 8 years ago.....
- jlcoff 5y ago
  I'm pretty sure FreeBSD still uses newbus(4), written 20 years ago and already obsolete 10 years ago. 8 years in BSD time is nothing, 8 years in Linux time is an eternity.
tryauuum 5y ago
What is a go-to method of running a virtual machine with FreeBSD nowadays? Does amazon support it or are there better providers?
- toast0 5y ago
  FreeBSD release notes[1] include pointers to EC2 AMIs, Google Compute Engine deployment, as well as links to download generic virtual machine images. I personally run a FreeBSD vm on DigitalOcean, but I suspect they should work most places. [1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/announce/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/announce/
- nix23 5y ago
  I tested (successful) on: -Amazon -Hetzer (HW and VM) -Vultr -Oracle (self build image based on RELEASE) Yes amazon supports FreeBSD fully: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=92bb514d-02bc-49fd-9727-c474863f63da https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=92bb514...
wolverine876 5y ago
(2012)
balsam 5y ago
Anybody knows if the issues with FreeBSD translate to OpenBSD? Not a user of either but seriously considering them for my next OS switch.
- KZerda 5y ago
  OpenBSD is much more strict than FreeBSD with regards to release cycles. You get N-1 releases, period, which ends up being any version gets you about a year of support.
- somat 5y ago
  It's both worse and better. openbsd is unashamedly an operating system for openbsd developers. but they don't mind if you use it. I find openbsd far more comfortable than freebsd, freebsd has more features, but openbsd feels more useable. It's a subtle thing. Openbsd makes no guarantee of a stable abi, and they are not shy about changing the abi. however the api is remarkably stable, that is, you have to recompile your projects every time you upgrade. Openbsd sort of plays it's own game with regards to releases, they develop on "current" if you use this it is dynamic like arch. every 6 months(like clockwork literaly) they cut a release. if you use a release it's stable and out of date like rhel. Note that you can't make any assumptions about what changed from the release number, openbsd 6.8 to 6.9 to 7.0 was just three releases, nothing special changed between 6.9 and 7.0. Personally I run my desktop on current and find it usually takes around 3 weeks before they break abi, at which time I upgrade to latest current. I run my servers on a release and update them every 6 months. If you want to keep a stable system longer than a year, go for it, but it is up to you to make sure you have a copy of all the packages you may ever need, note that you will not find any security patches or sympathy online after two releases.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
rsecora 5y ago
Possible window of opportunity for a company focused on backporting fixes for FreeBSD. But in reality there is a big risk of nobody putting money on the table for that maintenance. Am I right?

151 points by rsync 5y ago

I wrote this in 2012 - almost exactly ten years ago - and it remains true. Looking at freebsd.org right now I see that my options for production, release systems are 12.3 and 13.0 ... ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with: "That's fixed in current ..." The 4.x nostalgia is justified: it was polished and polished and polished over many years and many organizations were incentivized to invest in that branch

LeoPanthera 5y ago
Just because you think it's still true doesn't mean you're justified in not putting (2012) in the title.
- freedomben 5y ago
  That's harsh and definitely not the benefit of the doubt. Seems more likely to me that OP didn't think about putting (2012) in there.
themerone 5y ago
What is "The Rift" you mention?
- rsync 5y ago
  The transition from the 4.x branch of FreeBSD to 5.x. 5.x had all kinds of problems and then 6.x was the first release that barely got out into public use before 7.x undercut it ... and that is the cycle we have been in ever since. 4.x had minor releases going all the way to 4.11. Nowadays, major versions generally stop at X.3 (for instance, 11.3).
  - rjsw 5y ago
    I switched to NetBSD instead of completely wiping 4.11 and installing 5.x.
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- Lammy 5y ago
  5.x was the start of "Giant lock" elimination: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-November/022368.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2007-Nov... There wasn't a "STABLE" release of it until FreeBSD 5.3 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBSD_5 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD_version_history#FreeBS... FreeBSD may not be a perfectly-run project but I honestly can't imagine using anything else :)
akulbe 5y ago
It also seems like 10 years ago folks were a lot more willing to have discourse, where today… if you have difference(s) of opinion, it's not received as well. Discourse used to be a thing.
- edgyquant 5y ago
  Is this true? When I was a kid using the internet to learn to code on the 2000s people seemed a lot meaner in general than they are now. It was hard to ask a question on a forum without being made to feel like an idiot.
  - philliphaydon 5y ago
    I would like you to meet stackoverflow. When I was learning to code in the late 90s early 2000s people seemed much nicer and more patient then than they do now… I try to avoid asking questions on SO because of the negativity there.
    - bee_rider 5y ago
      StackOverflow isn't really for beginner questions/"help me learn" kind of stuff. In the course of trying to come up with answers to most questions, they knocked out the easy/fundamental ones early. I used to answer question on the askprogramming subreddit sometimes, I generally didn't see a ton of negativity there.
    - teh_klev 5y ago
      You could learn how to write a better question. I've got ~140 questions on SO and none of them ever had hostile responses. Usually questions are downvoted because they're: * vague * no code example * pretty basic that a google search could answer your question * same old, same old repetitive questions answered many times over Back in the days of usenet there would be a FAQ and likely a set of HOWTO's, you had to read this so as not to fall foul of pushback from the group (probably considered hostile). If you are asking what might be a repeat question but didn't find a solution either on SO or elsewhere, then quote the sources that came close but didn't help. That shows you at least did some research. Both usenet and forums from the 1990/2000's were no different. I quit answering questions on SO because I felt people were lazy and wasting my time, and I was done with that, mostly for the reasons above. I still monitor the same tags I was active in, see the same old crap, and really cannot be arsed because it's clear the OP's did no research. Also when you do assist some users become quite indignant that you must solve their exact use-case. Many users never even say thank you for an answer that might take 30-45mins to produce. So feck that shite. I don't have the time or energy to be hostile, I just went dark. And sadly many early enthusiastic answerers that helped bootstrap the site in the early years did the same.
throw0101a 5y ago
> ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch before it was hopelessly passe and all queries regarding it would be answered with: So basically the same as Debian and Ubuntu LTS? Debian releases every ~2 years with 5 years of Security+LTS support, which is the same as Ubuntu (LTS): * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release_table https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debian_version_history#Release... * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu#Releases From "Changes to the FreeBSD Support Model": - Resolving our arbitrary (and unofficial) 5-year branch lifetime guarantee. The support policy is that the stable/X branch will be supported for 5 years (minimum) from the point X.0-RELEASE is released. We now guarantee a 5-year lifetime on the branch, regardless of how many releases are built from the branch. Additionally, a "last minute" release from the stable/X branch does not constitute expanding the support lifetime for the branch as a whole for an additional two years. […] - A new stable/ branch release will not occur before two years after the X.0-RELEASE from the prior branch. This limits the number of simultaneous supported branches, which will greatly reduce the overall number of branches that must be maintained and build-tested for Security Advisories and Errata Notices, reducing turnaround time. * https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-February/001624.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2015-Fe... * https://www.freebsd.org/security/ https://www.freebsd.org/security/
- ianai 5y ago
  Two thoughts: 1. GP makes me wonder whether the FreeBSD definition of LTS is less than people expect. 2. Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. i.e. Make the actual OS files changing have no effect upon hosted system/application stability.
  - toast0 5y ago
    > Maybe to properly admin a modern FreeBSD box the admin is supposed to be making the underlying system version easily replaceable. This is how things worked at Yahoo and WhatsApp. For the most part, a server kept whatever version of FreeBSD it was installed with, and the application logic lived in /usr/local/ or /home/y/ or /home/whatsapp/ Keep your 'build' machine to compile production executables on the oldest OS release of your fleet, and everything should run everywhere. (You'll need to use the compat-X stuff so your FreeBSD X+1 machines can run FreeBSD X binaries, but that's easy) You can use stuff from the base system, but not if you expect recent changes. I don't remember ever doing an OS upgrade at Yahoo, although it must have happened. In my group, we only got updates with new hardware; which was fine, hardware was changing rapidly. At WhatsApp, I drove the OS updates towards the end of WhatsApp's use of FreeBSD. A fair amount was just not wanting to have 4 different major versions out there, but there were also forced updates to get important network bugfixes or performance improvements. Sometimes it was easier to find the handful of boxes that were too old to use something nice in a script and update them, rather than fixing the script to not use the nice feature. When we ran into bugs on older versions, upgrading to a version that already had it fixed was sometimes an option, but sometimes it'd need to be backported, and sometimes the bug was still in -current. We didn't run into too many of those though, our local patch set was never more than about 10 patches.
alberth 5y ago
As someone who loves BSD, and really respects your opinion, a few questions given your long history with: - if you could start all over fresh, what OS (and why) would you run your business on? - what’s your opinion about Dragonfly? Any experience with it? - what are the things you love about FreeBSD, as well as what still needs improvement (besides release cycle topic)?
- rsync 5y ago
  I would still have built rsync.net on FreeBSD because of how familiar I was with it and how much I had personally (and institutionally) invested in it from JohnCompanies. Since ZFS is now so core to what we do, it was a very natural evolution. I have zero experience with Dragonfly BSD. I love that FreeBSD is still a very simple UNIX without complications like systemd. I was recently tinkering with a raspberry pi and had to work out wifi connectivity and had to interface with ... what is that weird wifi subsystem that linux uses ? Supplicant ? Wow. I just want to pipeline commands and edit config files. I don't care that it's inefficient or doesn't scale. It has scaled just fine for me.
  - dijit 5y ago
    I believe wpa_supplicant is still needed for wifi access on freebsd (or, it was in 2017 when I was last using freebsd on my laptop). OpenBSD has better integrations with ifconfig and wpa though, it’s possible they are ported over now, but wifi config is the same as in Linux (or had been for quite a significant amount of time) on freebsd. Completely agree about the opaque and incidental complexity of the systemd ecosystem though, I’m glad people love it but it’s not for me.
trasz 5y ago
If you have a large installation, why depend on FreeBSD releases at all instead of choosing (arbitrarily) a newer STABLE snapshot, testing it and eventually rolling into production same way you’d do with a release?
akkartik 5y ago
As someone without skin in this particular game, I'm curious to hear your view of the OS landscape today. Have you considered (or perhaps even tried) migrating rsync.net out of FreeBSD given these issues?
lmm 5y ago
> ... which means that if 12.1-RELEASE came out at the end of 2019 and 13.0-RELEASE came out in April of 2021, you had all of 16 months to make investments in the 12 branch A worst-case 16 months sounds like an absurdly long support window by the standards of most actively developed projects; anything but the largest and most corporate of projects is unlikely to do better than that. And it seems contradictory to complain that stable releases aren't supported long enough but you're waiting too long for new functionality. Of course everyone wants daily releases that are supported forever, but realistically with finite development effort most projects have to settle on something equivalent to "you can run -CURRENT or you can run LTS, pick your poison".
- smaudet 5y ago
  As others have pointed out LTS exists elsewhere - the truth is LTS is minimum level of support necessary for most users. Everything else is essentially bleeding edge - too much work to maintain, constantly bugged, etc. The previous model where a major change could have support last for decades, where the system was modular in that patches could apply to any major version - that was gold. Unfortunately today we have this "yesterday's tech is garbage" attitude, and honeslty it is mostly making all software garbage.
- r_hoods_ghost 5y ago
  This has not been my experience over the last 20 years across multiple industries. Generally I'd expect (and have written into an SLA) a minimum of 2 years support for anything even vaguely critical. If using Open Source I'd be buying from a vendor who would guarantee that level of support. I acknowledge it's different if you're working for an early stage startup designing the next tinder for marmosets or whatever in which case you probably don't care about support windows because you're likely to crash and burn within your support window.
  - lmm 5y ago
    I've worked across industries in everything from a 2-person startup to an F500 investment bank, and I've very rarely seen a 2 year SLA for anything. (Rolling 6 months was the standard at the investment bank). Buying all your open source frameworks is an expensive luxury (and rarely worth anything), at least if you're in a position where you actually need to deliver.
benschulz 5y ago
> It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers. I'm curious: Why _shouldn't_ it be an OS primarily for its developers? Why should they focus on others when they're the one building it?
- beowulfey 5y ago
  Well, it’s fine if you aren’t a FreeBSD developer yourself and don’t want to use FreeBSD. How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder?
  - nix23 5y ago
    >How many people run TempleOS these days, I wonder? Probably more then ever ;)
- throwawaylinux 5y ago
  We could quibble about what exactly "primarily" means, but that's not the phrase he used which is "by, and for" without the qualifier. So here's two reasons to make FreeBSD for others as well: - They use a lot of code that they don't develop. If FreeBSD is not for others then those external projects and developers would be disinclined to make their stuff work on FreeBSD. - Every new FreeBSD developer comes from a non-FreeBSD developer who is interested in FreeBSD and probably uses it. More developers ~= better FreeBSD for FreeBSD developers. - More users (very roughly) means more money. Whether that's money to pay for more FreeBSD developers, or incentive to make your hardware work with FreeBSD or port your software to it, there are some positive effects on the system and possibly your wallet. - Personal satisfaction to develop software lots of people use. Also the recognition that comes with that can get you a job or help you meet people and go places. So lots of reasons. Even being purely selfish and hoping to extract the most from it, there are plausible reasons why some amount of focus on others might be the best way to go about developing a the project.
rsecora 5y ago
Either there is a code contributor pushing for functionality (Example sendfile/nginx) or a donor suggesting a path forward or a volunteer given free time. Every foundation goals can be driven via sponsorship. At the end everything is simplify as who pays the bills at the end of the month? This raises the old question: Who pays for the free in free software? https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYear=2019 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...
- MrBuddyCasino 5y ago
  > "It's difficult to escape the notion that FreeBSD is becoming an operating system by, and for, FreeBSD developers." I don't know how many FreeBSD devs are paid full time and how much of it is voluntary, but this is the outcome that I would expect absent a traditional customer-vendor relationship. This is basically every open source project ever where most of the work being done is non-commercial.
r3trohack3r 5y ago
I’m curious, this response seemed fairly reasonable and proposed it start at 8.3: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037401.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan... Did anything come of it?

VWWHFSfQ 5y ago

Is this partly because there is no (or very little) commercial support for FreeBSD and therefore nobody is all that interested in the boring bits like long-term stability releases such as the 5 year release, 5 years of support suggestion in that thread? The volunteers want to do new and interesting things. They don't want to backport fixes for 5 year old bugs anymore when most likely the subsystem that contained that bug has already been replaced in current anyway, so "what's the point?". And if nobody is being paid to do it, if there's nobody _to pay_ to do it, then nobody is going to do it. This has always been the problem with FreeBSD. Despite some great technology the operating system itself has mostly fallen by the wayside in the grand scheme of things. There's way too much FreeBSD "religion" in that community IMO.

jlcoff 5y ago
There is plenty of commercial support, though, nobody publish anything publicly thanks to the BSD license, thus everybody re-invent the wheel internally. Btw, I'm an ex proprietary-solution-based-on-FreeBSD developer.

shimont 5y ago

Who uses FreeBSD those days? As a company that runs on the cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure you run windows/linux, and on desktop people mainly run MacOS/Windows/Linux. I am really asking as for what is the main use case of FreeBSD in 2022?

LeoPanthera 5y ago
Domain-specific derivatives of FreeBSD are still very popular, such as TrueNAS, pfSense, OPNsense, and so on.
rsync 5y ago
We[1] have our entire infrastructure on FreeBSD - and always have. That's why this has been frustrating - we have a history of committing real money[2][3] to the project in an attempt to make investments ... but there is never a fixed target to make those investments in. It is a matter of fact that our own use of FreeBSD - in live production for a business - is completely divorced from the experience and day to day usage of FreeBSD developers. [1] rsync.net and, previously, JohnCompanies [2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/2007cb.html https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/2007cb.html [3] USD 50k donation offered - https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-January/037369.html https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan...
- bojo 5y ago
  Whoa, I recall spinning a box up on JohnCompanies back when you guys first popped onto the scene. Cool to see people still building on FreeBSD, sad to see that it's an uphill battle to stay relevant with it.
  - rsync 5y ago
    Did you learn about us from our kuro5hin ads ? That was 21 years ago ...
    - bojo 5y ago
      That must have been it, used kuro5hin quite a bit back then.

KindOne 5y ago

Needs (2012) in the title.

bigiain 5y ago
I dunno, the whole point is that it’s just as true in 2022…
- KindOne 5y ago
  From my observations content from previous years tend to get the (YEAR) appended at the end of the title unless its from the current year.
  - froh 5y ago
    which makes perfect sense because this is hacker NEWS, indeed :-)

jl6 5y ago

Differentiation from Linux is a hot topic whenever FreeBSD is discussed. I could get behind “converge to a fixed scope, and polish relentlessly” as the primary ethos. Wouldn’t it be great for FreeBSD to be the first OS to have a release that was actually, truly finished? At the moment, all OS releases are just waymarkers on an endless, goalless roadmap of perpetual development.

burrows 5y ago
> I could get behind “converge to a fixed scope, and polish relentlessly” as the primary ethos. > Wouldn’t it be great for FreeBSD to be the first OS to have a release that was actually, truly finished? By OS do you mean just the kernel or also the userspace? Then I think the challenge is to determine what gets included under the purview of relentless polishing. Assuming you mean just the kernel, then probably bug fixes are included. But what about drivers for new hardware? And when researchers at Stanford develop a new file system algorithm with foo bar baz properties? Or a new scheme for sandboxing user programs?
- djbusby 5y ago
  Maybe all new features in new Major version? New FS=Next. But drivers should be buildable by the HW vendor right? And shouldn't the next kernel version be not crazy-hard to port the driver?
  - burrows 5y ago
    > Maybe all new features in new Major version? I don’t think I understand the (many) purpose(s) of OS versioning. Vendors use them to make specific maintenance commitments? “We will continue to make bug fixes for version XYZ until 2025.” And if end users care about a particular program, “Okay, version XZY of my favorite OS supports programs A and B.”? > But drivers should be buildable by the HW vendor right? The vendor may not create a driver for this OS. “Only 10k people use this OS, therefore it’s likely not profitable for us to make a driver for it.”
stragies 5y ago

toolcombinator 5y ago

Sounds like you might want to give Dragonfly a try!

csdreamer7 5y ago

Am I understanding this correctly? FreeBSD y releases (x.y) are not snapshots of CURRENT, but rather are backports that are maintained separately from the really LTS x release? I always assumed FreeBSD had a major release and then minor releases that were snapshots of CURRENT like Ubuntu's non-LTS releases were of Debian Unstable.

loeg 5y ago
Ubuntu's numbering scheme is year.month, not major.minor. FreeBSD's major releases are branches of CURRENT. Minor releases are branches from the stable branch. This chart attempts to draw the relationship in ASCII: https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/share/misc/bsd-family-tree#L395 https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd-src/blob/main/share/misc/...
phicoh 5y ago
FreeBSD creates a branch off current very close to a major release. So work for a new major release happens on current. At some point current blocks new features and focusses on fixing bugs. Then a branch for the major version is created and current can work on the next major release. After that, minor releases mostly contain backported material.

queuebert 5y ago

It's not just FreeBSD. It's everything. Do you ever think about your toaster? No of course you don't. It turns on when you need it, toasts the bread, and then turns off. It doesn't require your attention. Ever. Then you look at your computer and wonder what buggy hell you'll end up with if you roll the dice with the latest updates. Something is fundamentally wrong about how we are using computers.

alrs 5y ago
If you're running Debian Stable or RHEL, updates aren't buggy hell. If you're running Arch, Gentoo, or Alpine: of course updates are buggy hell, that's what you signed up for.
- errantmind 5y ago
  Anecdotal, but I haven't had problems with Arch updates, even with a lot of Aur packages.. yet. Maybe I've been lucky.
  - alrs 5y ago
    "Arch on my laptop" != "Arch on 2000 production systems."
- nicce 5y ago
  Arch at least is super stable in terms of bugs. The problem comes with changes in software versions. Too often people think that stability means only bugs. I would even argue that Arch has even less bugs than Debian.
  - vaylian 5y ago
    Arch and Debian user here. I find that hard to believe. I love using Arch and I am fine with the occasional (though rare) update problem, because I'm the only user of my system and I'm learning something when something stops working. But Debian stable is really stable, because other Distros ironed out the bugs before the version came into stable.

isoblvck 5y ago

this is from 8 years ago.....

jlcoff 5y ago
I'm pretty sure FreeBSD still uses newbus(4), written 20 years ago and already obsolete 10 years ago. 8 years in BSD time is nothing, 8 years in Linux time is an eternity.

tryauuum 5y ago

What is a go-to method of running a virtual machine with FreeBSD nowadays? Does amazon support it or are there better providers?

toast0 5y ago
FreeBSD release notes[1] include pointers to EC2 AMIs, Google Compute Engine deployment, as well as links to download generic virtual machine images. I personally run a FreeBSD vm on DigitalOcean, but I suspect they should work most places. [1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/announce/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/13.0R/announce/
nix23 5y ago
I tested (successful) on: -Amazon -Hetzer (HW and VM) -Vultr -Oracle (self build image based on RELEASE) Yes amazon supports FreeBSD fully: https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=92bb514d-02bc-49fd-9727-c474863f63da https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/seller-profile?id=92bb514...

wolverine876 5y ago

(2012)

balsam 5y ago

Anybody knows if the issues with FreeBSD translate to OpenBSD? Not a user of either but seriously considering them for my next OS switch.

KZerda 5y ago
OpenBSD is much more strict than FreeBSD with regards to release cycles. You get N-1 releases, period, which ends up being any version gets you about a year of support.
somat 5y ago
It's both worse and better. openbsd is unashamedly an operating system for openbsd developers. but they don't mind if you use it. I find openbsd far more comfortable than freebsd, freebsd has more features, but openbsd feels more useable. It's a subtle thing. Openbsd makes no guarantee of a stable abi, and they are not shy about changing the abi. however the api is remarkably stable, that is, you have to recompile your projects every time you upgrade. Openbsd sort of plays it's own game with regards to releases, they develop on "current" if you use this it is dynamic like arch. every 6 months(like clockwork literaly) they cut a release. if you use a release it's stable and out of date like rhel. Note that you can't make any assumptions about what changed from the release number, openbsd 6.8 to 6.9 to 7.0 was just three releases, nothing special changed between 6.9 and 7.0. Personally I run my desktop on current and find it usually takes around 3 weeks before they break abi, at which time I upgrade to latest current. I run my servers on a release and update them every 6 months. If you want to keep a stable system longer than a year, go for it, but it is up to you to make sure you have a copy of all the packages you may ever need, note that you will not find any security patches or sympathy online after two releases.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

rsecora 5y ago

Possible window of opportunity for a company focused on backporting fixes for FreeBSD. But in reality there is a big risk of nobody putting money on the table for that maintenance. Am I right?