7 ms·
A year of funded FreeBSD development
- tiffanyh 1y agoLots of respect for cperciva. Don’t know how he manages all of this + Tarsnap.
- cperciva 1y agoIt turns out that at a certain point, money can buy time. Do I fix the leaky tap myself, or hire a plumber? After electricians rip up my basement drywall (perfectly reasonably -- I was getting solar panels installed and the electrical panel needed to be upgraded) do I fix it myself or do I hire a professional drywaller? To be fair, some of the time I spent on this came away from Tarsnap. But less than you might imagine.
- Alupis 1y ago> or do I hire a professional drywaller When it comes to drywall, always hire a professional. Learn from other's mistakes... it's not as easy as you think and it won't turn out well.
- pokabul2 1y ago[dead]
- cperciva 1y agoTrue. In this case it was drywall in a poorly lit basement, so I wasn't all that concerned about it turning out perfectly -- but it absolutely did turn out much better than it would have if I tried to do it myself.
- bluGill 1y agoI know how to do drywall as well as a pro - it just takes me 6x as long. It is easy to do, but you can't do what the pros do without a lot of practice. By planning on 6x longer you can slow down, do thiner coats and such (pros do 3 coats of mud, I do 6 for the same thickness). Which falls into the do or hire.
- jonhohle 1y agoDry wallers are amazing. As a diyer, it’s one of the few things I can never seem to get right. I’m happy to put holes in it, but seeing professionals patch it is another level.
- firesteelrain 1y agoMy wall has orange peel on it so I just spray it with orange peel after getting the spackle smooth and sanded. Never know I patched it.
- firesteelrain 1y agoIt’s really not hard. I added onto a house I owned back in 2009 after returning from Iraq and saving a bunch of money. IRS also gave me a huge refund that year. Something with GWOT vets and taxes with combat pay. Anyhow, converted a covered porch to a room, had permits, raised the floor, added electric, energy efficient Argon gas windows, etc. You give 84 lumber the blue print plans from the architect and they tell you how much material you need. After I got to the stage to add furring strips for the concrete block part and insulation (which is easy too), I was ready to add the dry wall. Just lift it up to the wall then screw it in. Dry wall tape, corner bead, and mud to cover the seams. Orange peel can hide imperfections. Then paint. Pretty straightforward
- AlienRobot 1y agoAt a certain point money can even buy money. The other day I had the opportunity to get a 10% discount on a fridge if I could pay the whole thing in one payment. If I didn't have the money I wouldn't get the discount, so in a way being poor means everything is more expensive.
- naikrovek 1y agoBeing more poor is always more expensive than being less poor. All poor people know this in their bones because they face this every day of their lives.
- phonon 1y ago"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet. This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socio-economic unfairness." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
- fud101 1y agoI refuse to drop $300 on a pair of bluetooth earphones but i've spent easily over that by buying lots of bad cheap ones. I'm still ok with that on principle, I don't like the idea of being ripped off..
- wkat4242 1y ago[flagged]
- 77pt77 1y ago[flagged]
- tedunangst 1y agoA fourteen year old bug is relevant how?
- cypherpunks01 1y agoIf you've found a method to write software that is 100% bug-free, we're all ears.
- DoctorOW 1y ago[flagged]
- cperciva 1y agoRust would not have prevented that bug.
- mkfs 1y agoIIRC, it was a nonce-not-used-only-once vulnerability, wasn't it? Wouldn't that be tricky to detect, even in Rust? Regardless, it's quite unfortunate to see Colin's nits picked in this manner, dredging up some mistake from almost 15 years ago (which he handled as responsibly as could be expected), given all of the work he's done on FreeBSD and for giving the world scrypt.
- cperciva 1y agogiving the world scrypt Ironically that bug happened because of scrypt. Creating scrypt led me to refactor Tarsnap's crypto code, which is when the bug slipped in.
- 77pt77 1y agoThere are bugs and then there are BUGS!
- ksec 1y agoI was rather hoping Amazon would spend and contribute more. But it seems they basically only want to pay for the minimum FreeBSD support. Amazon isn't even on FreeBSD sponsors [1]. And Google only sponsored $9K last year. Apple isn't there. Edit: And Credit to Microsoft being at least on the list! And forgot to mention Meta / Facebook missing from it as well. I would have expect them to sponsor FreeBSD and OpenBSD annually by default given they use and continue to benefits the work out of both. [1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYear=2024 https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...
- cperciva 1y agoI'd love to see Amazon contribute more, of course; but the fact they don't show up as donors to the FreeBSD Foundation doesn't mean they're not supporting FreeBSD. The money they paid me didn't flow through the Foundation, for example; I'd guess that Foundation-funded development is maybe 10% of all corporate-funded FreeBSD development. (It's an important 10%, especially because it can be focused on "what does FreeBSD need" rather than "what does company X need" -- but it's still a small minority.)
- vitorsr 1y agoThis comment does not present the full picture. First, it presents the snapshot of donations within a given year to the Foundation. The history of donations is not represented by definition. Second, it does not present contributed development. Those are typically summarily available on the release notes of each release [1]. [1] https://www.freebsd.org/releases/ https://www.freebsd.org/releases/
- hackernoops 1y agoHas Amazon donated more to FreeBSD than Notch the Minecraft guy?
- OsrsNeedsf2P 1y ago[flagged]
- AndyKelley 1y agoSweet! By the way we just added FreeBSD to the download page on ziglang.org (as of today), so FreeBSD users can grab master branch builds automatically built by the CI. It's also now a first-class supported cross-compilation target, including when linking libc, so you can do stuff like `zig cc -o hello hello.c -target riscv64-freebsd`. And then of course if you have any C/C++ dependencies, you can fetch and build them with the zig build system, so it should be possible to easily cross-compile even quite complex projects for FreeBSD now. Hopefully that helps more projects decide to add FreeBSD support and respective testing to their CI!
- xedrac 1y agoZig's cross compilation is awesome, and it's nice to see FreeBSD on the supported target list.
- int_19h 1y agoGiven that Zig has a BSD-friendly license and FreeBSD already ships LLVM in the base system, I wonder if Zig will also end up there one day. Would be nice to have an official blessed C replacement.
- msdrigg 1y agoThere are some hilarious tidbits in here > Starting in the first week of 2024, the FreeBSD boot process suddenly got about 3x slower. I started bisecting commits, and tracked it down to... a commit which increased the root disk size from 5 GB to 6 GB. Why? Well, I reached out to some of my friends at Amazon, and it turned out that the answer was somewhere between "magic" and "you really don't want to know"; but the important part for me was that increasing the root disk size to 8 GB restored performance to earlier levels.
- xandrius 1y agoNow I really want to know though.
- cperciva 1y agoMy understanding is that EBS has some heuristics for deciding whether to keep data cached; an AMI which has a cached snapshot as its root disk will boot much faster than an AMI where all the data needs to be pulled from S3.
- tedunangst 1y agoSome huge customer chunked their data into 5GB pieces so now there's a "if size == 5GB" in the cache code.
- net01 1y agoThere is also a lot of work on the laptop front, I read that the BSD foundation invested $750k for this implementing: (S0ix Sleep State, etc ) you can find the project laptop here https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop
- cperciva 1y agoYep there's a lot of work going on. I was just writing about the work I was doing. ;-)
- SSLy 1y agocolin, fix your encoding
- cperciva 1y agoErr, I'm happy to fix things, but can you elaborate on what is broken?
- jonhohle 1y agoI may be wrong about OPs intention, but AFAICT, because no encoding is specified, the client gets to choose. For someone not using a default encoding that's a superset of ASCII (like ISO-2022-KR) the page appears as a �. Current practice is to put a meta tag with your encoding, use a Unicode BOM, or less favorably, send the charset attribute in the Content-type header.
- SSLy 1y agoThe em-dashes were mojibaked. They seem fine now. Cheers.
- johnnyjeans 1y agoCan someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? I'm well aware of the problems with GNU, but do you have problems even with something like Musl Void? I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.
- wkat4242 1y agoFreeBSD has a much bigger userbase than openbsd or netbsd. Not even comparable. Its software catalog is also much bigger. It's a viable modern desktop daily driver and I can't say that for the other two. As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by corporate interests.
- johnnyjeans 1y agoMy impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS, they hold a lot of soft power over it. I know the kernels are different and obviously only part of the userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD actually far enough away from Apple to say it's not bogged down by corporate interests? I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it exists in a non-trivial way, no?
- wkat4242 1y agoIt's not. Apple (or rather NeXT) took some of the userland for macOS but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much influence. It's more like a fork a long time ago. A few companies do. Skype and Netflix did but hardly use it now (at least Skype left it, not sure about Netflix but I never hear about it from bsd devs). Ix systems and netgate do but they're tiny.. No, it's not influenced in a trivial way and certainly not by apple. This is a huge difference to Linux where the vast majority of kernel commits come from big tech and have nothing to do with things end users care about. Also there's nothing in the FreeBSD world like the Linux Foundation which is basically a corporate lobby group.
- commandersaki 1y agoOut of curiosity, who are the top users of FreeBSD/EC2?
- temp0826 1y agoDoes netflix only use it on their edge boxes?
- cperciva 1y agoYes, their CDN is FreeBSD but last I heard all of their cloud operations are Linux.
- cperciva 1y agoI have no clue. Seriously, the users who talk to me are maybe 0.1% of the total FreeBSD/EC2 user base. I would love to know who is using FreeBSD in EC2.
- broken_broken_ 1y agoI can tell you some financial services I have worked for do use FreeBSD on EC2 as well as on the metal in data centers to do millions of transactions a month. I like the OS, thanks for your work.
- KlausWinter 1y ago[dead]
- xedrac 1y agoI wanted to use FreeBSD for my home gateway/firewall/dns/dhcp server, but unfortunately my 10 GbE NICs didn't seem to have drivers, so I ended up going with Nix instead. I used FreeBSD many years ago as a workstation, and found the experience to be quite memorable. It's nice to see that it's still chugging along.
- dazzawazza 1y agoI use FreeBSD for all my (and my companies) infrastructure. I only use hardware with Intel NICs because they are 100% reliable on FreeBSD. Anything with Realtek seem to crap out under load despite the hard work of the FreeBSD engineers who maintain the drivers (I'm not complaining and I respect their efforts). It's a small price to pay and it stops me having to install less stable operating systems.
- LAC-Tech 1y agoThis does not paint a good picture for FreeBSD development. An operating system of that size and complexity surely needs someone company to sponsor the release manager full time, not part time for a year. I don't say this to besmirch FreeBSD, FWIW. I think it's very important that Linux is not the only game in town.
- alanpearce 1y ago40 hours/month. Not week.
- LAC-Tech 1y agoI never said 40/hours week. Very confused by this post!
- irusensei 1y agoI remember the time around version 7 or 8 when FreeBSD had better drivers than Linux for stuff like Atheros wifi cards. I favored FreeBSD until around 2021 when computers with different CPU mixed together started to become common. I first bought a RockPro64 with 2 big and 4 little cores and then an Intel Alder lake. As far as I understand FreeBSD scheduler to this day don't know how to properly play with these so it brings the system to the lowest denominator of the slower cores.
- kevans91 1y agoIt's on the FreeBSD Foundation's roadmap: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/22 https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop/issues/22
- nithssh 1y agoVery enlightening piece on how corpo sponsorship of OSS work. Thanks to the author for writing this.