6 ms·

FreeBSD

108 points by vermaden 9mo ago

jmclnx 9mo ago
I had the printed handbook from the 3.x days, was a great resource and I am sure it still is.
- browningstreet 9mo ago
  Kinda feels like the submission title should be changed to FreeBSD Handbook, and possibly even the relevant version info.
- bionsystem 9mo ago
  I've said it before too, it is exemplary in terms of what documentation should be ; just read through it with a VM on, type the things, and everything just works, no googling or LLMing around. I heard it is the same for other BSDs as well, will try those some day. Also a testimony of how coherent this system is. As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.
GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
not to pick on OP but what is up with all the links to OS project homepages today? i've seen illumos, LFS, FreeBSD and a handful of others. did i miss something (other than W11 shitting the bed with app launching) that's got people suddenly interested in alternative OSes today?
- reactordev 9mo ago
  When you finally understand the full stack you inevitably end up down operating system rabbit holes. You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground. (This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)
  - GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
    no, i get it - i've been to wonderland and back :) i just noticed more of these types of links today than i usually see.
  - tacticalturtle 9mo ago
    The site guidelines is supposed to be anything that a hacker finds interesting. This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting? Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works. These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.
    - reactordev 9mo ago
      Sometimes a reminder for the audience is all it takes. Every couple of years we get new blood here and every year we lose some.
  - qmr 9mo ago
    Don't conflate engineer with programmer.
    - Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
      Programmers would build vehicular bridges with the same workmanship as Engineers writing code. =3
- stronglikedan 9mo ago
  my money is on fake-internet-points farming, and is directly related to "all the links to OS project homepages today"
- goalieca 9mo ago
  Surely most of us have heard of FreeBSD here. To the point that it should not be the top hit on the front page of hacker NEWS
- Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
  At a certain point in some use-cases the Linux problems outweigh the "improvements", and more traditional partially conformant posix systems reduce complexity. For example, the reduced attack surface area of OpenBSD hardware support is a kick in the pants for average users, but desirable for hardened system design. Why does none of this really matter practically? (seriously it doesn't) In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability. I am a fan of most things posix, and acknowledge most problems originate from Application space rather than the OS itself. =3
gigatexal 9mo ago
I ran it for a while it’s nice. Easy as breathing ZFS on root and zfsbootmenu is really nice. Also the userland is maintained in connection with the kernel (or something to that extent) and it’s just a nice solid whole.
- E39M5S62 9mo ago
  ZFSBootMenu doesn't work with FreeBSD, it only knows how to boot a Linux kernel.
  - bionsystem 9mo ago
    Maybe he meant boot environments ?
    - gigatexal 9mo ago
      That’s what I meant. My bad. Got confused.
brcmthrowaway 9mo ago
Does it support arm64?
- cperciva 9mo ago
  Yes, arm64 support has been Tier 1 since FreeBSD 13.0.
- kemotep 9mo ago
  I use FreeBSD on a raspberry pi 3b using the arm64 image. It’s under aarch64: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAGES/15.0/ https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAG...
  - dev_l1x_be 9mo ago
    How is the support? I would like to use CARP/pf if possible on RPI4/5.
    - kemotep 9mo ago
      I only have a 3B but everything I need works for me. I don’t do anything advanced with the GPIO pins, just as a headless little arm server running stuff in jails. Everything is quick. Ethernet only but network performance seems solid. Honestly feels as responsive as my amd64 desktop with 32 gb of ddr4 ram and 8 cores. My desktop has worst support for FreeBSD. No networking or graphics out of the box and significantly more work to get that “working” compared to the pi.
behnamoh 9mo ago
It took 30 years for linux to finally fulfill "x is the year of Linux Desktop", but I don't know if *BSD will ever get there.
- Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
  It is more that Windows abdicated its 87% market share due to incompetence in brand management. =3
  - behnamoh 9mo ago
    fine by me, microsoft deserves to go to hell.
alex1138 9mo ago
Posts FreeBSD Refuses to elaborate Leaves
- reaperducer 9mo ago
  Karma farming. Like how people look up what links got lots of engagement two years ago and then re-post them for a new audience.
  - publicdebates 9mo ago
    "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me." - Charles Manson quoting NBC in Family Guy
  - cube00 9mo ago
    After first wrapping it in low quality blog spam.
- nish__ 9mo ago
  Honestly lmao
- IgorPartola 9mo ago
  It could be worse. Could be written by an LLM.
mfro 9mo ago
I will say the FreeBSD handbook is such a breath of fresh air compared to other OS documentation. Everything is easy to find and well formatted. Same goes for the OS internals themselves. It's just a cohesive project altogether.
- IgorPartola 9mo ago
  Back in college I spent some time translating portions of it to Russian. It was super easy to work with the project on that. I honestly have no idea if any of my contributions are still a part of it but I am really glad I did that.
  - riffraff 9mo ago
    same experience for me, I translated a few chapter to Italian while in university, I learned a lot and the translation project was super well run.
- dev_l1x_be 9mo ago
  You're seeing the benefit of the cathedral model right there: a centralized, architected approach yields unified documentation, whereas the bazaar is inherently fragmented.
nish__ 9mo ago
Good OS. Idk what to say. I thought this was a news site.
- terminalbraid 9mo ago
  You are mistaken. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
  - nish__ 9mo ago
    I stand corrected.
nish__ 9mo ago
Someone should make a new mobile OS like android but based on FreeBSD.
- whalesalad 9mo ago
  FreeBSD is notoriously bad with modern hardware especially Bluetooth/wifi/etc so I can’t think of a worse base OS for mobile tbh
  - dev_l1x_be 9mo ago
    Vibe coding could change that. Porting drivers from Linux got much easier.
    - nish__ 9mo ago
      Good point.
- zdfgh 9mo ago
  Why a whole new mobile OS? Linux is the least important part of Android. It could be replaced. Probably will be, by Fuschia.
  - nish__ 9mo ago
    Simplicity. Also maybe use Go for apps instead of Java. The idea is it would be nice to have an OS that is a little easier to learn for the next generation of devs.
    - zdfgh 9mo ago
      Simplicity how? It would require a great deal of complex work.
      - nish__ 9mo ago
        Simplicity in the sense that BSD is a much smaller codebase than linux and therefore less complex and easier to onboard new devs.
jordemort 9mo ago
It's apparently "post a link to an OS with no further comment or discussion" day, first we get SmartOS and then Linux From Scratch and now this. Nice way to farm karma, I guess. Flagging them all.
- dang 9mo ago
  Also illumos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708807 - Jan 2026 (15 comments) People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
nla 9mo ago
I'd love for someone to show us an OS (not just a kernel) that is more secure.
- Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
  In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability. =3
joshstrange 9mo ago
Disclaimer: No disrespect meant towards FreeBSD or the maintainers. I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux. I also work (and have worked in my career) with Linux servers (Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and things like alpine in docker) and there isn't anything I do that I think "I wish I was on FreeBSD", the opposite is not true, I semi-regularly pine for X tool or Y program that doesn't run on FreeBSD (or is harder to run). It's very possible that I am just not using/experiencing the full power of FreeBSD (as in: I'm too dumb to know how great it is) but if I had pro/con columns for FreeBSD I can think of a number of cons and very few pros that Linux doesn't share. Again, there is a very good chance that I'm "holding it wrong", but I've heard "oh, but not on FreeBSD" or "Hmm, they don't support FreeBSD" about too many things that might have solved issues we've run into at my job. Maybe I'm boring or maybe I'm just lazy but I feel like Linux is the past of least resistance, it has the most info online available, the most guides, blog posts, LLM training, etc. I'd be interested to hear what people on HN like best about FreeBSD so I can see if it applies to my usage or not and to see if I can't learn new tips/tricks.
- Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
  While the "better" security than Linux argument is weak, the FreeBSD/OpenBSD OS network packet handling is extremely good (common OS for routers etc.) =3
  - kalleboo 9mo ago
    I ended up switching from FreeBSD to Linux twice (TrueNAS CORE -> TrueNAS SCALE, opnSense -> OpenWrt) due to poor network performance on FreeBSD. Could just never get 10 Gbps throughput on FreeBSD, whereas Linux on the same hardware was fine. Across Intel and Mellanox NICs, so not a specific driver issue.
    - Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
      Usually Linux can enable a vendors direct packet handling driver as a closed source firmware that bypasses the kernel almost completely once the user connection is setup. That was the most economical way to handle several SFP-DD Transceivers at saturation in a normal host. ymmv There are probably better solutions around these days. =3
mmerlin 9mo ago
Good to RTFM again and learn what's new (from a personal perspective) e.g. Thin Jails https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailhttps://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jail https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailh...
vermaden 9mo ago
How come this one about FreeBSD is [flagged] and this one [1] about SmartOS not? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706947
grigio 9mo ago
FreeBSD is nice nowdays if you are lucky with hardware but it has slower RAM memory read and write speed compared to Debian Linux

FreeBSD

108 points by vermaden 9mo ago

jmclnx 9mo ago

I had the printed handbook from the 3.x days, was a great resource and I am sure it still is.

browningstreet 9mo ago
Kinda feels like the submission title should be changed to FreeBSD Handbook, and possibly even the relevant version info.
bionsystem 9mo ago
I've said it before too, it is exemplary in terms of what documentation should be ; just read through it with a VM on, type the things, and everything just works, no googling or LLMing around. I heard it is the same for other BSDs as well, will try those some day. Also a testimony of how coherent this system is. As a seasonned SRE it is a breathe of fresh air in this world where everything else seems to change from one version to another and nothing seems to work at first try, ever.

GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago

not to pick on OP but what is up with all the links to OS project homepages today? i've seen illumos, LFS, FreeBSD and a handful of others. did i miss something (other than W11 shitting the bed with app launching) that's got people suddenly interested in alternative OSes today?

reactordev 9mo ago
When you finally understand the full stack you inevitably end up down operating system rabbit holes. You try them out. To jump distro to distro. Linux to BSD to Linux to Amiga EMU to C64 to BSD again. It’s a short circuit of the brain. One that thinks if they just learn one more thing. In the end, learning how these things work makes us better engineers. Knowing how compilers work makes us better engineers. Knowing how our mind works makes us better engineers. If you don’t want to go down the rabbit hole, don’t. Enjoy the Vista, or National Parks, or whatever you got going on. Some of us like digging underground. (This is just fun poking at what I’ve observed and in no way represents you, the OP, or my employer.)
- GuinansEyebrows 9mo ago
  no, i get it - i've been to wonderland and back :) i just noticed more of these types of links today than i usually see.
- tacticalturtle 9mo ago
  The site guidelines is supposed to be anything that a hacker finds interesting. This feels a bit like dumping the manual to a Toyota Camry without explanation. It’s technical, but what’s interesting? Maybe there is interesting stuff in here - but I’d love to see submissions do some kind of analysis to justify it - like an appreciation of an example of well-run user documentation, or a highlighting a clear and concise explanation of how a particular subsystem works. These posts just rocket to the top of Hacker News with no discussion.
  - reactordev 9mo ago
    Sometimes a reminder for the audience is all it takes. Every couple of years we get new blood here and every year we lose some.
- qmr 9mo ago
  Don't conflate engineer with programmer.
  - Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
    Programmers would build vehicular bridges with the same workmanship as Engineers writing code. =3
stronglikedan 9mo ago
my money is on fake-internet-points farming, and is directly related to "all the links to OS project homepages today"
goalieca 9mo ago
Surely most of us have heard of FreeBSD here. To the point that it should not be the top hit on the front page of hacker NEWS
Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
At a certain point in some use-cases the Linux problems outweigh the "improvements", and more traditional partially conformant posix systems reduce complexity. For example, the reduced attack surface area of OpenBSD hardware support is a kick in the pants for average users, but desirable for hardened system design. Why does none of this really matter practically? (seriously it doesn't) In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability. I am a fan of most things posix, and acknowledge most problems originate from Application space rather than the OS itself. =3

gigatexal 9mo ago

I ran it for a while it’s nice. Easy as breathing ZFS on root and zfsbootmenu is really nice. Also the userland is maintained in connection with the kernel (or something to that extent) and it’s just a nice solid whole.

E39M5S62 9mo ago
ZFSBootMenu doesn't work with FreeBSD, it only knows how to boot a Linux kernel.
- bionsystem 9mo ago
  Maybe he meant boot environments ?
  - gigatexal 9mo ago
    That’s what I meant. My bad. Got confused.

brcmthrowaway 9mo ago

Does it support arm64?

cperciva 9mo ago
Yes, arm64 support has been Tier 1 since FreeBSD 13.0.
kemotep 9mo ago
I use FreeBSD on a raspberry pi 3b using the arm64 image. It’s under aarch64: https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAGES/15.0/ https://download.freebsd.org/releases/arm64/aarch64/ISO-IMAG...
- dev_l1x_be 9mo ago
  How is the support? I would like to use CARP/pf if possible on RPI4/5.
  - kemotep 9mo ago
    I only have a 3B but everything I need works for me. I don’t do anything advanced with the GPIO pins, just as a headless little arm server running stuff in jails. Everything is quick. Ethernet only but network performance seems solid. Honestly feels as responsive as my amd64 desktop with 32 gb of ddr4 ram and 8 cores. My desktop has worst support for FreeBSD. No networking or graphics out of the box and significantly more work to get that “working” compared to the pi.

behnamoh 9mo ago

It took 30 years for linux to finally fulfill "x is the year of Linux Desktop", but I don't know if *BSD will ever get there.

Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
It is more that Windows abdicated its 87% market share due to incompetence in brand management. =3
- behnamoh 9mo ago
  fine by me, microsoft deserves to go to hell.

alex1138 9mo ago

Posts FreeBSD Refuses to elaborate Leaves

reaperducer 9mo ago
Karma farming. Like how people look up what links got lots of engagement two years ago and then re-post them for a new audience.
- publicdebates 9mo ago
  "If I haven't seen it, it's new to me." - Charles Manson quoting NBC in Family Guy
- cube00 9mo ago
  After first wrapping it in low quality blog spam.
nish__ 9mo ago
Honestly lmao
IgorPartola 9mo ago
It could be worse. Could be written by an LLM.

mfro 9mo ago

I will say the FreeBSD handbook is such a breath of fresh air compared to other OS documentation. Everything is easy to find and well formatted. Same goes for the OS internals themselves. It's just a cohesive project altogether.

IgorPartola 9mo ago
Back in college I spent some time translating portions of it to Russian. It was super easy to work with the project on that. I honestly have no idea if any of my contributions are still a part of it but I am really glad I did that.
- riffraff 9mo ago
  same experience for me, I translated a few chapter to Italian while in university, I learned a lot and the translation project was super well run.
dev_l1x_be 9mo ago
You're seeing the benefit of the cathedral model right there: a centralized, architected approach yields unified documentation, whereas the bazaar is inherently fragmented.

nish__ 9mo ago

Good OS. Idk what to say. I thought this was a news site.

terminalbraid 9mo ago
You are mistaken. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
- nish__ 9mo ago
  I stand corrected.

nish__ 9mo ago

Someone should make a new mobile OS like android but based on FreeBSD.

whalesalad 9mo ago
FreeBSD is notoriously bad with modern hardware especially Bluetooth/wifi/etc so I can’t think of a worse base OS for mobile tbh
- dev_l1x_be 9mo ago
  Vibe coding could change that. Porting drivers from Linux got much easier.
  - nish__ 9mo ago
    Good point.
zdfgh 9mo ago
Why a whole new mobile OS? Linux is the least important part of Android. It could be replaced. Probably will be, by Fuschia.
- nish__ 9mo ago
  Simplicity. Also maybe use Go for apps instead of Java. The idea is it would be nice to have an OS that is a little easier to learn for the next generation of devs.
  - zdfgh 9mo ago
    Simplicity how? It would require a great deal of complex work.
    - nish__ 9mo ago
      Simplicity in the sense that BSD is a much smaller codebase than linux and therefore less complex and easier to onboard new devs.

jordemort 9mo ago

It's apparently "post a link to an OS with no further comment or discussion" day, first we get SmartOS and then Linux From Scratch and now this. Nice way to farm karma, I guess. Flagging them all.

dang 9mo ago
Also illumos - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708807 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46708807 - Jan 2026 (15 comments) People often post follow-ups but they're usually the opposite of what we want, since the idea is to have 30 buckets of the frontpage hashed out evenly over the topic space. https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=follow-up%20downweight&sort=byDate&type=comment https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que... https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20repetition%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...

nla 9mo ago

I'd love for someone to show us an OS (not just a kernel) that is more secure.

Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
In general, Linux has so many people looking at its code, that the CVE and driver issues will be addressed with higher frequency. Thus, FreeBSD/OpenBSD lower 0-day incident rates tend to be illusionary, as the security incidents in fringe OS always have lower discovery probability. =3

joshstrange 9mo ago

Disclaimer: No disrespect meant towards FreeBSD or the maintainers. I currently work on FreeBSD servers pretty much exclusively for my job and I have a really hard time grokking why I would want to use them over some flavor of Linux. I also work (and have worked in my career) with Linux servers (Ubuntu and Debian primarily, and things like alpine in docker) and there isn't anything I do that I think "I wish I was on FreeBSD", the opposite is not true, I semi-regularly pine for X tool or Y program that doesn't run on FreeBSD (or is harder to run). It's very possible that I am just not using/experiencing the full power of FreeBSD (as in: I'm too dumb to know how great it is) but if I had pro/con columns for FreeBSD I can think of a number of cons and very few pros that Linux doesn't share. Again, there is a very good chance that I'm "holding it wrong", but I've heard "oh, but not on FreeBSD" or "Hmm, they don't support FreeBSD" about too many things that might have solved issues we've run into at my job. Maybe I'm boring or maybe I'm just lazy but I feel like Linux is the past of least resistance, it has the most info online available, the most guides, blog posts, LLM training, etc. I'd be interested to hear what people on HN like best about FreeBSD so I can see if it applies to my usage or not and to see if I can't learn new tips/tricks.

Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
While the "better" security than Linux argument is weak, the FreeBSD/OpenBSD OS network packet handling is extremely good (common OS for routers etc.) =3
- kalleboo 9mo ago
  I ended up switching from FreeBSD to Linux twice (TrueNAS CORE -> TrueNAS SCALE, opnSense -> OpenWrt) due to poor network performance on FreeBSD. Could just never get 10 Gbps throughput on FreeBSD, whereas Linux on the same hardware was fine. Across Intel and Mellanox NICs, so not a specific driver issue.
  - Joel_Mckay 9mo ago
    Usually Linux can enable a vendors direct packet handling driver as a closed source firmware that bypasses the kernel almost completely once the user connection is setup. That was the most economical way to handle several SFP-DD Transceivers at saturation in a normal host. ymmv There are probably better solutions around these days. =3

mmerlin 9mo ago

Good to RTFM again and learn what's new (from a personal perspective) e.g. Thin Jails https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailhttps://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jail https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/#thin-jailh...

vermaden 9mo ago

How come this one about FreeBSD is [flagged] and this one [1] about SmartOS not? [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706947 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46706947

grigio 9mo ago

FreeBSD is nice nowdays if you are lucky with hardware but it has slower RAM memory read and write speed compared to Debian Linux