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OK. If you just want the technical details: * FreeBSD supports ZFS, whereas Linux can't really due to license issues. (Although people have tried-- please do
by cmccabe 14y ago
OK. If you just want the technical details:
* FreeBSD supports ZFS, whereas Linux can't really due to license issues. (Although people have tried-- please don't reply to me saying "but XYZ got it to run!" It's a legal issue that's not going away.) However, Linux has btrfs, which delivers a lot of the benefits of zfs. However, btrfs is not really at the same level of stability yet (although it may get there soon.)
* For its audio drivers, FreeBSD uses a descendant of OSS, whereas Linux moved to ALSA and later PulseAudio-over-ALSA. I have heard claims that OSS4 provides lower audio latency. I am not an expert so I cannot evaluate those claims. On the other hand, Linux also has JACK, an alternative sound API which is supposed to fix some of the latency issues of PA+ALSA.
* The original version of Rubberhose (the deniable encryption filesystem) was written for FreeBSD by one Julian Assange. I don't think it's still maintained, though. There was a version for Linux 2.2 at some point, but good luck getting that to compile in this day and age.
* Linux in general has a lot more APIs between kernel-space and user-space. In Linux, you've got procfs, sysfs, debugfs, netlink, and so forth. BSD was a lot more conservative about adding APIs.
* The FreeBSD jail mechanism is pretty good. Linux has seccomp, SELinux, SMACK, Tomoyo, cgroups, and so forth, but none of them are as easy to use as jails.
- SEJeff 14y agoDisagree. I can create a Linux container (lxc) using virt-sandbox in fedora to bring up a container to run a single command with very ver little effort. It is roughly equal or less work to build a chroot
- lifeisstillgood 14y agoI am biased but BSD jails are waaay more sophisticated than LXC - but even so I see myself renting vas in backspace rather than building my own vas
- SEJeff 14y agoWith very new Linux kernels that have almost all of the user namespace patches merged, there is very little difference. I am curious the technical and not assumed differences however. Note that I donated to the FBSD foundation not because I ever use FBSD, but because in the open source ecosystem, diversity is important. Also, I'm a huge fan of pcc and clang/llvm
- cmccabe 14y agoHi Jeff, Thanks for pointing out virt-sandbox. I wasn't aware of it until now; it looks pretty interesting. Unfortunately the apps I would most like to sandbox, like pdf readers, don't seem likely to work with this approach, since it precludes interaction with X windows. virt-sandbox does not seem to be available on my Linux distribution (SuSE), so, at least for me, it trivially can't replace jails :) On a more serious note, though, jails seem more appropriate for sandboxing daemon processes than for running one-off commands. I don't think virt-sandbox was designed for this role. In that sense, SELinux is more of a replacement for jails than virt-sandbox.
- SEJeff 14y agoFYI: virt sandbox created containers are automatically locked down via SELinux[1] so you get the best of both worlds. I do not believe FBSD has a similar information assurance feature akin to SELinux. [1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Securecontainers http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Features/Securecontainers
- redthrowaway 14y ago>The original version of Rubberhose (the deniable encryption filesystem) was written for FreeBSD by one Julian Assange. I don't think it's still maintained, though. Wiki says it's not maintained and never made it out of alpha. Is there much difference between it and a hidden truecrypt partition?