7 ms·

It's always intriguing to me how critical the BSDs and BSD programmers are to the Linux ecosystem, even though their user base is fairly small.

by debacle 12y ago

epistasis 12y ago
Every time I spend some time in BSD land I'm pleasantly surprised with how well-designed, featureful, and well documented everything is. For dedicated server systems that developers don't access, it's pretty much perfect. I kind of wish that the developer world had standardized on that rather than GNU/Linux, though perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward.
- byuu 12y ago
  > perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward. That's exactly how I feel about it. You never want too many cooks in the kitchen. They have all they need for a very successful server system already. Right now I'm just hoping for some sort of BSD-based desktop environment∗. Doesn't have to be a Windows/OSX/GNOME/KDE killer, just something functional. I suspect the usage of Linux GUI environments is going to become increasingly volatile in the future with so much Linux-only tech being pushed in as dependencies to absolutely everything these days. (∗ I don't mean something like Lumina, I mean from the display server up. Xorg is moving to Wayland/Weston, GTK3 is pretty much becoming GNOME-only, which is becoming systemd only. I'd like to see a new BSD-style lightweight, modular, minimal display server, widget toolkit, and desktop. Run the whole thing on either VESA or barebones EGL.)
  - pnathan 12y ago
    I believe Gentoo is able to run with a BSD kernel.
    - valarauca1 12y ago
      Gentoo is largely kernel agnostic. So once you remove that your left with GNU utils. Which can compile on most posix plateforms. For example I can run GNU bash on an HPUX system.
  - angersock 12y ago
    I think the big risk there is graphics support on $BSD, right? What is the state of things like GL, nvidia or AMD drivers, etc.?
    - jlgaddis 12y ago
      I can't speak on GL or AMD drivers but both Intel and Nvidia (graphics hardware) work great on FreeBSD and have native drivers. I don't run X on any of the other BSDs so I can't comment on those either (although I believe Nvidia is also well-supported on OpenBSD).
      - bch 12y ago
        OpenBSD was doing (surprising to me) a tremendous amount of work w/ accelerated gfx over the past few years. My personal NetBSD experience has been that (on a laptop) my ATI Radeon was supported (back in the day) and currently, we've been experiencing "near misses" with accelerated gfx w/ Intel integrated (ie: i915) GPUs. NetBSD -current (7.99.1) is currently (on my Lenovo Thinkpad t420) unstably supporting accelerated graphics. I'm hoping this effort stabilizes and sticks around.
      - byuu 12y ago
        No, OpenBSD support for nvidia is very, very sad. There is no nvidia binary driver, and no nouveau port. You only have the ancient nv driver, which is just a frame buffer. And an absolutely horrible one at that. It is at least 20x slower than pure VESA. I don't know how that's possible, but it's too ridiculous to make up. If I drag a window across the screen, it takes about five seconds for the system to catch up on the redraws. OpenBSD also lacks the memcontrol utility, so you can't tweak MTRR (write-combine caching) for VESA (which increased my video bandwidth rate from 200MiB/s to 1,200MiB/s), unless you write your own C program to use the kernel API for doing that. Even then, the real problem is that finding a video card that has your native widescreen VESA resolution is like winning the lottery. I managed to find a 2560x1600 card for my primary system, but I've yet to ever find a card that has a 1920x1080 VESA mode for my secondary PC.
        12y ago
  - digi_owl 12y ago
    The biggest sticking point in all that is systemd. You can run Xorg on top of Wayland simply by changing the driver Xorg use. Now if GTK or Qt drops their X support completely, that becomes a different story. But that don't seem to be a issue any time soon.
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    Aren't BSDs planning to support wayland in the long run anyway?
    - byuu 12y ago
      Hopefully. I don't get the feeling there's a strong desire in the Wayland camp to support non-Linux. I mean, I don't think they're actively hostile like the systemd team, but at the same time, they don't seem as committed to cross-platform support as the XFree86/Xorg teams were. I am not an expert here, and I would be happy to be wrong. But I'd rather be proactive in planning for an eventuality where Linux software becomes just too difficult to port to the BSDs anymore.
- chipotle_coyote 12y ago
  For dedicated server systems that developers don't access, it's pretty much perfect. While this is mildly off-topic, I'm mildly frustrated that there doesn't seem to be any BSD equivalent to hosts like Digital Ocean and Linode. The closest I've been able to find in recent searches is RootBSD, and its specs are... well, pretty sad for a VPS in 2014. Are there technical reasons that make this difficult to do with FreeBSD? I know you can't use a Linux-specific VM solution like KVM, but is there no BSD equivalent, or no VPS provider with a more OS-agnostic solution?
  - empthought 12y ago
    The BSD equivalent is Bhyve[1] which was only added to a release version of BSD this year. There is also very little in the way of tooling to make this easy to use. FreeBSD is available as an EC2 AMI. For what it's worth, Nearly Free Speech[2] offers jailed hosting on FreeBSD and has recently improved their ability to handle persistent processes. [1]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve [2]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net
  - paulfurtado 12y ago
    Note that KVM has no trouble hosting FreeBSD as a guest OS. You can also vote on this suggestion on the DigitalOcean website: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/3232571-support-bsd-os https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea... I've had a lot of luck getting bleeding edge Arch linux kernels running on DigitalOcean using kexec to essentially turn the kernel DO gives you into a bootloader. It should theoretically be possible to get FreeBSD running in a similar manner, but it would obviously not be officially supported. If you're looking for other hosting providers, EC2 does have FreeBSD images available.
    - justincormack 12y ago
      I was wondering about a kexec boot loader for BSD. Never seen one, was wondering exactly what state the hardware is left in.
lugg 12y ago
Care to expand your points on this? I'm not totally up with all BSD does / how it is used today.
- freehunter 12y ago
  Quite a bit of critical software comes from BSD, such as OpenSSH. During the era of OpenSSL vulnerabilities, a lot of people/companies realized how much they depend on software like that and how little (nothing) they pay for it and began to... actually pay for it, or at least contribute developer time to it. --OpenSSL, not SSH.
  - chimeracoder 12y ago
    Yes, though for the record OpenSSH comes from the OpenBSD team[0] (which is separate from the FreeBSD team, the recipient of the donation at hand). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSH
    - hobarrera 12y ago
      Sadly, The OpenBSD Foundation seems to be getting a lot less donations, while some of their software (eg: OpenSSH) is incredibly widely used.
  - 0x0 12y ago
    Did you mean OpenSSL vulnerabilities? That's a whole different team again :) (neither freebsd nor openbsd, although openbsd recently forked it)
    - freehunter 12y ago
      Yes, OpenSSL. Sorry. Long day :)
wyager 12y ago
>It's always intriguing to me how critical the BSDs and BSD programmers are to the Linux ecosystem, even though their user base is fairly small. Edit: "critical to". My mistake. Why? Do you think popularity reflects quality? It is immediately evident to me that the popular BSDs (or at least FreeBSD and OpenBSD) are of vastly superior quality (both in terms of design and code) to Linux. I understand why people use Linux instead (it's generally for the same reasons corporate environments use Windows: legacy, large userbase, and familiarity), but it is definitely the case that by all my metrics, the BSD programmers have every right to be critical.
- aethr 12y ago
  I'm guessing the parent meant critical as in "important to" the Linux ecosystem.
- untothebreach 12y ago
  I think you might have misunderstood the GP (or I misunderstood your reply). The GP comment was saying that the BSD programmers are critical _to_ the linux ecosystem, not that they are critical _of_ the linux ecosystem. Like I said, sorry if I misunderstood your post.
- justincormack 12y ago
  Any reason to omit NetBSD from that list? It might not be as popular, but the code is good too..
  - wyager 12y ago
    I just haven't read much NetBSD code. Can't speak to it personally.

It's always intriguing to me how critical the BSDs and BSD programmers are to the Linux ecosystem, even though their user base is fairly small.

by debacle 12y ago

It's always intriguing to me how critical the BSDs and BSD programmers are to the Linux ecosystem, even though their user base is fairly small.

epistasis 12y ago

Every time I spend some time in BSD land I'm pleasantly surprised with how well-designed, featureful, and well documented everything is. For dedicated server systems that developers don't access, it's pretty much perfect. I kind of wish that the developer world had standardized on that rather than GNU/Linux, though perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward.

byuu 12y ago
> perhaps if there was a wider pool of developers, the BSDs wouldn't be so clean and straightforward. That's exactly how I feel about it. You never want too many cooks in the kitchen. They have all they need for a very successful server system already. Right now I'm just hoping for some sort of BSD-based desktop environment∗. Doesn't have to be a Windows/OSX/GNOME/KDE killer, just something functional. I suspect the usage of Linux GUI environments is going to become increasingly volatile in the future with so much Linux-only tech being pushed in as dependencies to absolutely everything these days. (∗ I don't mean something like Lumina, I mean from the display server up. Xorg is moving to Wayland/Weston, GTK3 is pretty much becoming GNOME-only, which is becoming systemd only. I'd like to see a new BSD-style lightweight, modular, minimal display server, widget toolkit, and desktop. Run the whole thing on either VESA or barebones EGL.)
- pnathan 12y ago
  I believe Gentoo is able to run with a BSD kernel.
  - valarauca1 12y ago
    Gentoo is largely kernel agnostic. So once you remove that your left with GNU utils. Which can compile on most posix plateforms. For example I can run GNU bash on an HPUX system.
- angersock 12y ago
  I think the big risk there is graphics support on $BSD, right? What is the state of things like GL, nvidia or AMD drivers, etc.?
  - jlgaddis 12y ago
    I can't speak on GL or AMD drivers but both Intel and Nvidia (graphics hardware) work great on FreeBSD and have native drivers. I don't run X on any of the other BSDs so I can't comment on those either (although I believe Nvidia is also well-supported on OpenBSD).
    - bch 12y ago
      OpenBSD was doing (surprising to me) a tremendous amount of work w/ accelerated gfx over the past few years. My personal NetBSD experience has been that (on a laptop) my ATI Radeon was supported (back in the day) and currently, we've been experiencing "near misses" with accelerated gfx w/ Intel integrated (ie: i915) GPUs. NetBSD -current (7.99.1) is currently (on my Lenovo Thinkpad t420) unstably supporting accelerated graphics. I'm hoping this effort stabilizes and sticks around.
    - byuu 12y ago
      No, OpenBSD support for nvidia is very, very sad. There is no nvidia binary driver, and no nouveau port. You only have the ancient nv driver, which is just a frame buffer. And an absolutely horrible one at that. It is at least 20x slower than pure VESA. I don't know how that's possible, but it's too ridiculous to make up. If I drag a window across the screen, it takes about five seconds for the system to catch up on the redraws. OpenBSD also lacks the memcontrol utility, so you can't tweak MTRR (write-combine caching) for VESA (which increased my video bandwidth rate from 200MiB/s to 1,200MiB/s), unless you write your own C program to use the kernel API for doing that. Even then, the real problem is that finding a video card that has your native widescreen VESA resolution is like winning the lottery. I managed to find a 2560x1600 card for my primary system, but I've yet to ever find a card that has a 1920x1080 VESA mode for my secondary PC.
      - 12y ago
- digi_owl 12y ago
  The biggest sticking point in all that is systemd. You can run Xorg on top of Wayland simply by changing the driver Xorg use. Now if GTK or Qt drops their X support completely, that becomes a different story. But that don't seem to be a issue any time soon.
- hobarrera 12y ago
  Aren't BSDs planning to support wayland in the long run anyway?
  - byuu 12y ago
    Hopefully. I don't get the feeling there's a strong desire in the Wayland camp to support non-Linux. I mean, I don't think they're actively hostile like the systemd team, but at the same time, they don't seem as committed to cross-platform support as the XFree86/Xorg teams were. I am not an expert here, and I would be happy to be wrong. But I'd rather be proactive in planning for an eventuality where Linux software becomes just too difficult to port to the BSDs anymore.
chipotle_coyote 12y ago
For dedicated server systems that developers don't access, it's pretty much perfect. While this is mildly off-topic, I'm mildly frustrated that there doesn't seem to be any BSD equivalent to hosts like Digital Ocean and Linode. The closest I've been able to find in recent searches is RootBSD, and its specs are... well, pretty sad for a VPS in 2014. Are there technical reasons that make this difficult to do with FreeBSD? I know you can't use a Linux-specific VM solution like KVM, but is there no BSD equivalent, or no VPS provider with a more OS-agnostic solution?
- empthought 12y ago
  The BSD equivalent is Bhyve[1] which was only added to a release version of BSD this year. There is also very little in the way of tooling to make this easy to use. FreeBSD is available as an EC2 AMI. For what it's worth, Nearly Free Speech[2] offers jailed hosting on FreeBSD and has recently improved their ability to handle persistent processes. [1]: https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve https://wiki.freebsd.org/bhyve [2]: https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net https://www.nearlyfreespeech.net
- paulfurtado 12y ago
  Note that KVM has no trouble hosting FreeBSD as a guest OS. You can also vote on this suggestion on the DigitalOcean website: https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocean/suggestions/3232571-support-bsd-os https://digitalocean.uservoice.com/forums/136585-digitalocea... I've had a lot of luck getting bleeding edge Arch linux kernels running on DigitalOcean using kexec to essentially turn the kernel DO gives you into a bootloader. It should theoretically be possible to get FreeBSD running in a similar manner, but it would obviously not be officially supported. If you're looking for other hosting providers, EC2 does have FreeBSD images available.
  - justincormack 12y ago
    I was wondering about a kexec boot loader for BSD. Never seen one, was wondering exactly what state the hardware is left in.

lugg 12y ago

Care to expand your points on this? I'm not totally up with all BSD does / how it is used today.

freehunter 12y ago
Quite a bit of critical software comes from BSD, such as OpenSSH. During the era of OpenSSL vulnerabilities, a lot of people/companies realized how much they depend on software like that and how little (nothing) they pay for it and began to... actually pay for it, or at least contribute developer time to it. --OpenSSL, not SSH.
- chimeracoder 12y ago
  Yes, though for the record OpenSSH comes from the OpenBSD team[0] (which is separate from the FreeBSD team, the recipient of the donation at hand). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSH https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSH
  - hobarrera 12y ago
    Sadly, The OpenBSD Foundation seems to be getting a lot less donations, while some of their software (eg: OpenSSH) is incredibly widely used.
- 0x0 12y ago
  Did you mean OpenSSL vulnerabilities? That's a whole different team again :) (neither freebsd nor openbsd, although openbsd recently forked it)
  - freehunter 12y ago
    Yes, OpenSSL. Sorry. Long day :)

wyager 12y ago

>It's always intriguing to me how critical the BSDs and BSD programmers are to the Linux ecosystem, even though their user base is fairly small. Edit: "critical to". My mistake. Why? Do you think popularity reflects quality? It is immediately evident to me that the popular BSDs (or at least FreeBSD and OpenBSD) are of vastly superior quality (both in terms of design and code) to Linux. I understand why people use Linux instead (it's generally for the same reasons corporate environments use Windows: legacy, large userbase, and familiarity), but it is definitely the case that by all my metrics, the BSD programmers have every right to be critical.

aethr 12y ago
I'm guessing the parent meant critical as in "important to" the Linux ecosystem.
untothebreach 12y ago
I think you might have misunderstood the GP (or I misunderstood your reply). The GP comment was saying that the BSD programmers are critical _to_ the linux ecosystem, not that they are critical _of_ the linux ecosystem. Like I said, sorry if I misunderstood your post.
justincormack 12y ago
Any reason to omit NetBSD from that list? It might not be as popular, but the code is good too..
- wyager 12y ago
  I just haven't read much NetBSD code. Can't speak to it personally.