[HN Gopher] A year of funded FreeBSD development
___________________________________________________________________
A year of funded FreeBSD development
Author : cperciva
Score : 336 points
Date : 2025-06-06 19:35 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.daemonology.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.daemonology.net)
| tiffanyh wrote:
| Lots of respect for cperciva.
|
| Don't know how he manages all of this + Tarsnap.
| cperciva wrote:
| It 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| cperciva wrote:
| True. 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Dry 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| At 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 wrote:
| Being 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 wrote:
| "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
| ksec wrote:
| I 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/?donationYea...
| cperciva wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| This 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/
| hackernoops wrote:
| Has Amazon donated more to FreeBSD than Notch the Minecraft
| guy?
| p_ing wrote:
| I wonder for what reason Microsoft funds them. Their Hyper-V
| extensions are not as complete as Linux. There's no Microsoft-
| supported port of .NET. I can't think of any services that run
| on *BSD from Microsoft, cloud or otherwise.
| cperciva wrote:
| I don't know, but Microsoft has some developers working on
| Hyper-V for FreeBSD. They've even come to FreeBSD developer
| summits.
| voidfunc wrote:
| There are customers that run FreeBSD on Azure and Microsoft
| officially supports it: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-
| us/azure/virtual-machines/lin...
| ksec wrote:
| My thought process was that it is such a small amount of
| money for Advertisement or marketing to have your logo on
| some prominent Open source project to at least try and redeem
| / make themselves look good.
| petesergeant wrote:
| I wonder if this is a very, very, very long-term holdover
| from the Hotmail team having some expertise, and Microsoft
| wanting to be able to offer something a bit nix-y that wasn't
| Linux
| oblio wrote:
| Amazon does the least for FOSS out of the FAANGs.
| AndyKelley wrote:
| Sweet! 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 wrote:
| Zig's cross compilation is awesome, and it's nice to see
| FreeBSD on the supported target list.
| msdrigg wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| Now I really want to know though.
| cperciva wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| Some huge customer chunked their data into 5GB pieces so
| now there's a "if size == 5GB" in the cache code.
| cperciva wrote:
| Maybe, but I don't think that would explain 8 GB also
| being fast while 6 GB is slow?
| 0x457 wrote:
| Customer started using 8GB chunks /s
| MobiusHorizons wrote:
| Yeah, I found that pretty unintuitive when I read it. How
| did you find 8GB worked? Trial and error?
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| What's the smallest size for which those heuristics keep
| the snapshot cached?
|
| (I'm currently using 1GB snapshots, because my actual disk
| image is a tiny fraction of that size. But if bumping that
| to 2GB or 4GB would make it _faster_ , that's a small price
| to pay.)
| cperciva wrote:
| I believe 1 GB is also fast.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Thanks, that helps to hear!
|
| Do you have any other wisdom regarding mysterious reasons
| for fast or slow booting? EC2's boot process is deeply
| opaque, and any insight at all is better than nothing.
| cperciva wrote:
| Nothing comes to mind, but if you want to drop me an
| email I can walk you through some benchmarking.
| richardwhiuk wrote:
| At a guess, powers of 2 are fast?
| cperciva wrote:
| 5 is not a power of 2. ;-)
| messe wrote:
| Gotta admit it's pretty close though.
| selimnairb wrote:
| Yeah, I am constantly curious about how the sausage that is
| cloud services like AWS is made. It seems generally slick on
| the surface, but what's holding it all together? I imagine it
| as a tangled ball of tools like Puppet, Chef, etc. and custom
| glue.
| akdev1l wrote:
| At Amazon scale mostly everything is custom
|
| Less puppet/chef
| selimnairb wrote:
| Yeah, I would imagine they maybe started with off-the-
| shelf tools that were then gradually replaced as the
| system grew and matured.
| arcfour wrote:
| A lot of AWS services are built on other AWS services. Like
| Lambda, SQS, and other such "core services" are used by
| others under the hood.
| jeffbarr wrote:
| The original object size limit for S3 was 5 GB, as noted in my
| 2006 blog post:
|
| https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_s3/
|
| I do not know if this has anything to do with the cliff that
| you saw.
| cperciva wrote:
| Pretty sure that's not related. For one thing I don't think
| EBS snapshots are stored in S3 as 5 GB segments.
| polskibus wrote:
| I wonder how long did it take to bisect such issue. Build image
| every time and reboot a vm?
| cperciva wrote:
| I can't remember exactly but it was a few hours. I already
| knew which week the issue arose (from comparing weekly
| snapshots) so that gave me a head start.
|
| But yes, I built a lot of AMIs. And launched new EC2
| instances for each of them -- it wasn't just a matter of
| rebooting since the first time an AMI launches there's
| different behaviour (both from FreeBSD, e.g. growing the root
| disk, and from EC2, e.g. disk caching).
| polskibus wrote:
| Thanks for the additional information, a few hours sounds
| great, I was expecting multiple days to narrow it down,
| given a lengthy feedback loop.
| net01 wrote:
| There 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
| cperciva wrote:
| Yep there's a lot of work going on. I was just writing about
| the work _I_ was doing. ;-)
| SSLy wrote:
| colin, fix your encoding
| cperciva wrote:
| Err, I'm happy to fix things, but can you elaborate on what is
| broken?
| jonhohle wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| The em-dashes were mojibaked. They seem fine now. Cheers.
| cperciva wrote:
| Weird. I haven't changed anything, and the em-dashes were
| just "—", not UTF-8.
| SSLy wrote:
| Yeah, super weird. It doesn't appear again - even on a
| fresh OS - but it was some `a` with a diacritic, and a
| quotation mark.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| Can 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 wrote:
| FreeBSD 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 wrote:
| My 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 wrote:
| It'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.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| > but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much
| influence.
|
| I understand the former. But with how Apple operates,
| it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from
| something they don't have some kind of soft power over.
| They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's
| changed?
|
| >Ix systems
|
| I did some reading and saw a FreeBSD contributor ended up
| going to Apple until 2013 before he founded this company.
| https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ Apple is listed here.
| Six degrees of separation and all, but probably not a
| coincidence. Nothing wrong with that, business is a
| social structure. This is how they work. We make and keep
| friends, even if only professionally. Backchannels are
| where real deals are made. But this to me is not nothing.
| No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things
| you don't get. You just can't afford the manpower. It
| looks more like 9 Front than a BSD that has some serious
| billion-dollar problems under its belt.
|
| That sounds harsh, not a judgement. Just very deep
| skepticism of the assertion of no influence. I'm
| realizing there's not a lot that can be done to sway that
| _intentionally_.
|
| > This is a huge difference to Linux
|
| This I'm well aware of. I just like having a perspective
| across the fence. These days they're starting to get a
| little too aggressive for my tastes. FreeBSD seems fine
| in comparison.
| toast0 wrote:
| > But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to
| believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't
| have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull
| downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed?
|
| Apple doesn't merge often. They basically haven't merged
| kernel tcp since 2002. When I started using OSX in 2011,
| they hadn't merged userland for several years, and when I
| stopped in 2019, they had only merged once.
|
| They famously stopped picking up bash when upstream
| changed the license, and most of the FreeBSD userland
| doesn't change that frequently, so most things you
| wouldn't notice a difference. cal(1) started highlighting
| the current day at some point, tar probably grew new
| compresion arguments, etc.
|
| Apple certainly was a major contributor/driving force/etc
| of LLVM for a while, not sure if they still are? And LLVM
| was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea
| is coming from?
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| > And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where
| this idea is coming from?
|
| Partially, but after seeing the Jordan Hubbard
| connection, there's a lot of layers to this. May have
| reinforced my biases, but it's definitely non-trivial
| according to my hippie-tier anarchist baseline. Oops.
| Worst case scenario of answering your own question.
|
| But your reply does give me actually contradicting
| evidence. It wouldn't surprise me that distance has grown
| to the point of total atrophy, given the general
| trajectory Apple has been on since 2012 or so. This is
| why I ask these questions, because the people on the
| ground give the most informative answers.
|
| As Ptahhotep advises circa ~2300BCE:
|
| > Fine words are more sought after than greenstone, but
| can be found with the women at the grindstone.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > May have reinforced my biases, but it's definitely non-
| trivial according to my hippie-tier anarchist baseline.
|
| The definition of 'trivial' would come into play yes. I
| would only consider it non-trivial if a commercial party
| can (and does) influence the direction of development. I
| don't think Apple does so. Even Netflix. In the Linux
| world there's billions of investment and many
| contributors are directly employed by big business. The
| waters are much murkier there.
|
| Again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just not
| something I want which is one of the reasons I picked
| FreeBSD. Other reasons were the great ports collection,
| the division between OS and apps (you can have rolling
| apps but a stable OS), the traditionalism (only change
| things if it's really needed) and the single main flavour
| of the OS which makes support much easier. Also the
| excellent documentation.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| > No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice
| things you don't get.
|
| Yes that is the flipside. But I don't mind that. If you
| choose your hardware carefully it works fine.
|
| Note that this is not too different from using Windows or
| Mac. Your hardware is also chosen carefully to work with
| those, just not by you but by the vendor. With FreeBSD
| you're more involved with the nuts & bolts and this is
| exactly what I want. I don't want my OS to be a black box
| I don't understand.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| >>Netflix did but hardly use it now
|
| Unless I misunderstood you, Netflix delivers all video
| content via FreeBSD and contributes code back and money
| to the foundation.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I had read they were migrating to Linux but I could be
| wrong. I just never hear much about Netflix in FreeBSD
| circles.
|
| If they still use it they are more of a user than an
| influencer in its development.
| soupbowl wrote:
| They use it and influence its development. You can search
| freebsd git repo, you'll see Netflix all over it for many
| years Including 2025. They've added many large features
| across the code base.
| cperciva wrote:
| I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft
| power over FreeBSD" thing from. Netflix is probably at the
| top of the list given all their performance and stability
| work -- and, you know, the fact they push a large chunk of
| all Internet traffic using FreeBSD -- and NetApp and
| Juniper are somewhere up there, but I'm not convinced Apple
| would even be in the top 10.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| > I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft
| power over FreeBSD" thing from.
|
| The only thing I've ever heard from FreeBSD-land, not
| paying attention to users, but the maintainers and the
| tools. Apple comes up. In the same manner that RedHat and
| others come up for Linux. How to explain? It's an
| abstract pattern. Transparent, understandable.
|
| I mentioned somewhere about the connection through ix
| systems. And honestly to project, if I was a maintainer
| of something used between Netflix and Apple, I'd
| prioritize Apple. Apple has outlived IBM. If you know
| your history, you know how serious that is. If you've got
| authority over something as large as FreeBSD? Yeah, you
| don't ignore that kind of actual power especially when
| it's personal. Like I say, all based on guesses. But some
| things are hard to mistake.
| cperciva wrote:
| Apple did very important work making LLVM happen, but
| that was a long time ago. At this point there are lots of
| companies involved in that project.
|
| As far as "power" is concerned... speaking as release
| engineer, I don't give special treatment to anyone; nor
| have I even been asked to. If anyone has a special
| relationship it's Netflix but if anything that's the
| opposite way around: "Can you please throw 10% of all
| Internet traffic at this TCP stack patch and let us know
| if anything breaks" is a thing. They're incredibly
| helpful with Q/A.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| Consider me convinced. Like I say, it was never anything
| but empirical skepticism. Neither for or against until
| sufficient evidence has been collected, as painful as
| that can be. Thank you for your work on scrypt.
| wkat4242 wrote:
| I know some maintainers of the userland and apple never
| comes up. Most maintainers have no commercial ties to
| anyone so they don't really care abour corporate
| influence anyway. They just maintain the software because
| they like using it. This is exactly the kind of thing I
| like, in Linux there are too many companies putting money
| into it because they want to make money back (usually not
| from normal users but from cloud instances, steering the
| project in a direction away from its grassroots origins).
|
| I'm sure if Apple wants something it would be considered
| but there would be a strong validation of "what's in it
| for us" on the freebsd side. There's also some pretty bad
| experiences with corporate influence and this is reviewed
| a lot more independently since the netgate wireguard
| disaster. https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-
| overruns-lice...
|
| Unlike in the Linux world where RedHat and canonical are
| so embedded due to most of the devs working for them that
| there will be a lot less questions. And not just those
| two, also companies like Huawei are heavy kernel
| contributors.
|
| I'm not saying it's bad to have such commercial
| influence. But it's not what I want for the OS I run.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > My impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS,
| they hold a lot of soft power over it.
|
| Apple has no influence over the FreeBSD project.
|
| > 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?
|
| Yes.
|
| OS-X (now macOS) is based on XNU[0], which itself has roots
| in the Mach[1] microkernel. The Unix user-space programs
| distributed with OS-X/macOS are those found in FreeBSD
| distributions AFAIK. This is also conformant with FreeBSD
| licenses for same.
|
| So there is no "soft power" Apple has over FreeBSD. And
| FreeBSD is _not_ "Apple's shadow in FOSS".
|
| > I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it
| exists in a non-trivial way, no?
|
| No. It does not.
|
| EDIT: Just in case you'd like to verify any of the above
| yourself, see here[2].
|
| 0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
|
| 1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
|
| 2 - https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
| mbac32768 wrote:
| > As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged
| down by corporate interests.
|
| This is a rather funny statement because at various points,
| high level execs at Apple Computer (and on another occasion
| Sun Micro) invited Linus Torvalds out to lunch and pitched
| teaming up together to take on Microsoft. Linus turned them
| down.
|
| Then a little bit later Jordan Hubbard announces FreeBSD
| would be the UNIX layer of OS X.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers,
| ELF, etc. why not Linux?
|
| FreeBSD has better ZFS support than Linux, because it doesn't
| have the licensing issues.
| AdieuToLogic wrote:
| > Can 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?
|
| My experience with FreeBSD is that it provides a nice balance
| of the concerns OpenBSD and NetBSD specifically address.
| Historically, FreeBSD prioritized Intel CPU's (where NetBSD had
| greater portability) and had solid security (where OpenBSD had
| more of a focus on it).
|
| The FreeBSD ZFS support really is a game changer. I believe
| Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers - for a
| long time FreeBSD's kernel Linux support was required.
|
| > 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.
|
| Again, for me, FreeBSD has proven to be a nice blend of the
| features other BSD's provide as well as being incredibly stable
| on the h/w platforms I tend to use.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| I figured the goldilocks metric might factor in. Are you
| dealing with non-x86 platforms? I've always been disappointed
| by the ARM experience on Linux. It always feels second-class.
| assimpleaspossi wrote:
| >>I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD
| drivers
|
| When I first started using FreeBSD, in 2004, Nvidia had
| native FreeBSD drivers for all their boards.
| toast0 wrote:
| FreeBSD is throughput oriented in a way that OpenBSD certainly
| isn't, and I don't think NetBSD is either (although, I haven't
| really looked, I feel like NetBSD competes on portability and
| doesn't spend a lot of time making sure networking throughput
| is high).
|
| All of the BSDs tend to have a lot less churn, for better and
| worse; so IMHO, they make a nicer platform to integrate on.
| johnnyjeans wrote:
| Very interesting. Doing more reading on FreeBSD's presence in
| the HPC space. Thank you.
| toast0 wrote:
| If you want a high profile example, look at what Netflix
| CDN does.
|
| Could you do that work with Linux? Probably --- but nobody
| who does is talking about it as much.
|
| This kind of high throughput service has been a FreeBSD
| niche since forever too. Walnut Creek CDROM, Inc ran what
| was reportedly the world's busiest ftp site, ftp.cdrom.com
| on FreeBSD in the early days of the internet.
|
| Yahoo ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2004-2011) WhatsApp
| ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2011-2019) Both were leaving
| FreeBSD when I left, but sadly, I didn't leave to work
| somewhere else with FreeBSD :p
| broken_broken_ wrote:
| I have worked for financial services companies that used
| FreeBSD both in EC2 and on the metal in data centers (self
| managed). The two features we used all the time were zfs and
| jails. Each service ran in its own jail for isolation. One (not
| even beefy) server could run all the services which was
| insanely cost efficient. A cloud migration was undertaken at
| some point to have a hybrid setup, using a mix of Linux (k8s)
| and FreeBSD, and costs skyrocketed. It's a trade off because in
| the data center we had to buy and replace our own disks, react
| to fires taking place, being only in one country etc. AWS gives
| you multi region, and tons of good stuff, and that has a price.
|
| ZFS was not leveraged that much but it saved our beacon once
| when a table in the production database was accidentally
| dropped and we could instantly rollback to the previous zfs
| snapshot (there was a tiny bit of data loss as a result but
| this did not matter too much for this application - uptime was
| more important). ZFS was also used for backups I believe.
|
| A few times I used dtrace in production to troubleshoot.
|
| When we introduced Linux to our fleet of FreeBSD servers, every
| team picked a different distro organically so it was a bit of a
| zoo. With FreeBSD on the server you only have the one variant.
|
| I still use and like both, but I must say I really like that
| FreeBSD is a kernel+OS integrated together.
| LeFantome wrote:
| Your "zoo" comment is an important one.
|
| It really makes sense to think of different Linux distros as
| different operating systems. At the very least, the ones from
| different "families".
|
| There are a lot of differences between Debian and RHEL. Suse,
| Alpine, Void, or Chimera Linux are completely different
| again. In some ways, they are almost as different from each
| other as FreeBSD is from them.
|
| Compared to that "zoo", using FreeBSD everywhere is far more
| cohesive. But if you use RHEL, Alma, Rocky, and even Fedora,
| things are still going to feel pretty consistent. Or Debian,
| LMDE, and Kali. I am not advocating an ecosystem.
| mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote:
| For me, who's daily driven FreeBSD in the past, and switched
| back to it again recently. FreeBSD serves as a refuge from
| systemd, and the only BSD that is a fairly drop in replacement
| for linux in terms of software compatibility, as well as the
| only game in BSD town in terms of support for modern
| hardware.(though it does significantly lag Linux in this regard
| still, so YMMV).
|
| As to why I use it over the various systemd free linux distros?
| Well, there's a couple things. First lot of those distros, like
| Artix linux say, actually have smaller communities than
| FreeBSD(I'm guesstimating based on the activity level in their
| irc channels). The Linux community might be much, much larger
| than the FreeBSD community, but it's also extremely fragmented.
|
| _triggerwarning, hyperbole incoming. Don 't bother correcting
| me, it's a polemic, not a scientific paper_
|
| Secondly, for someone like me, who's been using various unix
| like OSes for two decades, FreeBSD is just a nice, batteries
| included, well integrated system. Things like jails, Dtrace,
| ZFS, Bhyve, pf etc. All being in the base install means they're
| just better integrated with the kernel, and eachother. Most of
| those things exist for linux, or have equivalents, but they're
| not all part of the same project. Obviously Dtrace and ZFS
| originated in Solaris, but they've been made first-class
| citizens. There's a harmony to FreeBSD that Linux distros lack.
| Documentation is also very good, all accessible via manpages(no
| GNU INFO...). And, as I mentioned briefly before. It doesn't
| have a lot of the cruft that's been added to linux distros over
| the years(though some of it is available in ports if you want
| it). In FreeBSD, my experience is actually useful. Things I
| remember how to do from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years
| ago, still work. If I'm on some modern, plug and play linux
| distro, I have no idea what's going on under the hood any more.
| All I know is it's not what was going on 5 years ago, which
| isn't what was going on 10 years ago, which isn't what was
| going on 15 years ago. The amount of pointless churn going on
| in the linux space is ridiculous. When I started using linux,
| what I loved about it was that it was transparent. I could
| change anything. The system was easy to understand. Yes, it was
| janky, but it was understandable jank, whereas Windows was
| janky in an opaque way. 20 years later, Linux is still janky,
| but nothing is understandable, at least not to my greybeard
| brain. Systemd takes over a new daemon every distro upgrade.
| DNS resolving now involves 4 different daemons with 15
| different configuration files, there's two display protocols,
| both broken in different ways, /etc is full of long files
| written in strange, alien languages, and every file has its own
| bespoke language. There seems to be 54 different ways to make
| any change to your system, and all of them are somehow
| unsatisfactory in a unique way. I just can't, anymore. Enough
| already.
| MrArthegor wrote:
| I'm agreeing with your description.
|
| The mains issues with Linux is it's just the kernel, and
| anything is developed in their corner without taking account
| of the rest. Also, I tend to think the Linux folk in general
| seem to want to reinvent the wheel every 6 months, where
| FreeBSD and BSD in general have tendency to make things
| better from previous work in comparison
| tuna74 wrote:
| Linux is "just" an OS kernel. If you want to compare
| FreeBSD to something you can compare it to Fedora, Debian
| or Arch etc.
| MrArthegor wrote:
| Yes I know, but maybe my initial message wasn't clear
| enough.
|
| But for me the fact Linux is just the kernel doesn't make
| the previous criticisms invalid. The first concerning the
| development of the different components in sort of echo
| chamber where no one seem to communicate with each other
| is directly taken from the Linux Kernel philosophy, the
| maintainer have expressed in multiple time they don't
| care what happen outside of the kernel, in contrast with
| FreeBSD developers for example
|
| The second point is more towards distribution I admit
| LeFantome wrote:
| To make my long-winded point more concretely, the core
| diference is really just that there are "so many" Linux
| developers.
|
| Linus has a pretty firm hand on the tiller of Linux
| evolution. I counter "don't care what happen outside of
| the kernel" with his many, many public "never, ever break
| userland" rants. And many kernel devs and maintainers are
| employees of companies like Intel, Red Hat, Google, IBM,
| and AMD that absolutely care about coordinating kernel
| dev with the bigger picture.
|
| Something like 250 devs contribute to FreeBSD each year.
| For just the Linux kernel, the number is closer to 5000.
| There are just way more people working on way more stuff.
| It is not a surprise to see a more significant halo of
| chaos around Linux. Coordinating the Linux kernel is
| herding cats and, even when everybody eventually lines
| up, there are going to be periods where it seems like
| everybody is talking past each other.
|
| And while the Linux kernel does have a "release early,
| release often" mantra, it also touts "trust but verify"
| and has a strong meritocracy and hierarchy. So I am not
| sure "no one seem to communicate with each other" is
| fair. Not just anybody can drop whatever they want into
| Linux. We also need to remember that shipping the Linux
| kernel is not the same as shipping a Linux distro
| (operating system). Actual Linux distros bring kernel
| versions in according to the philosophy of the distro.
| Many are very stable and conservative. Others are a whole
| lot less so (but that is users choice).
| LeFantome wrote:
| "The mains issues with Linux is it's just the kernel, and
| anything is developed in their corner without taking
| account of the rest."
|
| I hear this a lot when people talk about FreeBSD but I am
| not sure about it.
|
| A LOT of the core Linux ecosystem comes from Red Hat
| developers for example. If I look at RHEL as an operating
| system, they have a definite vision for the OS, they take a
| long-term view, and they invest in development to get it
| there. My guess is that Red Hat alone employs more devs
| than work on FreeBSD.
|
| Red Hat contributes heavily to the kernel, the core C
| library (glibc), the userland (GNU utils), the system
| supervisor (systemd), the compiler (GCC), the desktop
| environment (GNOME), the GUI framework (Wayland now, Mesa,
| etc), the sound system (pipewire), the hypervisor system
| (KVM, libvirt), and the container system (podman and
| Flatpak). Red Hat heavily influences the direction of all
| this stuff with a common vision and they work to implement
| it as a cohesive expression in their distro. This is a
| broader swath of what makes the operating system than
| FreeBSD considers its scope and it is all built to work
| together.
|
| If you use RHEL, you know it is very stable (static). When
| Red Hat makes changes, they tell you about them years in
| advance.
|
| I honestly do not think you can say that FreeBSD is more
| cohesively developed or better documented than RHEL.
| FreeBSD arguably has less control over key aspects of the
| OS than Red Hat does.
|
| I am not advocating for Red Hat here by the way. I am not
| even a RHEL user. I use Chimera Linux which rejects quite a
| lot of the Red Hat vision including SystemD and pretty much
| the whole GNU system (userland, glibc, gcc).
|
| My point is that Red Hat is truly a maker of their own
| destiny and their distro reflects their vision. They want
| to move to SystemD. They introduced DRM and KMS instead of
| the traditional Xorg driver model. They want to move to
| Wayland. They have heavily embraced the OCI container
| model. It is all part of their vision and design.
|
| Pragmatically, FreeBSD has to create tools like
| Linuxulator. FreeBSD is adding support for OCI containers.
| FreeBSD is adding Wayland support and, as popular desktop
| environments abandon X11, may have to move to Wayland as
| the preferred display server. Even the FreeBSD utils have
| added many options over the years to be compatible with the
| userland that Red Hat developed. Was 'ls --color=auto' a
| FreeBSD design? In other words, the Red Hat agenda drives
| the evolution of FreeBSD (but not much the other way
| around).
|
| So sure, FreeBSD is more stable and cohesive than the
| universe of Linux distros. But even BSD has fragmentation.
| GhostBSD is close to FreeBSD but not quite and would be
| more different if they had more devs. DragonFly BSD
| certainly has its own agenda (and again, is held back more
| by bandwidth than solidarity). The free-for-all in the
| Linux world is an expression of its size and collective
| innovation. But how much of this you want as a user is up
| to you. As many have said, you don't use "Linux", you use a
| Linux distro.
|
| Again, my main distro is Chimera Linux. The whole point of
| the name is that it pulls together things never designed to
| work together (including the FreeBSD userland on Linux).
| And yet, the Chimera Linux dev team has a very strong
| vision of what they want their OS to look like and they
| work very hard to build that into a cohesive
| implementation. This includes keeping the system and the
| code small and understandable. It is a goal that you can
| sanely build the entire system from the ground up. That is
| why Chimera uses a BSD userland and does not use SystemD.
| But while they want to keep things simple, they also want
| "modern" features.
|
| They choose components that fit their vision. Where changes
| are required, they make them. Where they deem good options
| not to exist, they invent them (eg. Turnstile, cports). As
| a user, I get that "solid, cohesive, well-designed,
| intentional, and heavily curated" experience that FreeBSD
| users talk about. More to the comment above, Chimera reeks
| of "looking to preserve tradition while striving to make
| things better". Of course, it is also still a niche distro
| with a tiny community (at this point). As somebody said
| above, FreeBSD may be a better choice for this and other
| reasons. But Chimera Linux is still Linux and that has its
| advantages. The box I am typing on uses bcachefs and
| Distrobox. For me, it is perfect.
|
| Anyway, I apologies for the length. When you talk about
| FreeBSD vs "Linux", you really have to choose a specific
| Linux distro for the comparison to be meaningful. Depending
| on which one you pick, the statements made by @MrArthegnor
| may or may not hold. At least, that is my view.
| LeFantome wrote:
| I both agree and disagree with comments about Linux choas and
| churn. That is true of the overall ecosystem of course. But
| any given Linux distro can be thought of as its own operating
| system.
|
| You can choose a Linux distro that reflects your own
| preferences in terms of pace of innovation. Sure Arch has 100
| package updates a day and 30 ways to do everything. However,
| RHEL (or its compatibles) is not that way. You can go 10
| years without changing your config files. Precisely because
| there are so many distros with so many different curated
| experiences, you can find a Linux distro that matches your
| own preferences.
|
| And yet all Linux distros give you the hardware support and
| things like the OCI ecosystem that only the Linux kernel can
| provide.
|
| Given the above, I wonder sometimes why you would choose
| FreeBSD over a Linux distro. But your statement that FreeBSD
| has more users than many Linux distros is a good one. It is
| also true that, while distros like Arch or Debian have more
| software in their repos than FreeBSD, the FreeBSD ports
| collection has a much larger selection than most distro
| repos. So, overall, FreeBSD does achieve a nice balance. So,
| that makes sense to me.
| commandersaki wrote:
| Out of curiosity, who are the top users of FreeBSD/EC2?
| temp0826 wrote:
| Does netflix only use it on their edge boxes?
| cperciva wrote:
| Yes, their CDN is FreeBSD but last I heard all of their cloud
| operations are Linux.
| cperciva wrote:
| I 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_ wrote:
| I 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.
| xedrac wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| This 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 wrote:
| 40 hours/month. Not week.
| irusensei wrote:
| I 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.
| nithssh wrote:
| Very enlightening piece on how corpo sponsorship of OSS work.
| Thanks to the author for writing this.
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