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BSD Operating Systems

Byte: FreeBSD vs Linux Revisited 401

Posted by michael from the no-holds-barred dept.
Beerwolff writes: "This time I have remembered the link to the Byte article that's a follow-up to two of Moshe Bar's previous articles comparing FreeBSD and Linux--This time with the new Linux VM. His Apache "results show that Linux is better at handling I/O cache than FreeBSD, and that FreeBSD is more efficient at building up and tearing down processes."" As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth.
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Byte: FreeBSD vs Linux Revisited More

Byte: FreeBSD vs Linux Revisited

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  • Especially Salted (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Satai ( 111172 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:09PM (#2566989)
    "As usual, please take benchmarks with a grain of salt, caveat emptor, look before you leap, and so forth."

    In particular, be sure to read the very bottom of the article:

    Before you fire up your e-mail program to contest the results or suggest some neat trick to get even more out of either the Linux benchmark server or the FreeBSD server, remember what I said at the beginning of this review: This was not a scientific benchmark in a professional benchmarking lab. All results are only valid within my own environment and you are certainly bound to see a different result on your machines. The benchmark was only about finding out how well Linux handles stress loads compared to FreeBSD, and I do not claim that one OS is better than the other one.

    These aren't scientific. These are the results one person sees - and also note that the various problems presented to the servers give different results. FreeBSD and Linux both had strengths and weaknesses even in his tests.

  • The right tool for the right job. (Score:4, Informative)

    by thetechweenie ( 60363 ) <jsatrape AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:16PM (#2567012) Homepage
    Regardsless of what some reviewer comes up with, I have just found that they each do something specific. For servers, I would run FreeBSD. All of the daemons are ported, and the security is great. For my desktop, it's linux all the way. I think this is comparing apples to oranges.

  • I suppose you could say (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GISboy ( 533907 )
    the daemon's in the details, too.

    (shurg) Very nice and interesting article anyone else care to verify or dispute the findings?

    And a serious question; does linux and bsd scale well across various architectures?

    I suppose if people get riled up about any comparison maybe there should be a catagory such as "from the benchmark or skidmark dept."

    Heh.
  • To me the most interesting result was that both systems came out just about equal. I doubt there is much room left to squeeze out more performance, so competition will have to be based on other factors.

    This is good.

    • I agree.

      When examining bids from contractors/subcontractors on construction projects, an important consideration is "how close are the bids?". When the bids are close, it means the bidders are reading the bid documents the same way. When they diverge greatly, it means there is a lot of confusion about the scope of work.

      Similarly here, I think that seeing the performance of these two OS's tracking so closely might indicate a corresponding agreement about how to approach various OS problems.

      But I really have no idea. Is this true? I don't know anything about the finer details of how these two systems operate. How similar are they, really?
    • I can't get over all of these posts in here like "I'm running a {webserver/database/mail server} and I wonder which one is best?"

      For 99% of the people here, the low-capacity applications they are discussing are going to operate identically on both platforms. Unless you are running AOL, Yhaoo, or Hotmail, you are not a corner case. Use whatever you like, it is not going to make one lick of difference in performance or stability.

  • Installers (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Arctic Fox ( 105204 )
    Not to flame or troll.... but......
    How come Debian has such a PITA installer? Mandrake was nice, however, OpenBSD and FreeBSD have mega-top notch installers. Easy to use, easy to configure, just say "go".
    I've tried Debian three or four times before giving up... 2 years ago... about a year ago and last week...
    Downloading the ISO for FreeBSD 4.4 was the hardest thing I did with that. (Still can't quite get my Linksys WPC11 card to talk to my AP but that's a different issue).
    • some say it's because debian users only ever have to install once.

    • Give slackware a try. It's a nice, simple little distribution and the installer's pretty easy too.
  • We just switched our email, file and http/servers to FreeBSD. Why? Mandrake had become a horrid mess of dependencies and package problems. Building from source (painstaking and too labor intensive for a one person admin team) had become frustrating. The machines were inherited and had never had any documentation and administrative control. I got three machines to replace them (white boxen) and started fishing for what OS to put on them. Initially, I thought, well, Mandrake8.1. I did a test install. Gigs and Gigs and Gigs of useless crap and a horrible package management system to boot. Selecting packages individually took time I didn't have. I knew I needed samba, sendmail, ftp and apache (sshd too). An admin in another department suggested Debian. But (let me put my flamesuit on), another guy said "if you are going to use Debian, why not just install FreeBSD." I did a test install. 1 hour later, I had samba cooking and talking to our Win2K DC. I was sold. This after using Linux for 6 years. I wouldn't say "I saw the light" but as far as clean and Unixy goes, it doesn't get any more so than FreeBSD. I am interested in hearing horror stories about FreeBSD, cuz so far I am very impressed.
    • Glad you got your boxes up and running. I wouldn't worry about your setup, FreeBSD is really great, clean, stable. But, FWIW, I have just as easy a time with Slackware(shameless plug!).

      Slackware is clean, extremely simple, can be easily installed without all the unnecessary shit. It can also be installed with gnome, kde and enlightenment for the desktop. Makes it easier using the same system for servers and desktops... As for package management, I just build everything myself from source. Once you learn enough about the different packages you use all the time, there's no easier way to admin a server(depending on many factors of course, YMMV and all that).

      Never even tried Debian... I'm sure apt-get is nice, but I have no use for it.

      • How do you upgrade from one release of Slackware to another? Is there a code repository like FreeBSD's where you can cvsup and make the kernel and userland? I'm assuming not but I don't know - it's a been a while since I used Slackware.

        I'm not putting down Slack. Just wondering... It was my first distribution and I remember going from a.out to elf on it by myself (with a guide). It was a great experience.
      • Slackware is great for low-end and mid-end servers - and high-end servers if you can find the fsck-ing drivers.

        Debian is for overworked admins. If you're in a relaxed environment, running Slackware will teach you a lot about *nix that package management systems hide from you.
    • I too had a similar experience but I've moved from Slackware->RedHat & Mandrake->Debian->Debian(desktops) & FreeBSD (servers) & OpenBSD (some tasks). This was of course over many years and there was a half year break between slack and redhat (went to redhat to see what all the hubub was about).

      Debian testing or unstable is great on my laptop and desktop machines. FreeBSD is great on my servers. It's a win win situation.

      Be sure to cvsup to 4.4-CURRENT and make a custom kernel and buildworld (just noting this for other people considering FreeBSD) and also if you use IDE drives edit /boot/loader.conf and put in:

      hw.ata.atapi_dma=1
      hw.ata.ata_dma=1

      to enable DMA (have to reboot too)...

      I could go on about how FreeBSD is simply less work than Debian to admin for a server (when you want current releases of apache, samba, etc) but I'd be preaching to the masses. Lets just say that you owe it to yourself to try both Debian and FreeBSD and see which you like better. Only you can make the right choice based on your needs...

      For me it was FreeBSD.

      An example: I'm upgrading a server from FreeBSD 4.0-RELEASE-CLIENT-2. It's a bit convoluted to get up to 4.4-STABLE but it can be done with cvsup and make. That's part of the beauty of FreeBSD...
      • Be sure to cvsup to 4.4-CURRENT...

        Ahhh! Sorry, that should be 4.4-STABLE! My bad...
      • Buildworld takes ages. It's very l33t, but takes ages. I still tend to just install from the CD.

        On the subject of DMA I believe that ata write caching (hw.ata.wc) was disabled in 4.3, but re-enabled again in 4.4. Partially as a result of getting hammered in benchmarks. I'd leave it off. Honestly. Turn softupdates on (much easier to do when installing afresh), and leave write caching off.

        Not scientific, but I do remember there being some potential difficulties with using hw.ata.wc=1 and softupdates together.

        Dave
        • Buildworld takes ages. It's very l33t, but takes ages. I still tend to just install from the CD.

          Well we are talking servers here... I think buildworld takes about 1.5 - 2 hours on my lowly 550 Mhz Celeron (100 Mhz FSB). I'm not sure how long the kernel takes but it isn't too bad... The whole point here is that when you have a co-located server it is easy to upgrade without having to go burn an ISO. Or even if the server is at work and you are at home or in another location. It's just handy and practically essential no matter what it's l33tness rating is...

          On the subject of DMA I believe that ata write caching (hw.ata.wc) was disabled in 4.3, but re-enabled again in 4.4. Partially as a result of getting hammered in benchmarks. I'd leave it off. Honestly. Turn softupdates on (much easier to do when installing afresh), and leave write caching off.

          I have both softupdates and write caching on at the moment. I think I'll give it a good test run because the server in question is not in production. Everything seems to be cranking along ok...

          Not scientific, but I do remember there being some potential difficulties with using hw.ata.wc=1 and softupdates together.

          Supposedly this is fixed now but good thing to keep in mind...
          • The problem with write caching is that it can leave the file system in an unknown state. Because the writes happen when the drive decides and the OS receives no notification when they've finished, you could have a crash and be behind several seconds (or a lot more) and fsck won't necessarily pick it up.

            Simply put, be real careful and research it a bit before making the decision. It's a big perf. improvement but I hesitate to take the risk on a server.

          • just building a custom kernel takes about 15 minutes on my bastion box... which is running 3.4, and is a P133.

            buildworld is much, much bigger :)

    • You used *MANDRAKE* for your servers? Are you nucking futs? Don't get me wrong, it's what I'm using and it's a wonderful distro, but not for servers. It's bloated -- it comes with the kitchen-sink *AND* the kitchen-sink-devel RPMS installed by default, for Pete's sake. For a server, you should run Debian, or Redhat, or Suse. Mandrake? That's for kids and grammas and folks who *ahem* just want to have their TV tuner working out of the box.
      • and folks who *ahem* just want to have their TV tuner working out of the box.

        God forbid that a linux user would want everything to work without having to configure anything. But seriously, how hard is it to select only the packages you want installed? Duh.
        • Heh.. Ever tried doing this in a Mandrake install? The first time I installed Mandrake 8.1, I said what the hell and selected the individual package selection. What a fuckin pain in the ass, lemme tell ya. Almost everything is selected to install by default so you have to go thru several hundred if not a thousand packages checking off all the useless bullshit. It helps to not have any general categories selected before doing the individual package selection, but there is still plenty of shit after that.

          I want my installer to only have the most minimal set of packages to install (kernel, shell, libs) and then let me add on the individual packages I need (compiler, tools, etc). I guarantee that would take a whole helluva lot less time than selecting the packages that I don't need.
        • how hard is it to select only the packages you want installed? Duh.

          It's very hard. Select a package by mistake when all you're trying to do is read the description. So go unselect that package. No go find the 144 dependencies that got selected without telling you. Now go find all of their dependencies. All without going blind on their yellow/purple color scheme.
      • ...who *ahem* just want to have their TV tuner working out of the box.

        Read:

        Those who want their operating system to work as it should when they install it.

        Yes, there are arguments against running Mandrake (stability maybe) But not using it because it works doesn't make sense.

        "Yea, I tried Mandrake, but it worked too good... I switched to [insert distro here] so that I could spend hours trying to get every piece of my hardware working correctly."
      • bloated -- it comes with the kitchen-sink *AND* the kitchen-sink-devel RPMS installed by default, for Pete's sake

        and that's the reason you wouldn't recommend it? what sort of admin does a default install of anything? are you installing a mail server? a file server? database? DNS? you've always gotta do some customisation, and when you do, mandrake is no more bloated than any of the other distros.
      • Why does it matter to have 'crap' installed? It's not as if the disk space is expensive.

        On a server (or on any machine in fact) you want to minimize the number of services running, suid binaries, and so on. But why should there be any problem having ordinary, non-suid files lying around the filesystem?

        If your system security is adversely affected by having a copy of same-gnome installed then you have bigger problems than worrying about 'bloat'.

    • Try Slackware 8 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by aussersterne ( 212916 )
      Slackware has always had BSD-like cleanliness and simplicity. No shit to dig through in scripts and packages and etc. etc. etc., just a nice, efficient Unix-like feel. I started using Linux with Slackware and for years saw Linux as just another Unix, albeit a newer, flashier one. The first time I tried Red Hat (at 5.0) I was totally startled to find that most people were seeing Linux as a whole other operating system...

      And with Slackware, you'll get the extra drivers and hardware up-to-dateness that Linux offers -- the one place where *BSD really suffers, especially for desktop or small server applications. That's my FreeBSD horror story... trying to install it on modern (Athlon+AGP graphics) hardware and on my Thinkpad.
      • Huh? I run Slackware 8 and FreeBSD (4.4) on my Athlon+GF2. Both run like a charm, and all hardware (including USB printer, scanner etc) is supported by BOTH. FreeBSD Horror story? I don't know what you're talking about, except 3D graphics (no NVidia driver, which is Linux only alas). If you don't need 3D graphics (like for a server or a desktop where 3D games are not important) there is no reason to skip FreeBSD at all.
    • Horror stories? nope, you made the right choice!

      The only mild annoyance (not horrible) I find with FreeBSD on white-box hardware is that device driver support for random hardware isn't as good as Linux; it appears that you were using well selected hardware (as everyone should be for production purposes!) rather than the cheapest thing you money could buy.

      The BSD ports system is also kept more up to date than stable Debian packages.
    • Contrary to what other people say, I think Debian is closer to FreeBSD than Slackware. FreeBSD ports at least sound very similar to Debian packages -- Debian packages just happen to precompile for you, which saves a little time for you but isn't otherwise significantly different. apt handles building from source as well, if you really want to do that.

      Slackware is more do-it-yourself than FreeBSD is, it seems to me. I don't know what the other BSDs are like -- maybe they are more like Slackware.

      Building from source tarballs is okay, especially when you have a very limited set of functions and only a handful of user accounts. But if you want a richer environment and/or you want to have other users (who may not be entirely trusted), it seems like a lot of effort. A good packaging system -- be it binary or with source -- saves a ton of time.

      I was just recently talking with someone who was firmly convinced that you couldn't do a decent job of administering a server without spending 10 hours a week on the server. I think he was stuck in the past -- at least for a simple server, dedicated to a few stable functions (like email or web hosting), it hardly takes any time at all to keep a good OS working. I think that guy just isn't familiar with modern OSes and distributions. Old school just isn't efficient.

  • The best thing... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by stox ( 131684 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:27PM (#2567039) Homepage
    that ever happend to FreeBSD, was Linux. The best thing that ever happened to Linux, was FreeBSD. Instead of fighting in the mud with those other guys, both can compete on the higher ground of techinical merit. As long as both keep leap frogging each other, we are all better off.

    • Re:The best thing... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by MonMotha ( 514624 )
      I really think this is the kind of way that OSS could win out in the end over closed proprietary software. When one OSS group does somethign innovative, new, etc, the other guys will either try to "one-up them" (disregard the reasons here) or say to them "hey, that's a great idea, mind if we implement it here?" Basically OSS development just keeps going with thousands of programmers each contributing what they know. Isn't this a major point of OSS anyway? Not to flat out "beat the commercial competition" but rather to develop the best software possible with the help of others? We have multiple OpenSource operating systems, and we have healthy competition in them (something the commercial market is currently lacking). As long as one side keeps innovating (must...refrain...), development will make leaps and bounds as the competition tries to improve upon the other to "better their market share".

      --MonMotha
    • It will be interesting to see where things go.

      I think that Linux and FreeBSD will continue to help eachother. It does seem to be true that in some applications, FreeBSD is losing to Linux, but this is happening very slowly and could easily reverse itself. The real losers to Linux are proprietary UNIX operating systems like Solaris and AIX which now more than ever have to justify their value.

      I have said before that I think that Linux will "shield" FreeBSD from the proprietary UNIX OS's. In fact many people I know in the Linux community are fascinated by FreeBSD and so Linux's rise may well benefit both AND result in more portable programming.
  • ...throw DOS in there. :)

  • Linux Vs BSD (Score:2, Informative)

    by dsinner ( 526910 )
    With all the media/capital hype surrounding linux right now, BSD doesn't stand a chance. Everywhere I go on the net I see linux cluster this, linux PDAs, linux games, linux servers, linux everything..

    I'm waiting for the linux powered toilet brush, personally. I'd just hope that these people who are pumping their servers full of linux goodness don't do it just because the hype is there, they really need to get more information BOTH BSD & Linux, besides benchmarks with sendmail and what not.

    Linux is not the only Microsoft alternative.

    • Re:Linux Vs BSD (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bogie ( 31020 )
      I think your forgetting OS X which is BSD based. Like Apple says they will soon have the largest installed base for unix desktops.If OS X ran on X86 linux would probably fall off the face of the earth as far as nix destkops go.

  • Holy bat guano (Score:5, Interesting)

    by stox ( 131684 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:36PM (#2567065) Homepage
    MAXUSERS was set to 20!!

    Jeez, I won't even set it that low for my personal machine. For the purposes of this kind of benchmark, I would have at least started with 128. If you want to be fair in I/O benchmarks, have BOTH machines mount the filesystems asynch. If you're going to do a comparison, at least compare apples to apples. Softupdates rocks, but I still think async is going to be faster.
    • MAXUSERS was set to 20!!

      I know, incredible isn't it, below what even the generic kernel ships with. But I think FreeBSD has some problems with MAXUSERS, in that nobody knows what the hell it's for. I believe that as of 4.4 all the parameters that were previously dependent on MAXUSERS are now boot time programmable. Although what they are and some ideal values is news to me. Guess I had better go do some more reading - tuning(5) IIRC.

      Dave
    • He mentions raising it from 4 - doesn't the LINT config have maxusers set to some really low value (4 sounds about right) ?

      He probably just assumed that the settings in LINT were the default settings, and copied them over.
      (unless he based his config off of LINT rather than GENERIC - but would that even boot? I've never tried it...)
      • The last time I looked, LINT had comments to the effect that it would be surprising if it compiled, as some of the options are mutually exclusive. It's been a while, though. Mostly I just keep an eye on UPDATING.

    • Re:Holy bat guano (Score:3, Informative)

      by brass1 ( 30288 )
      MAXUSERS was set to 20!!

      Which explains the awful IO cache[sic] performance seen during this "benchmark". According to my math, the author set aside nearly 17K of RAM for mbufs. This will materially effect network and file IO performance. Honestly, I'm impressed the system actually stayed up under load with this stupid of a setting.

      Oh.. and LINT has a maxusers setting on 10 (plus a comment about not using LINT to build a kernel). GENERIC's is 32. Considering what this guy's bio says and the end of the story, I have a hard time believing this is really is an honest mistake.
    • He compared with FreeBSD 4.3, while 4.4 has been out since September. In 4.4, softupdates are on by default b.t.w. (licensing problems have been solved).

      It is very clear from this article that this is a long-time Linux user who (being curious) wants to give FreeBSD a try. The difference in his expertise of Linux vs. FreeBSD shows.

      Regarding I/O performance: As someone who is running both Slackware 8 and FreeBSD 4.4 on the same hardware, and being a benchmarking freak myself, I have to say that the result of his benchmark simply IS WRONG. This was (apart from a stupid MAXUSERS=20 setting) a one-sided benchmark, testing only a single program in a single (SMP) configuration.

      FreeBSD is lagging in SMP lock granularity (which only affects certain programs) but any decent I/O benchmark shows that I/O of FreeBSD by far outperforms that of Linux (2.4.14): better bandwidth, response times and lower CPU usage.

      There may always be some particular devices where the driver for either Linux or FreeBSD is particularly bad or good, but generally speaking when it comes to performance FreeBSD wins in almost all areas hands-down, and certainly for I/O.

  • gigabit networking? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by _|()|\| ( 159991 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:47PM (#2567086)
    The switch I used for this test was the 10/100/1000 24-Port Managed Gigaswitch. The Gigabit functions require external modules that are very easy to install.

    The NICs were a mix of Alteon and Intel Gigabit for the clients.

    If he's using the Gigaswitch I think he's using, it takes two Gigabit Fiber Modules that each provide two 1000BaseSX ports. He's ignoring the twenty-four 10/100 ports and running a network on the backbone, as it were.

    Not that it matters to a magazine columnist who has a Proliant to play with, but this is a little more expensive than 1000BaseTX, isn't it?

  • FreeBSD and Linux will always complement ... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by SuperDuG ( 134989 ) <<kt.celce> <ta> <eb>> on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:47PM (#2567090) Homepage Journal
    FreeBSD and Linux are always going to complement each other completely. Even though they are based behind two different kernels they are both free as in beer.

    Personally I would use FreeBSD for a server for the sheer fact that I can never crash it. For desktop uses I would definantelly use linux.

    But both of them being free in the same world will always complement each other. The only thing holding FreeBSD back from the desktop is a pretty installer ... though this [apple.com] _might_ count as a desktop varient of FreeBSD ...

    The latest releases of mandrake [mandrakesoft.com] and redhat [redhat.com] are full of wonderful packages and resources that make linux more than a prime candidate for the desktop.

    But Linux and FreeBSD will ALWAYS complement each other ...

    SuperDuG

  • Workstation use? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by CtrlPhreak ( 226872 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @10:52PM (#2567106) Homepage

    As well as I like to see benchmarks, apache benchmarks none the less (seems kinda like the infamous Photoshop benchmarks for the average user), I'd like to see a comparison between *BSD and Linux on a desktop workstation. I've been happy using slackware for a while and would like to know the difference on a usability standpoint.

    There are questions that are never answered for the average (above average for using some other platform than windows) user because of all the flame wars. How is compatability with software made for linux? Gaming support? Driver support? How do installs go? How much of a difference is there for setting up/configuring devices and other system preferences? These are things that I am interested as a perspective user and I am not that interested for this case about the differences between the BSD license and other free licenses which are important for some people. Is there a reason for me as a home non server user to switch to *BSD?

    • Re:Workstation use? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Baki ( 72515 ) on Thursday November 15, 2001 @03:56AM (#2567697)
      I run both (slack-8/2.4.14 and FBSD 4.4) on my workstation. I find FreeBSD way easier to manage and generally have better performance, more pleasant to administer.

      Support of "important" hardware is about the same.
      My USB printer and scanner function well in both, for example.

      Support of more exotic hardware still is more problematic in FreeBSD: No 3D graphics on nvidia because nvidia's driver has not been ported to FBSD yet. My DVB-S (satellite card) is not supported in FBSD, in Linux I can use it to watch and digitally record programs. DV-video through Firewire doesn't work in FBSD. I don't know whether Linux does any better (I think so) because I switch to Windows to capture and process video.

      For software (except 3D games as mentioned) FreeBSD has somewhat less native software, but almost everything (even including VMWare for Linux) runs extremely well under the Linux emulator, often even surpassing the speed when run natively under Linux (this is possible since technically it is not really emulation, but all Linux system calls have been added via a loadable kernel module).
      • I run both (slack-8/2.4.14 and FBSD 4.4) on my workstation. I find FreeBSD way easier to manage and generally have better performance, more pleasant to administer.

        I use both FreeBSD and GNU/Linux (debian testing with some packages from unstable), and have used Redhat, Mandrake, and Suse in the past. All are excellent systems, with their own unique advantages and disadvantages. Your reference to the maintainability of FreeBSD is right on point, it is excellent, and the /ports section is IMHO one of the most elegant approaches to software packaging ("make compiling and installing from source as easy as installing a binary-only package under any other os would be").

        Mandrake has the smoothest, easiest install, but is often plagued with bugs early on, and really isn't upgradable without reinstalling (I've tried ... painfully). Redhat is comparable, with other tradeoffs not really worth detailing here. Ditto for Suse.

        Debian, on the other hand, has a very dated install that is quite demanding, requiring the user to have a fairly high level of competence and familiarity with their hardware prior to installation. Nowhere near as easy as setting up any of the other three GNU/Linux distros mentioned, nor as easy as FreeBSD. However, it is amazingly simple to maintain and upgrade. I have literally installed ancient versions of the distro because those were the disks I had handy, pointed apt to a (much) newer testing or unstable release by editing two lines in one file (/etc/apt/sources.list for the curious), then running two commands at the command line, namely "apt-get update" (update the list of available packages) followed by "apt-get dist-upgrade."

        This is like upgrading from Mandrake 7.0 to 7.2 or 8.0, or upgrading FreeBSD from 3.4 to 4.0 or 4.1. In two painless commands, which grab the latest packages from one of the numerous debian package servers and installs them. Never again installing from scratch, even for major upgrades. Security patches? While they make it into testing last of all (a really critical machine such as a firewall should really be running the staid but rock solid "stable" release, for which security patches come out within 24-48 hours, or better yet, some version of *BSD), pulling them down from unstable as source via "apt-get source [package] --compile" followed by a "dpkg -i [packagename].deb" of the .deb created is easy and painless for the impatient.

        The point of all this rambling? FreeBSD is great. GNU/Linux comes in many flavors, all of which are generally compatible but each of which has its advantages and disadvantages. For maintainability, stability, and quality Debian is IMHO at the front and very comparable to FreeBSD (in some ways better, in some worse ... which is why choice is so marvelous and why I use both).

        Others value other aspects of their respectively favorite distributions of course, which again is what makes the freedom of choice we as Free Software users enjoy so marvelous. I toute my own favorite merely to point out that, if maintainability and managability are your primary concern (as they are mine), you may definitely wish to give Debian a gander. Install off the old "stable disks," point sources.list to testing or unstable (I typically point the deb lines at testing and the deb-src lines at unstable, but others have other strategies for finding their comfort zone vis a vis stability vs. bleeding edge fun), run a couple of commands and you're good to go.

        That having been said, FreeBSD's source-based "ports" section is the only software distribution approach I've ever seen that in many ways I actually prefer to debian's approach (though the paradigms are in some ways apples and oranges to each other) ... a compliment of the highest order to both approaches.

  • Good to hear that Linux is catching up (Score:3, Funny)

    by SumDeusExMachina ( 318037 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @11:00PM (#2567126) Homepage
    After the disasterous VM mistakes that have been happening in the 2.4 Linux kernel series, it is good to see that it measures up with and in some cases even beats what is widely accepted as the best open source VM implementation on the planet.

    I think these kind of concrete results are what can help Linux out in breaking into the enterprise market. God knows IBM is pouring all they've got into it, and now that we have a killer VM, we'll probably be seeing Linux a lot more in mission critical systems such as database servers. All in all this is great news on the kernel front.

    As always, many props to Alan, Linus, et al. who make this kind of innovation possible.

  • here we go again (Score:3, Insightful)

    by necrognome ( 236545 ) on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @11:03PM (#2567133) Homepage
    now, before we start, everyone remember that *BSD IS NOT DYING!

    carry on.

  • Stupid Media Trash (Score:4, Insightful)

    by ksw2 ( 520093 ) <[moc.liamg] [ta] [retaeyebo]> on Wednesday November 14, 2001 @11:06PM (#2567141) Homepage
    Media loves a good "(X) VERSUS (Y)!" fight. I say fuck them. It's going to depend on the application. Linux users don't use their OS's in the same way the BSD users use theirs.

    Tell one person using OpenBSD that they should use Linux instead because the I/O cache is faster, and they'll tell you to GFY. Likewise if you tell a desktop Redhat 7.2 user that FreeBSD is going to suit him better because of process creation statistics.

    It's just another stupid OS jihad that doesn't matter. People should take a lesson from Linus when people ask him what he thinks of the "competition".

  • OK, the more important question these days is which OS (or even distribution) is better for colocated machines? I'm looking at it from the perspective that my machine would be many hundreds of miles away and I don't intend to go drive to sit at the console to do an upgrade. What would be my choices? I believe FreeBSD supposedly is strongly suited to that type of environment but it looks like Debian GNU/Linux also has strong points there as well.
    • If you're doing colo hundreds of miles away, it'd make sense to figure out how you want to do OOB management. We use HP servers and they have a great out of band management capability -- power off, on, restart and console-level keyboard and text mode display capabilities independant of the OS. Couple this with a modem and you should be able to handle anything short of a total reinstallation.

      Dunno what your colo environment is, but if you're buying a couple of U of rack space you could add one of those serial port management gizmos that does dialup and telnet access to a few serial port for greater flexibility.

      That being said, I've had good luck with FreeBSD just doing makeworld and installworld remotely and rebooting without the machine going foobar on me. My drive is like 10 miles and the longest part of the journey is from the parking garage to the machine room, but I haven't had to make it but once due to a stuck management controller (fixed by BIOS upgrade) that required "F2" to continue booting but also locked out out of band management.

      The key is being able to whack the box remotely without driving in. Unless you totally screw the OS to the point of reinstallation, most systems with OOB capabilities can get you going when the OS prevents a ssh-type connection.
      • FreeBSD has serial console support. You don't get the BIOS, but you pretty much get everything other than that. If you're colocating two (or any even number of) machines, just hook up serial 1 of one machine to serial 2 of the other. Then you can log on even if the machine is in single-user mode, for OS upgrades and when a sudden reboot leaves you at the manual fsck prompt.

  • My opinion... take it or leave it. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Fucky Badger ( 535691 ) on Thursday November 15, 2001 @12:17AM (#2567307)
    Any response to a question like this is bound to upset someone. I'll
    answer with the caveat that this is my opinion that developed over the
    past three years following them both as well as other commercial OSs.
    Those of you offended in any way by this, please cat flames > /dev/null.

    That said -- the differences between FreeBSD and Linux can best be
    understood in the context of American politics. There are essentially two
    philosophies: Republican (FreeBSD) and Democrat (Linux).

    The FreeBSD organization is a republican structure -- we have our say as
    users, but the final decisions devolve to the core team who take the final
    responsibility for their decisions. FreeBSD takes a conservative approach.
    In other words, better things should work correctly at the expense of a
    minorities desires, than to please all of the people all of the time and
    have unexpected components of the OS breaking on a regular basis. We are
    free to vote our approval or disapproval by changing our OS.

    Linux is a democratic group. There is no single authority to accept final
    responsibility except for Linus as it relates to the kernel. Linux adopted
    early on a consensus approach (POSIX, etc.). In a sense, Linux is much
    like current Democratic politics -- the mob pretty much rules. The end
    result is that there is really no such thing as Linux -- there are
    distributions that use the Linux kernel and from then on you have
    essentially different operating systems. Slackware, for example, doesn't
    look at all like Red Hat. Describing Linux is much like describing Mach.
    (There isn't much - both are just micro kernels. _Anything_ can be
    implemented over them.)

    So as I see it, it comes down to this: vote for the philosophy that
    appeals to you. I use FreeBSD because I rely on my machine for many other
    uses besides tinkering with operating systems. FreeBSD doesn't change the
    world on me every 6 months. Linux is in constant change. New things are
    showing up all the time. If you like tinkering with operating systems and
    having things that used to work break, Linux may be your answer. If you
    don't know Unix -- pick one and get started. You'll learn how to pick the
    best choice. No matter which one you pick, it will be infinitely better
    that Micros**t anything.
    • Hm. The analogy you suggested works further: Linux and *BSD are basically the same, except for certain details. US Republicans and Democrats are basically the same, except for certain details.

      Another analogy I once suggested: the various *BSDs are like the myriad of leftist political groups: no one really knows what the difference between them is, but they really seem to like nothing better than fighting among themselves.

    • No flames here.. just a little nitpick:

      (There isn't much - both are just micro kernels. _Anything_ can be implemented over them.)

      Mach is definitely a micro kernel, but Linux most certainly is not. Although it does have a few characteristics of a micro kernel, at the end of the day its still technically a monolithic kernel.

    • *Your* Opinion? (-1, Cut-And-Paste) (Score:4, Informative)

      by Rabenwolf ( 155378 ) on Thursday November 15, 2001 @06:40AM (#2567903)
      Well, had this really been your opinion, you wouldn't have needed to copy it from elsewhere [google.com] on the web, would you?

      Please karmawhore with your own material if you have to.

    • If that's the case, I'm *never* voting for a democrat again :)


      hawk

    • No your analogy is ridiculous, since you're not comparing kinds. Not to mention there is no real difference between the republicans and democrats.
      Republicans and Democrats is more like comparing Windows 98 and Windows ME. Neither works worth a shit.

      Linux is a kernel, FreeBSD is a distribution. You can compare the BSD kernel with linux, or FreeBSD with Debian or Mandrake, but you can't compare OpenBSD with linux, any more than you can compare W2K with linux (unless you're just comparing kernels).

      This Byte article is comparing the bsd kernel with linux.
    • ... such as Win2K and WinXP. consider:
      • all are owned by corporations
      • none of them works worth a damn
      • everyone thinks they're different, but they're really the same, due to "product churning" every 2 years (elections = new releases)
      • they all have the personalities of screaming 2 year old children - always screaming "My this, my that, mine mine MINE!!!!"
      • everyone seems to like them for the same reasons (there "isn't anything else"). Suggesting windows users use linux is very much like asking a democrat to become a syndicalist.
  • I did my own test to compare the linux VM's on a couple different kernel versions. I booted the system into the test kernel, once loaded I ran 32 simaltaneous instances of mpg123. Using BSD process accounting (thanks tcsh!), I measured the elapsed time, kernel time, user time, major page faults, and minor page faults of each of the 32 processes. I then found the mean/stddev/min/max of these numbers.

    The mean elapsed time for the process and mean number of page faults are shown below: (I'd post all the number but the slash filter doesn't like the gratuituis white space)

    kernel: 2.2.20 2.4.10 2.4.12 2.4.8
    mean major page faults:
    7833 7208 7285 8990
    mean elapsed time:
    88.62 86.81 86.52 88.44

    so what's this show? not much :) The 2.4.8 kernel had a lot more page faults. But the vm might measure major/minor page faults differently, I don't know. Also, my kernel configs may have been slightly different but that shouldn't matter too much. If someone wants to do a more complete analysis let me know and I can give more details.

    Anyway, in terms of number of page faults:
    2.4.10 < 2.2.20 < 2.4.8

    of course, YMMV.

  • Not a VM benchmark (Score:5, Insightful)

    by velco ( 521660 ) on Thursday November 15, 2001 @03:37AM (#2567671)
    Note that this is systems benchmark, not a VM one.
    There are a lot more different things in the two
    kernels, than the VM. And note, that the server was
    SMP, an area where FreeBSD folks admit "Linux is a
    year ahead". It may turn out in the end that
    actually the FreeBSD VM performs better, making
    able the Big Lock BSD kernel catch up with more
    fine graned Linux .
    -velco
    Lies, damned lies, statistics
  • I know that Linux hardware support is at least more comprehensive, which is why I use it on the desktop. I am preparing to configure a server, and was wondering if I should do FreeBSD. I have used it in the past, and am reasonably self-assured in many areas, but I have lingering questions about these aspects:
    Software RAID-5: I see vinum, is that as good as or better than linux equiv? Are there more alternatives?

    lvm: seems to be integrated with vinum, is it relatively easy to shrink and grow fses and make more fses in a vinum managed group?

    nat/firewalling: I've heard very little about ipf and ipnat, how good are they at what they do? Do they do stateful firewalling? How intuitive are they to configure blocking/forwarding rules vs. iptables (note I consider iptables to be extremely intuitive)?

    ipsec: I see that there is support for ipsec, does it interoperate with FreeS/WAN? (Must connect to a site and tunnel network traffic with a linux FreeS/WAN box at other end.)

    I have a small linux box performing the firewalling/ipsec right now. I plan to upgrade and have volume management over a raid array, as well as apache, nfs, nis, samba (file serving and PDC), and want to maintain configurability while insuring stability. 2.4.x series of kernels have seemed to be a little too flaky in my usage for a high-availability solution, and FreeBSD seemed rock-solid when I used it.

  • In the opposite of what any might have predicted, the BSD in Mac OS X is now a formidable desktop OS, despite BSD users constant assertions of its server prowess.

    In spite of the wars (and heavy casualties) between genome and kde on Linux, increasing vendor support has pushed Linux far into the datacenter (Oracle 8i/9i, Linux on an IBM 390, the recent Compaq release of the Non-Stop Cluster code, etc.).

    BSD has nowhere near the datacenter penetration, and Linux has nowhere near the desktop elegance.

    This situation is perhaps diametrically opposed to what should be, but this is what the market, the developers, and the users have decided.

    Don't like this state of affairs? Port ReiserFS and XFS to BSD. Get Mac OS X running on a Linux kernel.

    p.s. And please don't tell me that softupdates makes journaling filesystems obsolete again - I'm bored of hearing it.

  • Combine the best bits of both? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Thursday November 15, 2001 @03:21PM (#2570345)

    FreeBSD rocks!! (But Linux doesn't suck. I use both. In fact, I say use whatever is best for the job, as long as it isn't Windows, because Windows sucks. (Bear with me for a moment--this is not flamebait, just part of the overall presentation of my comment.) Yeah, Windows might be useful at serving a purpose sometimes, as long as whatever it is doesn't need to actually function properly most of the time. But then, I was talking about FreeBSD and Linux, not Windows. Because Windows sucks.)

    Building up and tearing down processes is indeed one of the strong points of FreeBSD. I vaguely recall reading about that somewhere in the documentation on the website or the CD or somewhere. I also recall reading about how some older version of FreeBSD had an obscure timing-based vulnerability in some section of the forking code because keeping it fast requires it to be complicated. (Actually, it's not that complicated. It's just in deciding which parts of the process are copied to the new process and which ones aren't. Under very specific circumstances, something that wasn't supposed to be copied was, or the other way around. I just don't remember. That's what happens when you try to comment on something you read a year (or more) ago. Of course, this vulnerability has long since been fixed. The point is, I don't claim that FreeBSD is perfect while Linux isn't--they both have their strong and weak points and like I said, use whichever one is best for whatever you're trying to accomplish. And above all, like any machine, a system running any kind of operating system needs to be well maintained, and that is a big part of security. While there may be bugs in whatever parts of whatever operating system, proper maintainence will nearly always ensure that the system is kept running and is not compromised. (Unless you're running Windows, which, like I said before, sucks, so even if you maintain it properly, I am required by blood oath to tell you that it will be compromised anyway, just to make Windows look bad, even if it isn't all that bad for home use by computer newbies who just want to check out some website or whatever.))

    In the Linux compatibility section of the FreeBSD manual, the author claims that FreeBSD executes some parts of Linux programs faster than Linux. (I'm sure it executes other parts more slowly. This is what happens when you run programs designed for other software--you can use some of your features (or just circumstances) to your advantage while other things just don't work out quite as fast as you'd like.) It would be interesting to analyse FreeBSD and Linux, figure out which parts are best in both in terms of efficiency at running, say, desktop software, and modify both systems for better efficiency. Oh well. I got too much work to do. Maybe tomorrow.

  • I e-mailed the fellow and he confirmed that both the MAXUSERS and kernel version listed in the article were misprints. He used 4.4-R and MAXUSERS was set at 200 (still too low for a high-volume server, IMO).

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