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BSD Operating Systems

Interview With The FreeBSD Core Team 281

Posted by timothy from the free-as-in-bsd dept.
Gentu writes "OSNews features an ultra interesting and in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core team (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). They discuss issues from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even... re-unification of the BSDs."
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Interview With The FreeBSD Core Team More

Interview With The FreeBSD Core Team

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  • Go for the servers! (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Blaine Hilton ( 626259 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @03:34PM (#5827778) Homepage
    I'm glad to hear (again) that the freeBSD team is concentrating on the server segment and not on desktops, which IMHO is better suited for Linux.

    Go calculate [webcalc.net] something

    • Make a kernel very tuneable and scalable and it should suit desktops and servers. Unless they're going for extreme performance :)
      • Quick disclaimer here: I don't use FreeBSD, but I have no quarrel with those who do...

        But I find some of the arguments these guys have produced in support of their hostility towards Linux slightly disturbing. I am quite happy to believe them when they say that BSD is just as good as Linux for the desktop, but get a load of this:

        in a seminar by the Australian Government. We supplied all delegates with a CD-ROM of OpenOffice for a number of platforms, including FreeBSD, Linux and Microsoft. It proved to be e

        • the four days it requires to explain to members of the Government what './' means.
        • Considering all you need to do to get OpenOffice working on FreeBSD is "pkg_add openoffice-1.0.1_4.tgz", there are indeed more steps involved to get OpenOffice working under Linux. I didn't get any impression that the interviewees were expressing any hostility towards Linux (in fact, they explicitly mention several areas where Linux has excelled over FreeBSD). It does stand that there are things that are easier to do in FreeBSD than in Linux (installation onto a RAID partition is one of those things in my e
          • Considering all you need to do to get OpenOffice working on FreeBSD is "pkg_add openoffice-1.0.1_4.tgz"

            # pkg_add openoffice-1.0.1_4.tgz
            pkg_add: can't stat package file 'openoffice-1.0.1_4.tgz'

            Oh well, guess it takes more.

            Are there legal problems with binary releases? I can't seem to find a tarball.

            PORTROOT=ftp://ftp.???.???/pub/FreeBSD/ports pkg_add -r openoffice

            would be nice.

    • If it will make a great server, then it will make an even better client.

      I'm using FreeBSD as my desktop at work and at home. What am I missing that I could have if I used Linux? Beats me! I've got DRI, MPlayer, multichannel audio, KDE, Gnome, CUPS, USB, Wine, OpenOffice, Java, etc.

      Of course, it take slightly more effort to administer the system, but in some quarters this is actually a Good Thing(tm). It's more than suitable for the company desktop, because the IT department is going to be administering it
    • I'm glad to hear (again) that the Linux team is concentrating on the server segment and not on desktops, which IMHO is better suited for Windows.

      Makes just as much sense this way, as does yours. But hey, slashdot... Say something pro-Linux and your get moderated up, say anything anti-Linux and you get moderated into the ground.

  • Don't they know? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Ed Avis ( 5917 ) <ed@membled.com> on Monday April 28, 2003 @03:34PM (#5827779) Homepage
    Talk about 'last words'!

  • This Has Gotta Be a First (Score:3, Funny)

    by Homebrewed ( 154837 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @03:52PM (#5828030)
    What a surprise-- a well-written, usefull, and interesting article by Eugenia. Have pigs indeed spouted wings?

  • good analysis (Score:5, Informative)

    by ih8apple ( 607271 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @03:52PM (#5828036)
    Here's [extremetech.com] a good analysis of the various BSDs from last september. It gives a great background on the BSDs and it'll help explain why the BSDs should be re-united (or not.)

  • Getting started with FreeBSD (Score:5, Informative)

    by johnkp ( 178178 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @04:08PM (#5828221)
    FreeBSD is a great OS, if you get to know it. There's a lot of documentation available, and I thought I'd just share with you my experiences with FreeBSD.

    Which version to install.
    4.x or 5.0? 4.x is the stable series and 5.x is in development. It suffers of what's been called a chicken and egg problem described here [freebsd.org]. Think of 5.x as Linux 2.5 series. 5.1 when released(scheduled for release in june [freebsd.org])to will be the start of the new stable branch. If you want stability choose 4.x. Bleeding edge? 5.0.

    You can download the ISO's from here: [freebsd.org]

    You generally only need to download the first ISO

    Installation:
    The installer is text based, but dont let it scare you off. The partition layout is a little different than what you may be used to but it's all described in the FreeBSD handbook here [freebsd.org]

    The installation will leave you off with a pretty basic system and you're ready to install:

    Ports
    Ports is a very powerfull way of installing new programs and manage installed programs. You almost never run into dependency hell. A very powerfull tool to help manage ports is portupgrade. A short introduction is available here [onlamp.com] and to ports in general here [freebsd.org]

    Documentation.
    FreeBSD requires some time to get to know but the FreeBSD Handbook [freebsd.org], provides a great introduction to FreeBSD. Sites also worth a visit is Freshports.org [freshports.org] to keep you updated about new ports, and BSD dev center [onlamp.com]

    If you give FreeBSD an honest try it will pay off. Most of the applications avalible for Linux also compiles on FreeBSD, and in general I find it more easy to find documentation, thus making it more easy to maintain.

    • Re:Getting started with FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)

      by rutledjw ( 447990 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @07:20PM (#5830020) Homepage
      First off:

      I agree that - FreeBSD is a great OS, if you get to know it.

      I'm pushing it as a solution for our corporate web machines (DMZ level stuff). My company has made some good progress there. Six months ago, I was told in no uncertian terms by my boss "I never want to hear the 'L' word again. We'll pay big $$$ per Windows server and that's it." Asshole, he's going the way of the Tandy now...

      Here's my issue. Java support in BSD is spotty. I know the knee-jerk reaction is "And we care why?" but that's not appropriate. Server-side Java is very important for web-services and web-apps. Reading the article, it looks like they're working on it and ran out of money. My opinion is that until you get more native support from IBM (WebSphere), BEA (WebLogic) and some SDK developers (Sun, IBM, whomever) BSD isn't even an option.

      If this support was better, BSD would be a legitimate candidate for application-level boxes (instead of just web-level running apache) running the real guts of the apps & services. As it is...

      • Re:Getting started with FreeBSD (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @08:39PM (#5830536) Journal
        Java is quite stable. Its just not kosher meaining not certified. BSD users do not care as Linux users generally over such things since commercial support is alot more limited in the bsd world.

        For a decade FreeBSD has beaten the crap out of linux in almost every catagory untill smp and journaling filesystems during the last 2 years. THe reason why Linux is gaining momentium is because of things like certified java, distro's paying hardware makers to write drivers, and commerical apps.

        BSD hackers have elitism karma about them. For example read gregs comments in the interview about java and a journaling filesystem. They are very conservative and elitism. They need to think outside the box and focus on things like java for good reason. Another thing that might hurt FreeBSD is lack of hotswappable hardware support. Unix is still king in this area. Linux is about to take over during the next kernel release. More drivers for this are deffinetly needed.

        Its a different culture in bussiness then in hackerdom. Linux hackers at least figured this out back in the late 90's and made strides to fit in with bussinesses. Distro's really made the difference since they were bussiness oriented and acted as a liason to corporations. BSDI is the company to thank for java actually. Without them going to sun, FreeBSD would of had no java support at all.

        But the good part is FreeBSD is probably the most stable operating system out there due to its conservate development model. You can't have both ways.

        • BSD hackers have elitism karma about them. For example read gregs comments in the interview about java and a journaling filesystem. They are very conservative and elitism.

          Soft updates are just technically better than journaling, and the performance and stability shows that. With the advent of background FSCK in FreeBSD 5, nobody really has much reason to even want journaling.

          • Re:Getting started with FreeBSD (Score:4, Insightful)

            by Billly Gates ( 198444 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @03:30AM (#5832216) Journal
            "With the advent of background FSCK in FreeBSD 5, nobody really has much reason to even want journaling"

            Thats the problem.

            I have not done system administration for a couple of years but non journaled raid volumes take hours and not seconds to do FSCK. NT4 and Novel servers with close to a terrbyte of data before journaling came around took 4 to 6 hours to reboot after a crash. That costs tens of thousands of dollars in lost time. About a years salary for some of the IT workers.

            I have also seen FSCK unable to repair damaged ext2 filesystems after they became corrupted. Its not perfect and its only a last resort after shit really hits the fan.

            Were not talking about your home pc but a real enterprise environment. If the BSD developers want to move into this area they need to implement some of these features that Unix and Linux have. I can not convince my boss to use FreeBSD at work until it has this feature. Evem though FreeBSD is more stable then Linux. Also I do not get the argument of stability with journaling filesystems? Ever reliable os on the planet now has one without problems. It can not be that bad. All I know is in case of a power outage I absolutely need to have the disk working in seconds upon reboot without data corruption.

            You trade off performance for reliablity with soft updates. It seems soft updates are trying to implement some of the features of raw i/o which FreeBSD is lacking in that Linux and Unix have as well. Its conservative is making if fall behind even though it does guarantee its stability.

            soft-updates!= journaling.

            • non journaled raid volumes take hours and not seconds to do FSCK.

              Of course they do. But with UFS2, BACKGROUND FSCK means you don't have to wait.

              I have also seen FSCK unable to repair damaged ext2 filesystems after they became corrupted. Its not perfect and its only a last resort after shit really hits the fan.

              No, no, no, no... It's ext2 that is "not perfect". I've had ext2 partitions crap-out on me all the time, but NEVER ONCE has a UFS partition given me trouble. In fact, in the past 5 years or so

            • But, see, that's the point. You only need journalling to work around the limitations of the filesystem.

              UFS2 doesn't have those limitations, thus doesn't require journalling.

              • But, see, that's the point. You only need journalling to work around the limitations of the filesystem.

                UFS2 doesn't have those limitations, thus doesn't require journalling.

                But, see, that's not the point. Journalling is a good buzzword. Managment like buzzwords. You can't sell a manager an OS that isn't 100% buzzword compliant. Technical merit has absolutely nothing to do with it.

              • I would not call raw i/o and async i/o, limitations. Its required for any serious database work.

                UFS is not perfect. The unix haters manual mentions about the slowness and lack or reliabilty with it.

                If I am writing a large set of data and the power goes off even with synchronization on I still lose data. It wont corrupt whole partition tables like ext2 but it certainly would corrupt a database if the piece of data happened to be part of an index table.

                These posts just reconfirm the elitism in the BSD comm
      • Here's my issue. Java support in BSD is spotty.

        Actually it's pretty damn good. By a few accounts, Tomcat runs better on FreeBSD than on Linux. However, FreeBSD does not have official certification from Sun. Which means you have to build Java from source instead of using an official FreeBSD binary.

        And of course, the "official" binary for Linux works under FreeBSD.

      • Allow me to make a slight modification to your post:

        .NET support in Unix is spotty. I know the knee-jerk reaction is "And we care why?" but that's not appropriate. Server-side .NET is very important for web-services and web-apps. My opinion is that until you get more native support from Microsoft and some SDK developers Unix isn't even an option. If this support was better, Unix would be a legitimate candidate for application-level boxes (instead of just web-level running apache) running the real guts of

      • Want certified Java in FreeBSD?

        Here's where to donate money:

        http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/ [freebsdfoundation.org]

  • Is is just me... (Score:3, Informative)

    by BaldingByMicrosoft ( 585534 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @04:09PM (#5828237)
    ...or, in reading through this, does Greg 'groggy' Lehey come off as a bit of a prick?

    • Perhaps... but Greg 'groggy' is a great fella (Score:4, Informative)

      by ClarkEvans ( 102211 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @05:17PM (#5829000) Homepage
      does Greg 'groggy' Lehey come off as a bit of a prick?

      I've had many interactions with groggy, and he has been nothing but very professional and helpful.

  • What? No legal threats? (Score:5, Funny)

    by death to hanzosan ( 669177 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @04:10PM (#5828244) Homepage Journal
    "Finally, the FreeBSD core team has not been contacted by SCO representives directly."
    What? No pompous, threatening letters from SCO group? I've always thought that "BSD is dying" was just a huge troll, but if you're not even noteworthy enough to get unjustly harassed by SCO group, you're doing something wrong!
    • Just in case you didn't see the "Score 5, Funny" marker in the parent post, let me assure you that the BSDs have absolutely no reason to fear SCO. The BSDs are immune to this round of litigious warfare. Read here [daemonz.org]. Near the bottom of the page you will find this text:

      The lawsuit settlement also stipulated that USL would not sue any organization using 4.4BSD-Lite as the base for their system. So, all the BSD groups that were doing releases at that time, BSDI, NetBSD, and FreeBSD, had to restart their code

  • Why not use OpenBSD? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by use_compress ( 627082 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @04:12PM (#5828259) Journal
    Please excuse my ignorance, but why would I choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD? OpenBSD is more stable and secure. Why take the extreme step of using a *BSD distro if you're not goning to with the most secure one. If you value ease of use, why not go with some advanced flavor of Linux or even *GASP* the latest version of Win2K Server.

    • Re:Why not use OpenBSD? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ewan ( 5533 )
      Because OpenBSD still doesnt support SMP does it? Which makes it useful only for small machines.
      • I might be alone on this, but for most tasks (webservers esp.), you're better of spending the cash for SMP on another machine. Gets you redundancy if you do it right. Of course that's not really an option for heavily loaded backend DBMS but for frontend servers, we've found it to be the ideal solution!
      • Well, these "small machines" you speak of, make up 99% of servers. Hey, why use FreeBSD when it only has good support for i386 machines??? That means it's only good for "small machines"...

    • OpenBSD hasn't even moved to ELF format binaries yet. This means that development on binutils tools (such as ld, etc) has stalled - and as a result, certain applications (eg, avifile [sf.net]) simply won't compile under it.

      I like that OpenBSD in that it has been ported to more platforms than FreeBSD, but the years-old binutils is incredibly annoying.

    • There's a quote... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by devphil ( 51341 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @04:46PM (#5828642) Homepage


      I wish I could find this webpage again. (Google's not responding and I'm too busy to wait.) Anyhow, some guy had a great quote which IMHO accurately summed things up as far as free operating systems go. Went something like (in random order)

      FreeBSD is the most powerful OS.

      NetBSD is the most portable OS.
      OpenBSD is the most secure OS.
      Linux is the most popular OS.

    • Re:Why not use OpenBSD? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Baki ( 72515 )
      OpenBSD is more of a niche product concentrating 100% on security, at the cost of being somewhat archaic and sacrificing efficiency at times. Also it has much less ported software. It was split off of NetBSD which has many platforms to run on as its 'specialism'.

      FreeBSD OTOH has always targeted major platforms (i386 and alpha), also is secure but doesn't have the single focus just on that as OpenBSD, but is much more suitable as a general purpose (server or desktop) operating system.

      Unless you have a ver
    • From the extremetech article [extremetech.com] on the differences between the various BSDs:

      "FreeBSD has the largest development team, the largest user base, the largest number of ported applications, and the largest collection of active e-mail lists. It also has the best documentation..."

      It also points out that installation is easier. In short, you use FreeBSD because it has the richest feature set and greatest ease-of-use. You use OpenBSD when security is your first priority and you don't mind struggling a little bit.

      • I'll call bullshit on that!

        The OpenBSD man pages are far more complete than FreeBSD's, but if you are talking about non-man-page documents (although I don't know why you would) then you would be right... But hey, the more complicated the system, the more documentation is needed.

        The FreeBSD installer is many times more compicated and difficult than OpenBSD's. There are many times that you just can't get FreeBSD's installer to do quite what you want it to do.

        I will also say that OpenBSD has better ease-o
    • FreeBSD has many things that OpenBSD does not: good Mozilla support, OpenOffice, Java that works well, SMP, more ports, etc. Same goes in the other direction. Both have their fortes.

    • Re:Why not use OpenBSD? (Score:3, Informative)

      by zulux ( 112259 )
      Please excuse my ignorance, but why would I choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD?

      I use both - they both have their place. I tend to put OpenBSD on internet facing tasks(Apache, SMTP, DNS) , and FreeBSD on internal facing tasks (NFS, Samba, PostgrQL).

      The largest benifit of FreeBSD over OpenBSD is that they have the resouces to keep older versions well patched - you can pop FreeBSD on a server and know that you'll have about three years of patches waiting for you in the future. OpenBSD stops official support for
    • I tried them all...and FreeBSD is my favorite by far. OpenBSD has a very limited selection of ports. OpenBSD cannot run Mozilla, or Galeon, or Phoenix - any Mozilla-derived OS. Major show-stopped, as they say in the industry. NetBSD only has about 3000 ports compared to FreeBSD's 7000, which is a big difference in my book.

      FreeBSD kills on the platforms it supports, which is unfortunately limited, but fortunately expanding (check the BSD webpage). I'll try anything at least once, but atm, I won't use anyth

      • OpenBSD cannot run Mozilla, or Galeon, or Phoenix - any Mozilla-derived OS.

        I am posting this comment using Mozilla 1.3, from my Notebook, which has OpenBSD 3.3 installed.

        BTW, I would NOT call a gecko-based browser a "Mozilla-derived OS."
        • Did you install from the ports? I admit its been a while since I tried to do so, and that is great if the OpenBSD developers have worked out the issues, but when I typed "make install" in /usr/ports/www/galeon, I was greeted by a message saying the Mozilla port is broken. Searches on Google revealed I wasn't the only one having this problem, and some users even claimed to have been able to successfully run Mozilla - but not by simply installing from the ports. How did you do it?
          • No, the port simply hasn't been maintained by anyone. You will also want to note that programs like galeon do not work with OpenBSD/Mozilla yet.

            There are specific instructions for Mozilla 1.3 [ucalgary.ca], as well as Phoenix. [openbeer.it]
            • This is why I don't use OpenBSD:

              warning:

              this is a hack. mozilla works well, but it's compiled statically and one of my patches (patch-xpfe-bootstrap-mozilla-in) is a cheap work around. [...]. you first need some time and substantial disk space (~500Mb) and follow these simple steps...

              And of course, "No, the port simply hasn't been maintained by anyone.". Good news, FreeBSD's port is! :-)

              I'm sure OpenBSD has its uses (particularly on servers where client applications are unnecessary)...but its not f

    • I like OpenBSD myself, but FreeBSD does have it's advantages.

      It still supports a bit more hardware than OpenBSD... ACPI is not likely going to be able for OpenBSD for a number of years. A few WiFi cards don't work yet. Firewire is in FreeBSD 5 right now, while it'll probably be a couple releases (~1year) before OpenBSD's firewire support is finished. Java support leaves much to be desired on OpenBSD, if you need it. Some commerical products like Cylant Secure are not available for OpenBSD (but I like

  • porting FreeBSD to Java? (Score:4, Funny)

    by ceswiedler ( 165311 ) * <chris@swiedler.org> on Monday April 28, 2003 @04:27PM (#5828415)
    They're porting FreeBSD to Java? Wow, that's impressive. What OS do they run the JVM on?

  • The Debian guys are porting NetBSD (for x86 and alpha) and FreeBSD (for x86) for use with their existing Deiban system. Since both these are in their early stages the pages contain not much detailed information.

    Any comments or enlightening information would be great.

    A couple of more specific questions:

    1. Is it a joint project by FreeBSD and Debian teams?
    2. The Debian is basing their efforts on the already established ports of various applications on *BSD. eg. see the following from Debian's NetBSD based dist
    • For status of Debian's netBSD/FreeBSD based system:

      netBSD port status [debian.org]

      netBSD port status [debian.org]

      Answer to 2 specific questions:

      • [quote]Is it a joint project by FreeBSD and Debian teams?[/quote]

        I do not know exactly, ... but it looks like soley by Debian Developer developing user land software using only netBSD kernel.

      • [quote]The Debian is basing their efforts on the already established ports of various applications on *BSD. eg. see the following from Debian's NetBSD based distribuition's information page

  • All on one page (printer-friendly version) (Score:3, Informative)

    by Thing 1 ( 178996 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @05:16PM (#5828989) Journal
    For those of you with slow connections or who just hate clicking 10 times to read a story, here's the interview all on one page. [osnews.com]

    Enjoy!

  • The Glory of SunOS lives on (Score:5, Interesting)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Monday April 28, 2003 @09:20PM (#5830739) Homepage
    Back when I used to be called the Sun God (SunOS sysadmin 1989-1993), BSD/386 hadn't yet split, and Linux was in its infancy. A few years later, it was about time I get Unix onto my various Intel systems.

    The question was, Linux or FreeBSD?

    Today, the answer is a resounding both (FreeBSD runs perimeter firewall and fileservers, Linux runs my desktops), but back then, FreeBSD was the obvious answer.

    Why? Because it was the most like good old SunOS 4.1 you could get on an Intel chip. That's a good thing? Fuck yeah! Before Sun abandoned beloved Berkeley Unix for the nightmare that was, is, and will forever be System-V, they had an OS on a platform of choice. Not just choice, but prime (and I don't mean Pr1me, either, god help us).

    SunOS gave us a shockingly stable platform on the Motorola 68030 and SPARC chips. It provided some of the most stable TCP/IP around at the time. C-News (remember C-news?) rocked on it. C-News didn't have a prayer an the new-fangled AIX that we got to evaluate.

    Graphics? Fuck yes. I/O bandwidth? Fuck yes. xbattle at 1am after closing the terminal room? Fuck yes.

    And even then, it had lightweight processes, secure RPC, a super-clean dev interface, and other experimental features that we take for granted today.

    Solaris arrived shortly on the seen, I changed jobs, and SunOS is just a memory for most of us grizzled Sun Gods now. But you can still see a lot of SunOS in FreeBSD. I even remember when the -a option appeared in ifconfig on SunOS. It appeared in FreeBSD very shortly, too.

  • Linux is dying (Score:4, Funny)

    by 1g$man ( 221286 ) on Tuesday April 29, 2003 @04:34AM (#5832366)
    Linux sucks far worse than BSD.

    Just ask Google:

    BSD sucks [google.com] 28,400 results.
    Linux sucks [google.com] 228,000 results.

    It is quite clear that the users have spoken: Linux Sucks! Long Live BSD!

  • rcNG (Score:2)

    by fyonn ( 115426 )
    in the comments for the story, I noticed that wes peters replied to someone's comments and spent some time talking about rcNG, here is what he said:

    The booting sequence that seems to puzzle you is new to FreeBSD as well. It is a port of the NetBSD boot system, designed by Luke Mewburn. It is known as 'rcNG' in FreeBSD, and has quite a few desirable features. The main attribute of interest is that it allows subsystem or application designers to drop in a startup script that will be automatically sequenced

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