FreeBSD, Stealthy Open Source Project 291
zam4ever writes "Sean Michael Kerner has written an article on how FreeBSD has become a Stealth-Growth Open Source Project with various reasons outlined for FreeBSD's growth over the last years."
Re:Odd... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Odd... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:High load: Linux/BSD? (Score:5, Informative)
The tests were more 'tests' than 'real world'... create a million files and delete them, generate a million big numbers, shuffle great gobs of stuff around in memory, spawn/fork a million processes, etc, etc, etc. The BSDs took a shocking beating.
On the other hand, the BSDs, and FreeBSD in particular shows up in a *lot* of large and heavy duty installations, so maybe the tests weren't representative of the real world?
Re:Odd... (Score:3, Informative)
Netcraft queries uptime on servers periodicaly and uses fingerprinting to identify the OS.
Re:OS X Server part of FreeBSD count? (Score:3, Informative)
FreeBSD. And no, Netcraft reports OSX as
Enterprise Load (Score:5, Informative)
Re:FreeBSD is Undead (Score:1, Informative)
Re:High load: Linux/BSD? (Score:5, Informative)
(The trick for finding it was to use google instead of slashdot search. This search [google.com] found it at once.)
Re:High load: Linux/BSD? (Score:1, Informative)
I wouldn't think that's a ``trick.'' Slashdot search has proven itself to be entirely useless for any purpose.
Load average misleading... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What has FreeBSD got to offer? (Score:5, Informative)
it uses a much more monolithic kernel than Linux, making it lose some flexibility
Wrong. FreeBSD uses KLD modules just as extensively as Linux.
You wouldn't really want to use FreeBSD for an embedded system
I'm using FreeBSD on Soekris [soekris.com] net4801 boxes as router/postfix/imap/http/... low-power ADSL appliance.
Re:Java support is still lacking... (Score:4, Informative)
I don't believe (although I could well be wrong. Please correct me if I am) that it uses the new KSE in the 5.x branch, so it's still slower than on other platforms for multithreaded things.
Re:Load average misleading... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:FreeBSD is an OS, Linux isn't.... (Score:5, Informative)
As both a FreeBSD user and Gentoo user, I think the best description would be that Gentoo is BSD for Linux users. As a humourous aside, some friends have also started describing Gentoo as "ricenix: 2Fast2Optimized". ;-)
Gentoo is laid out fairly logically (no idea if it follows the Linux Standards Base [linuxbase.org] though). The main benefit is the total control you gain over your installation - much like you gain with BSD (hence, BSD for Linux users). Though it is achieved through the remarkable Portage [gentoo.org] package management system, vs FreeBSD which is a wholly maintained o/s, with a very large [freebsd.org] "ports" system.
The only thing that keeps me from using FreeBSD on my workstation is that I do play some games on Linux, and write software [mod3.net] to support game playing on a local Australian gaming network. For those that don't need the fluff that's supported on Linux (games being a primary example), almost everything else is available under FreeBSD. But to save you extra work, Gentoo is probably the way to go (easy to manage once installed through portage).
Re:$$$ Poured into Linux, puts it over the top (Score:5, Informative)
I had high hopes that Apple would contribute back to the community, but I don't think that has materialized like I had hoped.
Mac OS X uses the Mach kernel with a FreeBSD layer above it. This means that much of Apples work on the Mach kernel is irrelevant to FreeBSD. Mach is a microkernel, which was of course derived from BSD Unix, but it was forked so long ago that few similarities remain.
As far as stability and consistancey goes, only Debian-Stable approaches BSD
The BSD's also benefit from being a complete system, not a kernel with various userland stuff slapped together into 1001 distributions. This means that users running the development versions are using the same userland as the developers, and bugs can be shaken out far quicker.
Chris
Re:What has FreeBSD got to offer? (Score:3, Informative)
It's not about how small the kernel image gets, but how much RAM it typically uses. The net4801 is a rather powerful box with 128 MB RAM. You can easily fit a FreeBSD base system on a 512 MB CF card and operate without the need for swap. A stripped down kernel would take approx. 2.5 MB diskspace, but you can tune it down to nearly 800k if you really must. BTW, you can put a small Linux system on that box just the same. It just happens hat I used 5.2.1 because it supports PXE booting and network install out of the box.
Ignores biggest cause of *BSD's early slow growth (Score:5, Informative)
The article ignores the biggest obstacle that *BSD faced in its early days, which gave Linux a big head start: the AT&T lawsuit.
The FUD was flying and unlike today's situation with the SCO attacks, the open source model was not well known, and the idea of a free *BSD was not as established as Linux is today. The suit was eventually taken care of (AT&T had violated UCB's license terms, heh, heh) but the damage to *BSD's momentum was done, and Linux had taken a mindshare lead.
FreeBSD did quite well actually (Score:5, Informative)
Also if you notice the The socket benchmark, FreeBSD was optimized for when a process allocates in excess of 3500 sockets. Also in Measuring HTTP request latency you can see that there is optimization for when there have been in excess of 4000 requests. These types of clever optimizations are what sets FreeBSD apart.
Also keep in mind that absolute magnitude is not what is really important in these test results. The idea is that if your software scales well, you just get enough hardware to handle what you expect as worst case. The nice thing is that FreeBSD has some optimizations that are directed for scaling even better under some particular high load cases.
I would not say from these tests that FreeBSD performed much worse than Linux. In fact mmap syscalls are not actually used much except for mapping in dynamic libraries on many server type loads.
Re:$$$ Poured into Linux, puts it over the top (Score:2, Informative)
Linux net2 is not BSD net2 (Score:3, Informative)
asked Berkeley to use the BSD code under the GPL
and was turned down. Thus, the BSD code could not
be used.
It's obvious if you look at the old code. BSD has
a VAX heratage, where pages were 512 bytes and
memory was costly. Thus BSD used the mbuf, with a
linked list of little memory blocks. Linux used the
skbuf, which involved a nice linear chunk of memory
for better performance on a PC.
Re:$$$ Poured into Linux, puts it over the top (Score:3, Informative)
Mac OS X uses the Mach kernel with a FreeBSD layer above it. This means that much of Apples work on the Mach kernel is irrelevant to FreeBSD. Mach is a microkernel, which was of course derived from BSD Unix, but it was forked so long ago that few similarities remain.
Technically, Mac OS X's "xnu" kernel is not a microkernel with a BSD server process. The BSD emulation runs within the kernel address space for better performance.
Re:$$$ Poured into Linux, puts it over the top (Score:3, Informative)
As far as stability and consistancey goes, only Debian-Stable approaches BSD
parent post:
The BSD's also benefit from being a complete system, not a kernel with various userland stuff slapped together into 1001 distributions. This means that users running the development versions are using the same userland as the developers, and bugs can be shaken out far quicker.
It's odd that you'd point that out as a difference from Debian-Stable, since that's exactly what the Debian project, especially the stable distribution, does.
Re:Odd... (Score:2, Informative)