FreeBSD, Stealthy Open Source Project

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."

High load: Linux/BSD?

[LaserLyte]

Quandt also contends that FreeBSD is not currently on the same level as Linux when it comes to supporting heavy enterprise workloads...

I was almost certain this paragraph was going to end praising FreeBSD over Linux, and I was slightly suprised to see this was not the case. FreeBSD's ability to cope with extremely high workloads is often cited as one of the reasons to use it over Linux in such environments.

However, I don't remember ever seeing any evidence of this, except that FreeBSD has proven itself time and time again on some of the largest, busiest internet sites. It'd be interesting to see how the two compared side-by-side in a real production environment. Perhaps someone can convince Yahoo to switch to Linux for a day :)

</ BSD advocacy >

I just set up a 5.2.1-RELEASE server.

[geminidomino]

I know for damn sure I'm one of those who's gonna seriously love having a 5-STABLE branch. :) Damn tho, they need to stop talking to Linux people for these articles. I'm sick of hearing the GPL partyline.

Odd...

[dotslashconfig]

FreeBSD is used on over 95 of the top 100 servers (greatest average uptime). FreeBSD is tested and true on the server-side in a way few linux distrobutions can claim. The closest any distro has come to actually matching reliability with FreeBSD is Debian. But even then, FreeBSD is still light-years ahead. I'm not really sure what inspired this article, but a simple google search reveals that BSD is the route most major corporations are taking with servers. So while I do appreciate GNU/GPL support, try to be less blatant. ;)

Re:High load: Linux/BSD?

[geminidomino]

However, I don't remember ever seeing any evidence of this, except that FreeBSD has proven itself time and time again on some of the largest, busiest internet sites.

It's purely anecdotal, but back in 2002, the webhosting company I was admining for had two boxes dedicated to slashcode sites. They were brand new with the latest updates for FreeBSD 4-STABLE(I think) on one and RedHat on the other. We hosted some high-profile sites, and these poor servers took a MASSIVE beating. The RedHat box went casters-up when the system load hit somewhere around 7. FreeBSD stayed up (admittedly, slow as hell) even when the load peaked at 22. I switched sides then and have been a loyal Daemon worshipper ever since. ;)

Community is key

[wombatmobile]

Though he acknowledged that a FreeBSD license can be simple to deal with, he thinks the GPL (define) license, under which the Linux kernel is licensed, fosters a better sense of community.

Right [216.239.57.104].

Re:Ken Brown: Don't Read This Without Assistance

[Anonymous Coward]

Would be funny if some slashdot admin could do a grep for adti.net in their server logs and post the results...

Re:So Stealthy....

[geminidomino]

Eh, let the Linux fanboys talk all they want, as long as my mailserver keeps chugging away. ;)

OS X Server part of FreeBSD count?

[Anonymous Writer]

over one million new domains were hosted on FreeBSD over the last year

Since OS X (Darwin) is based on FreeBSD, does this mean that the Netcraft figures [netcraft.com] counted OS X Server hosts as FreeBSD?

Re:Odd...

[molarmass192]

Your Google search is wrong. I have never seen or dealt with a FreeBSD box at use at any of the Global 500 corp data centers I've visited / worked with. The breakdown is more like there's a whole lot of Solaris, a whole lot of Win2K (groans), a fair amount of AIX and HP-UX, and occasionally Linux (mostly RHEL) in use at major corporations. Understand that this isn't a reflection of how good FreeBSD is, it's simply that major corporations appear to be more interested in support contracts super human uptime guarantees than the quality of the OS in place. Granted, I haven't been to every data center on the planet, nor been told what every box is running (some of these places football field size) , but I've been to A LOT throughout North America and Europe over the years I've been doing this gig. The types of places I'd expect to find FreeBSD are the smaller, less bureaucratic data centers and ISPs where there are a handful of guys with free reign of the place.

Re:High load: Linux/BSD?

[Alioth]

I host a site for a pilot's union. Around bid time they all hammer a heavily DB oriented application with many, many reloads.

The load average on the system regularly gets over 50 during the last hour or so of the bid period.

It runs RedHat Enterprise Server. It's not fallen over once.

Re:Odd...

[steve_l]

yes, corporates are stuck in Windows land. One of their goals is to run fancy app server stuff, and for that -be it ASP, ASP.net or Java based- means windows, and historically a commercial unix (Sun, HP, IBM), with Linux a late entrant.

now that BSD does Java, things may change.

But outside the corporate, big sites like IMDB and Apache run FreeBSD, as far as I know.

Re:FreeBSD is Undead

[Anonymous Coward]

Well BSD is in a lot of strange places. Recently the company I work for aquired an eCabinet - which runs FreeBSD. The sales guy will usually say that it runs Unix, the tech guys who set up the thing say the thing runs Linux, but no one seems to actually KNOW that it runs FreeBSD. The same thing happens at my company where people think many of our servers are Linux or Unix (etc) but don't seem to know what BSD is. That's fine, it takes too much effort to explain the difference, and doesn't really matter what they know. I admin the servers, they get the reliable service and that's all that matters.

I think half the time FreeBSD admins don't say anything because they don't want to go on and on explaining what FreeBSD is. It's bad enough explaining what Linux is even though Linux has gained a lot of recognition.

More open license rules

[Anonymous Coward]

Did anyone else pick up from the article that BSD was gaining vs Linux because it did not have the GPL legal baggage?

Re:FreeBSD is Undead

[cpghost]

Isn't it actually funny that the ports system is a pure userland framework that has nothing inherently FreeBSD-ish? It could just as well be adopted by Linux distros, but right now, only gentoo [gentoo.org] did it.

One of the best features of FreeBSD is in my experience the ease with which you can update the whole system with a simple cvsup and recompile. No need to go hunting for N utilities and libraries all over the Net, just to get the sources to a base system. It's in the CVS repo, ready to be grabbed.

The CVS repository is also a great resource if you are interested in the development history of the system. Not only the kernel, but the whole system. If Linux (as an OS, not only a kernel) had a unified CVS just like the BSDs right from the start, it would have been much easier to debunk TSG/SCO's myths and FUD.

It's FreeBSD's biggest advantage

[swb]

I was a big RedHat/Linux user until about 5 or so years ago. I got sick of:

* The constantly changing startup environment and filesystem layout. I started typing "evolving", but that implies it was small changes for the better, not wholesale changes which weren't always for the worse.

* Kernel upgrades became a big nuisance, requiring me to track down a whole bunch of userland applications that needed updating for the kernel. to be usable (psutils, for one). Why the kernel and key kernel applications aren't packaged together is beyond me.

* The installer became more and more piggish, adding X11 elements even when I specifically told it not to. The portions were hard to remove, since they almost always were snared in RPM dependencies.

* RPM itself wasn't bad, but what DID drive me nuts about binary packages was the total absence of build documentation. So many UNIX applications have significant build-time options which are never documented in RPM. SRPM helped, but it was still an annoyance.

FreeBSD just seems how it *should* be. The filesystem and startup environment isn't static, but doesn't make wholesale changes. The entire system is rebuildable from source, applications are transparently and easily buildable from source thanks to ports.

FreeBSD's installer could be improved, though. sysinstall needs to be reinvented and perhaps have picobsd merged into it. I'd love to be able to install a variable-sized FreeBSD for firewall or appliance-type installs.

Re:High load: Linux/BSD?

[TheBracket]

I had a virus-scanning mail gateway hit a load of around 90 a while ago, running FreeBSD 4-STABLE (we were seeing how far we could push it before putting it into production); amazingly enough, at load 90 I could still login and tweak Qmail's settings. We primarily use FreeBSD for hosting at work, it takes a beating day-in, day-out - and is solid as a rock.

Re:Java support is still lacking...

[rycamor]

Those are the current *binary packages*. In other words, this is what IS directly supported by Sun, allowing for an easy binary install. Whereas, if you want 1.4.2, you can get that, but you have to follow a few more steps, as mentioned by "APurplePolarBear" above. (and you have to wait through an interminable compile time -- fortunately, FreeBSD compiles like a champ, still handling its other processes, even for the most demanding portions of a compile)

BSD Growth

[vga_init]

I don't doubt for a moment that BSD adoption is growing, and to me it just seems like a matter of course; the development of the system, the machines people are putting them on, and shifts in the market just seems to point in that direction.

Consider this: computers are getting more and more popular; they are being integrated into more aspects of our lives than they ever were before, and now it's standard for people to own them. Another interesting combination is that personal computers have gotten cheaper and more powerful at the same time.

Of course, none of this is a new development; people could have and were saying these sorts of things over a decade ago, but the good thing is that it's still true.

What's newer is the fact that open source seems to have escalated since then; every day it keeps becoming a bigger and bigger deal. More large companies are working with it than ever before, development has increased, and code maturity levels are always rising. A linux system installed today is something really different than what I started out using only three years ago.

Okay, so what does this all mean, and what does it have to do with BSD? Well, nobody will deny that linux is the big thing, and, while linux gets most of the press, BSD has always been around, and BSD is always being further developed and improved upon at a rate not at all unlike linux. What's good for one open source software product is good for another, and it seems that BSD is chugging right along with the rest of them.

I don't have data like Netcraft does, and it's a mistake to make hard conclusions based on pseronal experience, but I've spent a bit of time on the #freebsd channel on freenode, and from that alone I see FreeBSD adoption/development taking place. Any time I go in there (the channel is a little crowded), there is always somebody there who has questions about FreeBSD; some of them are curious about it, some are trying to install it for the first time, some are new to their systems and need help getting started with a particular task, and some are a little bit more experienced but are still pressing forward with something new. These people are always there. Talking to some of them, you'd find that most were people who had been using linux and started using FreeBSD after hearing good things about it or simply developing an interest in something new.

When people aren't talking about learning FreeBSD, they are talking about projected development, new features, etc. And this is all very apt because new developments in this modern operating system have proliferated (just look at all the changes in the FreeBSD new technology release).

I can imagine how people might consider BSD to be something traditionally "old-fashioned", but to me it's about as shiny and new as linux, and I regard both systems with equal fervor.

Re:You're pretty biased

[Anonymous Coward]

I never said FreeBSD was as secure as OpenBSD, what I said is that it is far more secure than Linux, which is true, and strongly supported by the facts.

Oh good, sounds like you've researched it well then. Please share.

And no, I don't want a link or two to a couple of vulnerabilities, and a story about how you've "had this FreeBSD server that saved the day crap crap blah blah".

I expect you have some comprehensive and unbiased statistics backed up with sources. Thanks.