The Case for FreeBSD

essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."

Re:hmmm

[drinkypoo]

Some linux distributions are more fragmentary than others. Gentoo linux in particular tends to put things in the same place every time; /etc/conf.d for commandline and environment options, and /etc/ for that package's config files. On the other hand I've been mulling over the possibility of putting QNX on my laptop, which has only 128MB ram :)

Requiem for the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

// Please *don't* mod this up. It has [slashdot.org] already [slashdot.org] been [slashdot.org] done! [slashdot.org] Thx

... facts are facts. ;)

FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004) [internetnews.com]
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004) [netcraft.com]
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004) [slashdot.org]
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."

NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004) [slashdot.org]
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004) [netbsd.org]

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004) [eweek.com]
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004) [newsforge.com]

*BSD in general:
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004) [mi2g.com]
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;) [keltia.net]

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Don't focus on microbenchmarks.

[HEMI426]

Scott has several good points. FreeBSD still has the same level of polish, the same amount of "professional" feel as it always has and it's just as consistent as before. The documentation is fabulous, Netgraph can do a lot of neat tricks, GEOM handles storage pretty well, vendor support is improving, etc. However, I think the most important one is discovered if you read between the lines: "don't focus on microbenchmarks."

Re:Who cares about this battle?

[debilo]

I don't see why people are so worried about advocacy. If you're not making money, what is the difference?

Donations. Many (maybe most) FOSS developers don't get paid, this is especially true of FreeBSD (or any of the BSDs) since there's less corporate backing than with Linux. A more vocal advocacy will surely change that by drawing more companies' attention to FreeBSD (look what IBM does for Linux) and get them to support the development, and a larger userbase will surely increase much needed donations, be that money or hardware.

Continue to refine the thing and get what you want out of it, and if other people don't get it, who loses?

The FreeBSD community loses, for the reasons laid out above. The more attention FreeBSD draws to itself, the more donations will flow, the more corporate backing they will get, the quicker native drivers will be written, etc. etc. Advocacy is important.

Re:To be fair, 5.x has been botched

[bcrowell]

It has taken the FreeBSD team literally years to get 5.x to an acceptable stage, which is reminiscent of the 3.x issues. Contrary to popular myth, FreeBSD goes through sustained periods in which the latest release is a very weak product.
Sure, there have apparently been a lot of very difficult problems with SMP in 5.x. But why is that an issue that we should be concerned about as users? Personally, I don't use SMP, and 5.3 has worked great for me as a desktop system. If 5.x doesn't work for you, keep running 4.x, which is very stable, and is going to be supported for a long time to come.

Coincidentily

[defile]

I just posted an article that's been sitting around on my hard disk for awhile now (I'm testing out nanoblogger). It's about how I'd improve LAMP, but it ended up becoming an advertisement for FreeBSD.

Have a look [bacarella.com] if you can stand an honest critique of Linux (I love and run Linux on everything, so don't accuse me of FreeBSD shilling).

Re:Why?

[hugo_pt]

6) no root exploits every month 7) decent codebase 8) organized filesystem layout 9) commits to the OS are closely monitored and quality-assured, unlike linux 10) an OS as a whole, not just a kernel.

Re:Where's the Java

[ririarte]

Yes, but there is a very dedicated team that manages to produce a very high quality J2SDK implementation, even if the installation involves compiling Java from scratch. 1.4.2-p7 runs a production Tomcat site like a dream here. I am very happy with OS X as as desktop OS, but i would not rate Apple's SDK as highly as FreeBSD's one, YMMV, of course. BTW, nobody knows if Apple intends to ship a 64bit JVM with Tiger, au contraire, FreeBSD's Java team has an already working, if early one, for AMD64.

--------Quick recipe to get up and running with Java under FreeBSD ------

a) Make sure to be running a modular kernel OR a kernel with linux compatibility enabled (Compile phase only)
b) Read http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-java/
c) Make sure to have a relatively recent ports tree
d) cd /usr/ports/java/jdk14
e) make install
f) follow instructions.

GEOM IS BLACK MAGIC

[QuietRiot]

Where are all the geom HOWTOs?

The linked man page is "tasty" n'all, but details on implementing such magical wonders, until recently, have been rather scarce.

This man page [freebsd.org] is better than the one linked to in the original post. There's also some information from committer (read: major contributor to ggate [freebsd.org]) Pawel Jakub Dawidek in Poland [freebsd.pl].

Not that the info isn't there now, right under man, but for a while it was all very vague.

When searching about all that is BSD, don't forget Google's special google.com/bsd [google.com] section.

You can also search the freebsd-geom [freebsd.org] mail list archives to learn more.

geom-gate [kerneltrap.org] sure looks nifty! [freebsd.org] It's akin to block-level NFS (though that's most likely an extremely oversimplified view). All the fun things you can do with geom you can do over your network. Need worldwide distributed, encrypted, multi-level RAID? Go right ahead!

Pretty slick. We'll be hearing more about this.....

Geom howtos

[dougnaka]

Root software raid via geom. http://people.freebsd.org/~rse/mirror/ [freebsd.org]

And the short version of the same thing, but using a recovery CD instead of a live system http://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/24/freebsd-howt o-gmirror-system/ [toldme.com]

Kind of a coincidence that this gets posted today on /., as I've spent most of the morning setting up geom on a new 5.3 box, had used Vinum in the past on 4.x, and have loved FreeBSD for servers since 2.2.5

Re:hmmm

[DrSkwid]

OpenBSD installs quickest, and that includes X & Apache

Re:hmmm

[DrSkwid]

getting lynx installed is a real pain

# cd /usr/ports/www/lynx
# make install

or perhaps you'd prefer a pre-compiled binary

# pkg_add ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packa ges-stable/All/lynx-2.8.5.tgz

n.b. you'll have to remove your own spaces though =)

Re:zerg

[Lord Omlette]

I think that's the problem. 5.0 cries for mommy under even moderate load, unless SMP is disabled... which sort of defeats the purpose. When version #s go up, things are supposed to get better.

Maybe NetBSD is sparse on features compared to FreeBSD, but NetBSD 2.0 was an improvement over previous versions of NetBSD, at least!

Re:More people need to try and use FreeBSD

[Neil]

The original vi wasn't by Sun. It was written by Bill Joy at Berkeley. The command-line version of the editor, ex, was in the very first "Berkeley Software Distribution". The first vi for display terminals was in 2BSD. (source: Twenty Years of Berkeley Unix [oreilly.com], Marshall Kirk McKusick's chapter in the O'Reilly Open Sources [oreilly.com] book).

The vi that FreeBSD uses these days is nvi, a "bug-for-bug compatible" rewrite of the original, which was produced for 4.4BSD (presumably the original vi/ex was "encumbered", derived in some way from Bell Labs Seventh Edition Unix sources?).

Re:zerg

[hawk]

I think that's the problem. 5.0 cries for mommy under even moderate load, unless SMP is disabled...

???

I've had this machien running SMP 5.0 for over three years, running 24/7.

I have no clue what you're talking about. Sure, mozilla can be slow to respond when the load is at about 30 or 50, but X remains crisp.

And yes, I have kept it at double-digit loads for days on end while still working on other things.

hawk