Facebook Is Hiring To Make Linux Networking Better Than FreeBSD

[stevenc]

BSDs have been more often used than Linux as the basis of enterprise firewall, switch and router products, at least until recently. It could have been largely due to the license, but it does mean the BSDs would have received much more attention and development effort to help it really excel in those areas.

Perhaps the IPv6 and IPSEC implementations work better under heavy load, or its device drivers for newer hardware like 10GbE NICs are more mature?

Or maybe FreeBSD has specific features of interest such as the PF firewall (which possibly scales better than Linux netfilter), or CARP (both from OpenBSD).

But I don't see what the problem would be to keep on using FreeBSD at the network edge/core (layer 2/3), and Linux on application servers, if each is the best tool for the job.

[Guest]

As opposed to all the troll bullshit you post.

Keep dreaming fanboy. I usually write about facts and people like you write about their imaginations.

[gens]

Keep dreaming fanboy. I usually write about facts and people like you write about their imaginations.

and yet i am to see a fact from you

[Guest]

and yet i am to see a fact from you

Check Linux and BSD server market share.

[Sergio]

Check Linux and BSD server market share.

Can't sleep these days, huh?

[jimbohale]

Can't sleep these days, huh?

Who cares about market share. Facebook certainly doesn't. Facebook has to deal with an insane number of clients with extremely low latency. They've had to make modifications to things like memcache before, and they've made modifications to the UDP stack on the Linux kernel before to remove some of the CPU usage. They're just doing it again to fit their needs. Considering they're likely the only company besides google who fits that description, but even then Google does things very differently. FreeBSD has always been better for me than Linux for networking and filesystems, in that while it might not have all of the features Linux has, it gets the job done very predictably and in some use cases easier. For NAS's in particular, FreeBSD has been so solid for me where as Linux (Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, etc) have all not been as performant for me. Obviously I'm not saying that Linux sucks, I'm saying that Linux can be better in this case as it's obviously not perfect, and so why not attempt to fix the problem.

[david_lynch]

FreeBSD has always been better for me than Linux for networking and filesystems, in that while it might not have all of the features Linux has, it gets the job done very predictably and in some use cases easier

Here's what a Facebook engineer just said on that subject:

Chris Mason started off the session by noting that, at his employer (Facebook), Linux is used anywhere that it is faster than FreeBSD ? which, he said, is everywhere. Facebook tends to keep its working sets in RAM, so its workloads tend to be CPU-, memory-, or network-bound. Performance is an important concern there, so the company maintains extensive metrics of how its systems and applications are performing.

[jimbohale]

Here's what a Facebook engineer just said on that subject:

Chris Mason started off the session by noting that, at his employer (Facebook), Linux is used anywhere that it is faster than FreeBSD ? which, he said, is everywhere. Facebook tends to keep its working sets in RAM, so its workloads tend to be CPU-, memory-, or network-bound. Performance is an important concern there, so the company maintains extensive metrics of how its systems and applications are performing.

and yet here we are, with Facebook attempting to hire someone to make Linux better. I suspect that just because it is "faster" that doesn't mean it's better. I think that there are some core issues that they want to sort out, and when they do 3.19 or 3.20 (whenever its merged) will be a good kernel. I get significantly better performance on FreeBSD than I do with Linux on 10GbE connections for some reason, and I think that's the sort of thing they are targeting.

[profoundWHALE]

Who cares about market share.

The large corporations and businesses that have servers. If I remember correctly, Netflix has FreeBSD servers. Right there you have about 10-20% of internet traffic.

[david_lynch]

and yet here we are, with Facebook attempting to hire someone to make Linux better. I suspect that just because it is "faster" that doesn't mean it's better. I think that there are some core issues that they want to sort out, and when they do 3.19 or 3.20 (whenever its merged) will be a good kernel. I get significantly better performance on FreeBSD than I do with Linux on 10GbE connections for some reason, and I think that's the sort of thing they are targeting.

The statements that "Linux is the fastest" and "We want to make it faster" are not mutually exclusive