Netflix Continues Experiencing Great Performance In Using FreeBSD For Their CDN

[Michael_S]

Not really. Sony uses BSD for the PS4. Apple uses BSD as a base for a lot of their stuff. They make some of the most popular devices in the world.

Well, I think aht0 addressed that with his (/her/their) post. Sony and Apple use FreeBSD because they can sell products that run modified versions of the software without being required to release changes upstream.

Netflix is streaming a service, not selling products, so even with Linux they wouldn't have to upstream any of the work they do. So absent solid evidence to the contrary, it's likely they have legitimate technical reasons to prefer FreeBSD and the decision isn't based on license.

I still don't like the situation. Not because of Netflix, but because of Apple and Sony and companies like them. They take as much as they want and give back only when they feel like it. Granted, even the GPL isn't a silver bullet here, with all of the proprietary firmware and GPL violations in every single damn Android product.

[F.Ultra]

Well, I think aht0 addressed that with his (/her/their) post. Sony and Apple use FreeBSD because they can sell products that run modified versions of the software without being required to release changes upstream.

Netflix is streaming a service, not selling products, so even with Linux they wouldn't have to upstream any of the work they do. So absent solid evidence to the contrary, it's likely they have legitimate technical reasons to prefer FreeBSD and the decision isn't based on license.

I still don't like the situation. Not because of Netflix, but because of Apple and Sony and companies like them. They take as much as they want and give back only when they feel like it. Granted, even the GPL isn't a silver bullet here, with all of the proprietary firmware and GPL violations in every single damn Android product.

They do however give the boxes that are described in the article to the ISPs and Netflix have on their past presentations talked about them specifically avoiding GPL in order to not make that specific instance an issue (them being a distributor in this case).

Their FreeBSD TCP/IP stack is heavily modified and far from all patches are sent upstream (perhaps all will be in the future but as of now not all are, and they continue to patch it) so the BSD license is not insignificant.

[F.Ultra]

Is 90 Gb/s upper limit? If it is not it sounds rather like a failure. On the other side if there is hardware offloading it doesn't say much about system performance.

90Gbps was only one specific example from their presentation, they have been talking about 150Gbps on other boxes back in 2017. And we are also talking about not only shuffling data around but full schema of: read from disk -> perform TLS encryption -> send to customer.

[cybertraveler]

AFAIK, the FreeBSD network stack has higher throughput than Linux's because it manages to eschew some buffer copying (zero-copy).

Some time ago there was some work in the Linux network stack towards also doing that (haven't tracked that development, don't know if it's still a work in progress).

Ooh, interesting. I love the idea of zero-copy. I really like the idea of zero copy graphics with Wayland + Intel embedded graphics. Your application can place some graphics in memory and that exact memory region can later be used by the graphics chip. Super efficient. Makes sense that it would be perused for networking too.

[tuxd3v]

AFAIK, the FreeBSD network stack has higher throughput than Linux's because it manages to eschew some buffer copying (zero-copy).

Some time ago there was some work in the Linux network stack towards also doing that (haven't tracked that development, don't know if it's still a work in progress).

Yeah I remember that,
And I think something went upstream, but don´t know its quality..

But even with that, GNU/Linux distributions are starting to become bloated..

[spirit]

cloudflare use linux with nginx for the cdn for example, it's not too difficult to get 90-150gb/s with videos. (with big network packets)

it's difficult to have millions pps and handle ddos. (we have dpdk, but also XDP now on linux)

[aht0]

Well, I think aht0 addressed that with his (/her/their) post. Sony and Apple use FreeBSD because they can sell products that run modified versions of the software without being required to release changes upstream.

Netflix is streaming a service, not selling products, so even with Linux they wouldn't have to upstream any of the work they do. So absent solid evidence to the contrary, it's likely they have legitimate technical reasons to prefer FreeBSD and the decision isn't based on license.

I am me, single not plural and male. And yeah, agree

AFAIK, the FreeBSD network stack has higher throughput than Linux's because it manages to eschew some buffer copying (zero-copy).
Some time ago there was some work in the Linux network stack towards also doing that (haven't tracked that development, don't know if it's still a work in progress).

I remember reading about some specific technical reason ages a go, could not track it down and thus weren't going to bring it up, so thank you.

Is 90 Gb/s upper limit? If it is not it sounds rather like a failure. On the other side if there is hardware offloading it doesn't say much about system performance.

Add 10% overhead, should make 100Gb/s

[Wojcian]

Add 10% overhead, should make 100Gb/s

Yes, F.Ultra already answered this.

[Wojcian]

Here are some benchmarks made by an ex-Red Hat employee. FreeBSD was performing quite poorly in some of the scenarios. It was even freezing under high load which seems to be in contrary to Haxor claims in another thread. It was pointed out VirtIO drivers which were used for a few of the tests could be a culprit. However, on a physical interface results didn't drastically change. That's why I found those benchmarks quite interesting. It also seems FreeBSD have higher syscall overhead. If someone has similar up to date benchmarks it will be nice to share them.

https://medium.com/@matteocroce/linux-and-freebsd-networking-cbadcdb15ddd

[skeevy420]

They do however give the boxes that are described in the article to the ISPs and Netflix have on their past presentations talked about them specifically avoiding GPL in order to not make that specific instance an issue (them being a distributor in this case).

Their FreeBSD TCP/IP stack is heavily modified and far from all patches are sent upstream (perhaps all will be in the future but as of now not all are, and they continue to patch it) so the BSD license is not insignificant.

Exactly and why I didn't go into ethics about it. Some use BSD and don't contribute back, some do. Luckily Netfilx does.