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FreeBSD Can Now Be Built From Linux/macOS Hosts, Transition To Git Continues

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  • #21
    Originally posted by Volta View Post

    It depends what do you mean by competitive? On desktops they're lagging behind badly. The same goes for HPC, mainframes, networking market share.
    If they were lagging behind so "badly", it wouldn't be possible for a commercial company to dust them off and use it. And yet this happens a fair amount.
    The fact that many users who are new to open-source platforms think FreeBSD is just a Linux distro is really a testimony for how similar they both are in terms of usability and functionality. I just find FreeBSD "cleaner".

    As for market share, going by that, we would assume that Linux is inferior to Windows on the desktop market? Would you really say that was true? I certainly wouldn't for FreeBSD.

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    • #22
      Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
      A good amount of "Git technology" is just SSH
      clown, ssh is one of many git transports, git can work completely without ssh
      Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
      . This is very much developed and improved from the BSD camp.
      and nobody uses it. portable ssh is developed by other people
      Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
      Also there are different Git clients (not-GPL). Such as Got or Git9
      with different missing features
      Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
      GPL license is incompatible with many other licenses by definition. This isn't a bad thing.
      moron, it's its whole point
      Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
      Perhaps the slight unorganisation of Linux is to blame for its relatively slow development.
      what non-imaginary os is being developed faster?
      Originally posted by kpedersen View Post
      Yes, BSD might be slow in development too but for the fraction of the developers, it really is much faster per contributor.
      additional developers can sometimes slow total development speed. you should educate yourself better.

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      • #23
        Originally posted by timofonic View Post
        It's very funny they need GPL software to improve their infraestructure.

        It's funny they need Linux to get more software to run and drivers.

        What's the reason for FreeBSD to exist then? To be the shadow of Linux?
        And even more funny that Haiku uses FreeBSD drivers. So they're actually using Linux drivers, but based on FreeBSD changes.

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        • #24
          Originally posted by kpedersen View Post

          If they were lagging behind so "badly", it wouldn't be possible for a commercial company to dust them off and use it. And yet this happens a fair amount.
          I didn't say it lags in everything. In networking, storage they may be on pair and maybe Netflix prefers to 'abuse' BSD licensed code. In other things it's not so widely used.

          The fact that many users who are new to open-source platforms think FreeBSD is just a Linux distro is really a testimony for how similar they both are in terms of usability and functionality. I just find FreeBSD "cleaner".
          Only the ones who never tried it, but the same can be said about Arch or some other Linux distributions. They're nowhere near Fedora or Ubuntu when comes to user friendliness. The hardware support is also lacking.

          As for market share, going by that, we would assume that Linux is inferior to Windows on the desktop market? Would you really say that was true? I certainly wouldn't for FreeBSD.
          Linux is inferior to Windows when comes to available software. However, when Linux (or *BSD) fit their needs they're superior of course.

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          • #25
            Originally posted by pal666 View Post
            <kiddie insult here>, ssh is one of many git transports, git can work completely without ssh
            Many of the others don't support encryption or security, so they are simply not used. Https is rarely used internally for this because you need certificates and the ACME systems involve exposing the repo.

            Originally posted by pal666 View Post
            and nobody uses it. portable ssh is developed by other people
            You mean this?: https://www.openssh.com/portable.html

            You might want to check who owns that domain

            Portable ssh is ported by other people (including many OpenBSD developers) but the core code is still 99% from the OpenBSD community... You do understand that right?
            Can you please respond with a simple confirmation of "yes" or "no" so I can educate you how software works. I am also fairly convinced at this point that you need a little more background understanding before something like the GPL vs BSD licenses can be discussed with you.

            Originally posted by pal666 View Post
            what non-imaginary os is being developed faster?
            Per developer, as I said, many BSDs. But you can re-read text in the forums by scrolling up or clicking on previous pages.

            Please consult the following example: https://helpdeskgeek.com/wp-content/...pg.optimal.jpg
            Last edited by kpedersen; 22 October 2020, 12:55 PM.

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            • #26
              Originally posted by Volta View Post
              The hardware support is also lacking.
              Though I honestly tend to agree with you about the other stuff (though personally find it a much smaller gap than one might suspect), this one is where I believe otherwise.

              If you look at a distro like Ubuntu, their i.e Beagle Bone Black support is not part of the OS. You cannot download an .img file from the official site for example. Yes, you can certainly find a distro that does support it or a hack of Ubuntu, however then it isn't entirely the same OS. So Linux as an umbrella supports loads of stuff but individual distros actually have fairly weak support (I think Debian is the better one). But contrast this to OpenBSD's platform list or even better; NetBSD's: https://www.netbsd.org/ports/ (yes, I do understand that some of them "barely" run. But this is at least a better starting point than nothing).

              Also for older hardware, Linux is not able to maintain these well enough. I am also not entirely sure why, in some ways I suspect pressure from many of the companies sponsoring work rather than passion from the developers.

              I don't value anything from the Steam DRM service so possibly this is where quite a few guys are stuck to proprietary operating systems or amd64 Linux.
              Last edited by kpedersen; 22 October 2020, 12:19 PM.

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              • #27
                Originally posted by skeevy420 View Post
                Goddamn. And here I was thinking this was good news.

                I also get a kick out of the GPL comments in threads like these. It's like they don't realize how much MIT and BSD licensed code is in the kernel; which has always made me wonder what the legalities of tweaking Linux kernel code that is more permissive than GPL. Do companies technically have to release those changes too?
                When you distribute a build of the kernel, anyone you distribute it to has a legal right to get access to the entirety of the source that went into that build, in the form the developers prefer to develop it in, under the GPL. They then have the legal right to share that source with anyone they want under the GPL.

                That's how the GPL works.

                2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
                • a) [...]
                • b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
                • c) [...]
                [...]

                3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:
                • a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
                • b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,
                • c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)
                The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable.

                -- https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html
                Last edited by ssokolow; 22 October 2020, 02:49 PM.

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                • #28
                  Originally posted by uid313 View Post
                  Is FreeBSD or Linux better?
                  I guess Linux is much better for gaming and graphics and desktop.
                  But is FreeBSD better at anything? Does it have any advantages?
                  Plenty, I'll list a few things it does better than Linux:

                  In-kernel audio mixing, ie. lower latency than PulseAudio.
                  It is the reference implementation of TCP/IP, its network stack performs better, and is used in networking research (eg. NETMAP).
                  ZFS fully integrated into the kernel and various userland tools, working out of the box.
                  Excellent documentation.
                  Strong binary compatibility within each major release, including within the kernel.
                  It is an operating system that DOESN'T UNNECESSARILY CHANGE, ie. no re-learning everything all the time like on Linux, your skills are preserved.
                  No systemd.
                  pkg is significantly faster than apt/yum (at least in my experience).
                  The ports system is so good it was widely copied by eg. Gentoo.
                  A system that was designed and engineered, not hacked.
                  Beautiful, clear source code.

                  Otherwise:
                  NVidia always supported FreeBSD.
                  Wine works well, and many Linux binaries run.

                  In some ways Linux was/is the one behind, eg. Linux's eventfd/timerfd were playing catchup to FreeBSD's kqueue added in 1994.

                  It is said, the mediocre developers go to Linux, but the best of the best go to BSD .

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                  • #29

                    Originally posted by Volta View Post

                    It's hard to take people like you seriously. On the other hand Linux powers entire YouTube, Google and Facebook, so your Netflix example is weak. Fanaticism aside, they did a great move by moving to git. It will probably noticeably improve their development.
                    Hes right, there were even benchmarks that prove this. Apart from GPL, the main reason that Netflix used BSD is under very high load their networking stack is much more mature.

                    Note that this was 6 years ago and Linux copied over the advantages that FreeBSD had on the network stack so the difference shouldn't be that large now. Right now DragonFlyBSD apparently has the best stack https://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/~sephe/perf_cmp.pdf.

                    You can also watch Netflix's presentation demonstrating that at the time networking was pretty bad on Linux, i.e.Also Nginx's reference implementation is actually on FreeBSD and performed much better because FreeBSD actually has proper async IO support (this was only recently fixed in Linux with io_uring ). There is also netmap, which was originally released for FreeBSD (released later for Linux but afaik it requires patching).

                    The longest uptime without failure for any kind of software was also BSD based at ~18 years (and it only failed due to physical hardware reasons), i.e. see https://qr.ae/pN5wmI . Also FreeBSD's take security much more seriously, they were the first distro to recommend disabling hyperthreading on Intel based CPU's years before the meltdown attacks were public.

                    No point in being a Linux fanboy/zealot, its not the best at everything, and on a lot of fronts Linux was way behind the BSD's. The one area where Linux is infront is general hardware support plus niceties that are specific to desktops (i.e. systemd).
                    Last edited by mdedetrich; 22 October 2020, 04:12 PM.

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                    • #30
                      mdedetrich

                      There were also benchmarks proving opposite. Don't tell me YouTube and others aren't under very high load. It seems we won't agree on this point. The report from DragonFly shows Linux is noticeably faster than FreeBSD (which makes little contradictions here ), but DragonFly is little faster than Linux in their benchmark.

                      When comes to Netflix presentations I only found one word about Linux: 'AMD is lacking some tools even on Linux', so it doesn't tell much about networking performance. Uptime time doesn't tell much either. If we got uptime from two identical servers under heavy load it would be more interesting. Linux runs stock exchanges, so it has proven its reliability already.

                      Security? No, both have cons and pros. Linux have/had more advanced security mechanisms and some of them had earlier.

                      Of course Linux wasn't the best at everything in the past, but this have changed. It may be more or less equal in some cases, but there are parts it's superior. Let's take scalability. FreeBSD just recently got RCU equivalent and Linux had it for years.

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