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

[Volta]

Plenty, I'll list a few things it does better than Linux:

In-kernel audio mixing, ie. lower latency than PulseAudio.

There's jack on Linux and PulseAudio have different purpose that FreeBSD lacks, so it's a downside.

It is the reference implementation of TCP/IP, its network stack performs better, and is used in networking research (eg. NETMAP).

Nothing proven so far.

ZFS fully integrated into the kernel and various userland tools, working out of the box.
Excellent documentation.

Correct.

Strong binary compatibility within each major release, including within the kernel.

Linux kernel has great binary compatibility. Linux distributions are different thing.

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.

Linux also doesn't unnecessarily change.

No systemd.

Huge downside.

pkg is significantly faster than apt/yum (at least in my experience).

Yes, but less advanced. Compare it with Pacman which should also be fast.

A system that was designed and engineered, not hacked.

Yes, they're using different terms for same things.

Beautiful, clear source code.

Depend who reads, but you may be right.

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

It seems there are only mediocre developers left on this planet.

[mdedetrich]

mdedetrich

There were also benchmarks proving opposite.

Then show them

Don't tell me YouTube and others aren't under very high load. It seems we won't agree on this point.

Just because youtube uses it doesn't mean its better. Google could just be solving the problem by throwing money at it, or there is another reason they are using Linux.

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.

In some cases yes, for very short lived HTTP transactions, i.e. what does benchmarks show this is actually not what Netflix uses FreeBSD for, they use it for their cached content.

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.

Watch the video

Linux runs stock exchanges, so it has proven its reliability already.

The fact that Linux runs stock exchanges is irrelevant. There are also stock exchanges that run Windows, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradElect .

Furthermore stock exchanges have different requirements, i.e. CPU latency is much more important for a stock exchange (doing trades as fast as possible) versus saturating your network so its a completely different set of requirements.

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

Wrong, also Linus himself doesn't have a favorable view of security (which doesn't help).

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.

Which is one of the few exceptions in Linux's favor.

The fact that, that in a lot of areas (I/O, Netowrk stack, IO stack) FreeBSD was far infront in Linux for many years. For a lot of people the difference is negligible (because they are not the scale where it really matters) or they don't care, but that doesn't change facts, i.e. Linux having a pathetic implementation of async IO compared to MacOS/BSD's/Windows which only got fixed 1 year ago with io_uring.

At the scale of Netflix it matters, whether companies use this to their advantage is up to them. In Netflix's case it helped a lot, because at the time they were not swimming in $$$ like Google was, so they needed the best performance from commodity hardware and Linux couldn't offer that at the time (Linux can probably offer that now but its 8 years too late).

[Volta]

Then show them

Oh Gods. You're showing nothing, but asking:

https://forums.freebsd.org/threads/s...x-again.71679/

Just because youtube uses it doesn't mean its better. Google could just be solving the problem by throwing money at it, or there is another reason they are using Linux.

And now Netflix analogy comes to mind..

In some cases yes, for very short lived HTTP transactions (which is actually not what Netflix uses FreeBSD for, they use it for their cached content)

So, you meant exact use case? One of dozens of possibilities?

Watch the video

Could you tell what exact part of the 40 min long video?

The fact that Linux runs stock exchanges is irrelevant. There are also stock exchanges that run Windows, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TradElect .

Netflix analogy comes to mind once again..

Wrong, also Linus himself doesn't have a favorable view of security (which doesn't help).

It does. He treats every bug as important.

Which is one of the few exceptions in Linux's favor.

The fact that, that in a lot of areas (I/O, Netowrk stack, IO stack) FreeBSD was far infront in Linux for many years. For a lot of people the difference is negligible (because they are not the scale where it really matters) or they don't care, but that doesn't change facts, i.e. Linux having a pathetic implementation of async IO compared to MacOS/BSD's/Windows which only got fixed 1 year ago with io_uring.

That was partially true, but even in those parts Linux had advantages like its file systems. Yes, Linux had not so great AIO, but now it has superior one. FreeBSD had pathetic SMP, NUMA and it also improved.

[Volta]

mdedetrich

And here's something especially for you:

http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ - very old one! Even then Linux TCP performance was superior:

Linux 2.6 scales O(1) in all benchmarks. Words fail me on how impressive this is. If you are using Linux 2.4 right now, switch to Linux 2.6 now!

FreeBSD 5.1 has very impressive performance and scalability. I foolishly assumed all BSDs to play in the same league performance-wise, because they all share a lot of code and can incorporate each other's code freely. I was wrong. FreeBSD has by far the best performance of the BSDs and it comes close to Linux 2.6. If you run another BSD on x86, you should switch to FreeBSD!

Linux 2.4 is not too bad, but it scales badly for mmap and fork.

As you can see, Linux 2.6 appears to be the only one achieving O(1) here. There are 10000 files total, 100 of them in one subdirectory (this is how actual applications like squid or qmail do it, putting a 10000 files in one directory has been benchmarked by others), so this should be pretty close to O(1) except for the cost of allocating the file descriptor maybe.

https://medium.com/@matteocroce/linu...g-cbadcdb15ddd

[KesZerda]

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.



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.



Linux is inferior to Windows when comes to available software. However, when Linux (or *BSD) fit their needs they're superior of course.

It's peculiar you use "abuse" with netflix, when they've made significant contributions to FreeBSD. A very cursory glance shows at least 1527 commits sponsored or submitted by people at Netflix. How do you get to your claims that they are "abusing" FreeBSD?

[kylew77]

Next big thing for FreeBSD (and derivates) : FreeBSD from scratch

I've always wanted to compile a custom FreeBSD kernel suited exactly to my hardware just like you can with Linux in Gentoo. It is harder though because there is no make menu config to give you a cursess based menu program to configure the kernel.

[Volta]

It's peculiar you use "abuse" with netflix, when they've made significant contributions to FreeBSD. A very cursory glance shows at least 1527 commits sponsored or submitted by people at Netflix. How do you get to your claims that they are "abusing" FreeBSD?

It's great they support it, but I bet Google, Facebook etc. did a greater job for Linux. This makes Netflix argument weaker.

[skeevy420]

It's great they support it, but I bet Google, Facebook etc. did a greater job for Linux. This makes Netflix argument weaker.

I'm gonna regret asking, but:

I think these multiple companies did more for this open source project than one company did for that other open source project.

That's the evidence for Linux superiority you're gonna go with? Personally, I'd just say "Have fun with the terminal watching all the network traffic with your superior network stack that's routing the traffic from the fun I'm having with the game I'm playing on Linux from Steam".

[KesZerda]

It's great they support it, but I bet Google, Facebook etc. did a greater job for Linux. This makes Netflix argument weaker.

So you're making baseless claims about Netflix "abusing" FreeBSD. Got it.

[KesZerda]

I'm gonna regret asking, but:

I think these multiple companies did more for this open source project than one company did for that other open source project.

That's the evidence for Linux superiority you're gonna go with? Personally, I'd just say "Have fun with the terminal watching all the network traffic with your superior network stack that's routing the traffic from the fun I'm having with the game I'm playing on Linux from Steam".

Except Steam works just fine under FreeBSD https://github.com/SteamOnFreeBSD/SteamOnFreeBSD