FreeBSD Developers Continue Work On Shortening Boot Time, Improving WiFi Driver Support

[kylew77]

What did they do in order to reduce the boot time? Have they something like systemd?

From the last quarterly update they cut out a lot of 1 second waits. SystemD requires cgroups and other Linuxisms so for better and worse isn't portable to FreeBSD as is.

[Steffo]

What did they do in order to reduce the boot time? Have they something like systemd?

[kpedersen]

On the other hand FreeBSD have way less manpower and resources than Linux, so it is completely understandable. Good job getting this far!

To an extent; however if you discount the (often duplicated) work of distributions and focus on a specific area, i.e the init system; then systemd, openrc, runit, sysvinit individually doesn't have that much more developers working on it compared to the *one* used in FreeBSD. And then if you look at some proprietary ones like Apple; their launchd has even less developers.

FreeBSDs init system is generally slower because the design of it has been a balance between flexibility and performance. This balance is hard to strike but in some ways is only achievable by monolithic operating systems like FreeBSD compared to the distributed approach like Linux. Both have merits; Linux implements good ideas much faster; but at the cost of some bad ideas for some creeping in.

Myself? I don't quite get the point of boot speed. Servers rarely boot (and their ie. hardware boot routines often dwarf that of the OS) and laptops are generally suspended anyway. I am guessing people just don't like the 10 second vs 3 second wait from their desktop/workstation in the morning?

[Vorpal]

I'm in two minds about my reaction to the freebsd boot time thing:

• On one hand: "ouch my Arch Linux install boots to login manager in just 4 seconds from grub" (uefi takes way more time than all the other parts combined).
• On the other hand FreeBSD have way less manpower and resources than Linux, so it is completely understandable. Good job getting this far!

[kylew77]

I find FreeBSD to be the best of both worlds between *BSD and Linux, you get working Linuxemulator and wine support, good hardware support, and some security, especially some security through obscurity since it isn't as heavily used as Linux. Linux maintains it's higher hardware support and OpenBSD greater security but FreeBSD tries to strike a balance and is far and above the best "engineered" OS-- by that I mean that a team puts it together as a collective whole. Linux is piece meal distros with the kernel having Linus as its final say person and OpenBSD has Theo as its final say on everything. FreeBSD and NetBSD are team projects that build every part of the OS into a cohesive whole product. Debian is probably the closest Linux equivalent but is still built piece meal.

[phoronix]

Phoronix: FreeBSD Developers Continue Work On Shortening Boot Time, Improving WiFi Driver Support

FreeBSD a few days ago published its Q1'2022 status report highlighting all the advancements made by this open-source operating system project...

https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=FreeBSD-Q1-2022-Status