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

[Danielsan]

I look forward for the better Frame Laptop support...

[aht0]

Good thing for root on ZFS support in FreeBSD then Nearly impossible to corrupt a ZFS pool with a power failure and I've lived in some places with some sorry power.

Haven't gotten shutdown-stalling on FreeBSD but it seems rather occasional thing on Linuces I use.

[sinepgib]

Is there any *nix operating system that 100% focuses on being a server OS and does not cave into any of these desktop-isms? It preferably would not have silly things such as wireless drivers which have nothing to do with running a server. Absolutely no graphical ports/packages would be offered and any attempt to suggest it would result in immediate shut down of the request. Having a stable and reliable system with no desktop users would be a dream. Is there any such thing?

Just build a Linux with Buildroot with everything you don't need disabled. I'm procrastinating setting one like what you describe for my Raspberry to run a few lightweight services.

[kylew77]

Is there any *nix operating system that 100% focuses on being a server OS and does not cave into any of these desktop-isms? It preferably would not have silly things such as wireless drivers which have nothing to do with running a server. Absolutely no graphical ports/packages would be offered and any attempt to suggest it would result in immediate shut down of the request. Having a stable and reliable system with no desktop users would be a dream. Is there any such thing?

I don't think such an OS exists and here is why: the developers will want to run said OS as a desktop/workstation. FreeBSD is about as close as you are gonna get. No xorg by default, KMS graphics drivers only available as packages, custom kernel support to remove wifi drivers if one wishes, etc. I run FreeBSD as a workstation but it is definitely more set up as a server OS. Even old server OS standbys like CentOS 7 support a gui if one wants it though it isn't installed by default. Maybe there is an Illumos distro the is server only with all workstation components stripped out?

[Lewis Leaky]

Is there any *nix operating system that 100% focuses on being a server OS and does not cave into any of these desktop-isms? It preferably would not have silly things such as wireless drivers which have nothing to do with running a server. Absolutely no graphical ports/packages would be offered and any attempt to suggest it would result in immediate shut down of the request. Having a stable and reliable system with no desktop users would be a dream. Is there any such thing?

[sinepgib]

Good thing for root on ZFS support in FreeBSD then Nearly impossible to corrupt a ZFS pool with a power failure and I've lived in some places with some sorry power.

The filesystem may not get corrupted (AFAIK any log structured filesystem is robust against that) but you can still lose unwritten/partially-written data which is problematic enough.

[kylew77]

Nah, boot speed ain't much of an issue. 20s or 2s makes little enough difference. Shutdown speed is more important when your laptop's battery is nearly empty - stalled shutdown while battery reaches 0% and turns machine off- THAT might corrupt your file system.

Good thing for root on ZFS support in FreeBSD then Nearly impossible to corrupt a ZFS pool with a power failure and I've lived in some places with some sorry power.

[aht0]

Nah, boot speed ain't much of an issue. 20s or 2s makes little enough difference. Shutdown speed is more important when your laptop's battery is nearly empty - stalled shutdown while battery reaches 0% and turns machine off- THAT might corrupt your file system.

[sinepgib]

Dunno what was done in kernel but when you actually happen to need service manager, FreeBSD Ports contains half dozen of those you can choose from.
Traditional RC init has Lua-scripting backend support (if you want to go creative) and FreeBSD Ports has at least OpenRC and S6, possibly also runit (cant recall for sure). Using custom inits means mandatory changes to ports tho. Be easier to mess with Lua. Worth noting that RC init on BSD's ain't mess of cross-linked scripts like SysV in Linux. Its using sort of standard library for boot scripts and pretty simple to use. No self-inflicted wounds (sysv) justifying later even more complicated masochisms (systemd).

Just to add on this, now knowing s6 is an option: s6 does pretty much all the things systemd does right in terms of boot speed, except socket activation for dependency handling (which is a rather controversial feature, I like it but I know many don't for some understandable reasons). It does support it for xinetd-like behavior as a separate tool.

[aht0]

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

Dunno what was done in kernel but when you actually happen to need service manager, FreeBSD Ports contains half dozen of those you can choose from.
Traditional RC init has Lua-scripting backend support (if you want to go creative) and FreeBSD Ports has at least OpenRC and S6, possibly also runit (cant recall for sure). Using custom inits means mandatory changes to ports tho. Be easier to mess with Lua. Worth noting that RC init on BSD's ain't mess of cross-linked scripts like SysV in Linux. Its using sort of standard library for boot scripts and pretty simple to use. No self-inflicted wounds (sysv) justifying later even more complicated masochisms (systemd).