FreeBSD 10.2 Beta 1 Released

[stqn]

Generally speaking, it is safe to say that freebsd is totally irrilevant nowdays.

Linux and its ecosystem really beats it in most (i say all) areas.

Not really, FreeBSD is the best systemd-free Linux distro I?ve tried.

[Luke_Wolf]

Not really, FreeBSD is the best systemd-free Linux distro I?ve tried.

Erm.... FreeBSD has nothing to do with Linux, and is most certainly not a Linux distro.

[stqn]

Erm.... FreeBSD has nothing to do with Linux, and is most certainly not a Linux distro.

I was attempting to humorously express my lack of success in finding a very good systemd-free Linux distribution.

After having had a look at the ~30 distros listed on without-systemd.org, I finally tried FreeBSD 10.1 in Virtualbox and found it to be relatively easy to use, not broken, well documented and fast, and I intend to use that on my second computer.

[endman]

I was attempting to humorously express my lack of success in finding a very good systemd-free Linux distribution.

After having had a look at the ~30 distros listed on without-systemd.org, I finally tried FreeBSD 10.1 in Virtualbox and found it to be relatively easy to use, not broken, well documented and fast, and I intend to use that on my second computer.

First of shame on you for your blatant anti-progressive atitude to new technologies like systemd.

Second of all, regarding "non-systemd" Linux distros, there's Slackware, Devuan etc... which are so much easier to use and way faster compared to FreeBSD or any other crapBSD. Also, talk about compatibility with mainline applications. Linux rules in this area too while BSD Sucks.

[endman]

I was a big fan of freebsd until it lost the opencl war. I was really excited about it for a number of reasons... but the new game is offloading compute.

There was no war. FreeBSD was never good at OpenCL or anything related to graphics.

Because of that it will be relegated to simple server tasks only... smtp server, ldap server, web server.... nas.

Even here, Linux destroys all BSDs in functionality, scalability, performance, reliability and security.

It is great at sending files fast, but I need more than that.

No, Linux is way faster then BSD at that.

[endman]

AFAIK PC-BSD successfully replaced OpenSSL with LibreSSL. OTOH they still have a crappy init system. The launchd port is WIP since years.

The infrastructure of Whatsapp runs on FreeBSD. At least for now. https://www.whatsapp.com/opensource/
Facebook already announced to work on Linux features where it lacks compared to FreeBSD. Apparently that's easier than closing the gaps where FreeBSD is lacking...

Well said.

BSD "devs" are close minded and impossible to work with. This is why everything that still runs of BSD will eventually switch away from it (mostly to Linux). examples: Hotmail, Yahoo, NetCraft, PHP.net, Apache.org, University of California Berkeley (the home of BSD) and the New York internet. And now Whatsapp, the FreeBSD fanboy's boasting tool will soon switch to Linux.

Yes Whatsapp will run Linux not FreeBSD.

[endman]

Generally speaking, it is safe to say that freebsd is totally irrilevant nowdays.

Linux and its ecosystem really beats it in most (i say all) areas.

True very true.

Linux really beats FreeBSD in ALL (not many) areas. As a matter of fact it beats ALL BSDs in ALL areas.

How Linux beats FreeBSD?
-NAS: OpenMediaVault has better performance, more features and scalability to FreeNAS or NAS4FREE. OMV not FreeNAS is the most used and reliable NAS.
-Servers: Linux's better performance, scalability, low power consumption and security far out strips BSD. It's insane to put BSD on a server. In fact, people who even suggest putting FreeBSD on a server should be sent to prison because FreeBSD NOT HAVE ASLR
-Desktop: That's PC-BSD and it's a complete piece of dog shit. Not only does it fail to get a user base in the general FLOSS community but also fails to get one even among FreeBSD supporters and "devs". This is my experience, It's performance is complete rubbish, it's needs 4GB of ram (more then Windows), it's flaky and crashes when doing something simple such as opening FireFox, less software and the new BSD desktop environment is the latest and most completely unusable piece of crap and they are making it the default DE. No way am I going to allow PC-BSD on any of my machines.

How Linux beats OpenBSD?
-Security: Security is OpenBSD's main propaganda claim. But tests have shown that in all practical situations, Linux is far more secure that OpenBSD.
+ ASLR: ASLR on OpenBSD is a joke. Range of variability is smaller then that of Linux or even Windows
+ 3rd party packages: In Linux distros, all packages are audited thoroughly and equally. On OpenBSD, 3rd party packages are neglected to the point that most of them do not work. Today most security intrusions are caused by holes in 3rd party packages. You can see the problem with OpenBSD here.
+ Attitude to CVE's: To keep it's "2 security holes in a heck of a long time" deception, OpenBSD "devs" have been denying or done playing security reports to such a degree that they even reject security patches.
-Performance: OpenBSD's obselete and ineffective 80s approach to security has caused it severly in performance making everything use giant locks even if they are the smallest operations. The OpenBSD "devs" know this and are desperately trying to fix their own mess and have failed.
-Code quality: Linux has more eyes so code quality is far superior to OpenBSD despite what OpenBSD fanboys say.

How Linux beats NetBSD?
-Portability: Portability is the NetBSD troll's go to myth in spreading lies. But the honourable Greg Kroah-Hartman has shown that Linux runs on more hardware then NetBSD. Also, for most hardware supported by both, Linux is usable while NetBSD just boots it's kernel and hangs.
-Performance and Reliability: Because of NetBSD's obsession into running on as much hardware the wrong way, it's performance and reliability suffers in trivial platforms like x86 and ARM. I ran a NetBSD server for a test and after 5 hours, it froze and the people on the mailing list had no idea why it did.

How Linux beats DragonflyBSD?
-Performance: DragonflyBSD is simply copying Linux's method of kernel threading and performance boosting. Because Linux improves so rapidly, DragonflyBSD is always behind in performance. Also, DragonflyBSD has lots of baggage and bloat from FreeBSD and 4.4BSD which weights it down. It can also never beat Linux's ability at cluster computing and multi-threading. Greg Kroah-Hartman once said Matt Dillon should just improve Linux rather then copy parts of it for a useless operating system.

[bpetty]

It's seen minimal adoption as a standard, and is mostly irrelevant for the time being for either Linux or FreeBSD, plus if you look here https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/OpenCL they've got it working basically but according to https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics they need to wait to drop FreeBSD 8.x support to merge it in.

1. That link you sent highlights that they have almost nothing working.
2. OpenCL, mainly on Linux, is what made bitcoin mining mainstream until ASICs hit the scene. People were buying the hell out AMD 6990s. These cards were on back order... all because of OpenCL. Rendering farms, scientific simulation clusters, etc. It is not for everyone... but it has a big impact for those that use it.

There was no war. FreeBSD was never good at OpenCL or anything related to graphics.

You are right, I was over zealous in my dramatic phrasing. It was never a war because they never showed up. Efficient massive parallel computation is the future for server workloads.

Even here, Linux destroys all BSDs in functionality, scalability, performance, reliability and security.

I just have this to say about that... FreeBSD's (and Mac OS X's) kqueue and zero copy api are much better than the Linux alternatives. I can not say much more because you are probably right.

[Luke_Wolf]

1. That link you sent highlights that they have almost nothing working.
2. OpenCL, mainly on Linux, is what made bitcoin mining mainstream until ASICs hit the scene. People were buying the hell out AMD 6990s. These cards were on back order... all because of OpenCL. Rendering farms, scientific simulation clusters, etc. It is not for everyone... but it has a big impact for those that use it.

Maybe I'm reading that wrong but that clinfo looked to me like clover was mostly working, Beignet has issues, but anyone using Intel for those purposes is nuts. So I consider it irrelevant. Additionally once they get the linux shim ready and up to date, things should get better on that front.

Although really for the time being you shouldn't be using Radeon cards on FreeBSD, as the support is too primitive. My assumption is that by the time FreeBSD 11 is released that should be mostly resolved though. If you want to do those things on FreeBSD I'd look towards Nvidia with CUDA support.

You are right, I was over zealous in my dramatic phrasing. It was never a war because they never showed up. Efficient massive parallel computation is the future for server workloads.


I just have this to say about that... FreeBSD's (and Mac OS X's) kqueue and zero copy api are much better than the Linux alternatives. I can not say much more because you are probably right.

Um no... Endman is not right, Endman is a well known troll with an anti-BSD pro-GNU agenda, who deliberately spreads misinformation to support his views on copyleft. Go through his post history if you doubt that, but it's best just to ignore him. There's been quite a bit of speculation that he writes this blog http://aboutthebsds.wordpress.com, but nobody knows for sure.

[Luke_Wolf]

okay forum ate my reply lets try this again...

1. That link you sent highlights that they have almost nothing working.

Maybe I'm reading it wrong but it looks to me like according to clinfo Clover is mostly working, Beignet has issues but I don't consider it particularly relevant to the question at hand.

2. OpenCL, mainly on Linux, is what made bitcoin mining mainstream until ASICs hit the scene. People were buying the hell out AMD 6990s. These cards were on back order... all because of OpenCL. Rendering farms, scientific simulation clusters, etc. It is not for everyone... but it has a big impact for those that use it.

And so use Linux in those roles for the time being, but realize that those are niches, and correct me if I'm wrong but my understanding was those niches are actually primarily filled with CUDA as opposed to OpenCL. Otherwise well... HSA is what's actually important for the future.

I just have this to say about that... FreeBSD's (and Mac OS X's) kqueue and zero copy api are much better than the Linux alternatives. I can not say much more because you are probably right.

endman isn't worth listening to, he's a well known anti-BSD troll who will spread misinformation and lies just to bash it. It's been widely speculated around here that he's the one that runs this PoS blog http://aboutthebsds.wordpress.com