Intel To Increase Engagement With FreeBSD, Makes $250k Donation

[Marc Driftmeyer]

??? I don't host Phoronix.com servers at my house, I use HiVelocity data centers.

Either do we. It's all co-located via linode.com and either the performance lag is the design of your board or a combination of Hivelocity and your boards. They crawl quite often in the Pacific Northwest routing through CenturyLink.

https://www.linode.com/pricing

The performance is phenomenal with Linode.

[torsionbar28]

I bet this situation comes out as a result of Linux beeing GPL2.. I'd prefer those guys supporting a linux based os for their consoles rather than a bsd and I don't see anything else than the licence to stop them to do so.

This is more of a response to the upcoming AMD Zen server chips. AMD only has 1% marketshare in the datacenter today, and they're banking on changing that with Zen. The upcoming 32 core Zen server chip looks to be a real monster, designed specifically for large virtualized datacenters. FreeBSD is the underlying OS for many of the top virtual datacenter appliances (routers, firewalls, etc). Optimizing FreeBSD for intel products, possibly with associated branding and marketing, is one way to counter the new Zen competition. If intel can create even a little FUD in customers minds about the performance or compatibility of replacing Xeon servers with Zen, it will work in intel's favor.

Now if AMD would follow suit and donate similarly to major open source datacenter projects, it would be a real win-win for everyone.

[Guest]

$250k and people praise Intel? They write off billions. The least they could do is toss in $20 Million for all platforms annually they leverage and contribute to. The cost of technically qualified pools of future development talent pays that back in spades.

It seems their BSD customer base isn't big enough.

[indepe]

Regardless of what motivated this specific move, it appears the Linux environment could be more open to the improvements made in Clear Linux, For example it appeared that its optimizations could go upstream more easily.

[Geopirate]

It seems with the little exploring I've done of FreeBSD/FreeNAS they tend to advise people steer clear of AMD largely due to various driver issues. I'm guessing AMD is planning to fix this in the near future and Intel needs to counter?

[Guest]

This is more of a response to the upcoming AMD Zen server chips. AMD only has 1% marketshare in the datacenter today, and they're banking on changing that with Zen. The upcoming 32 core Zen server chip looks to be a real monster, designed specifically for large virtualized datacenters. FreeBSD is the underlying OS for many of the top virtual datacenter appliances (routers, firewalls, etc). Optimizing FreeBSD for intel products, possibly with associated branding and marketing, is one way to counter the new Zen competition. If intel can create even a little FUD in customers minds about the performance or compatibility of replacing Xeon servers with Zen, it will work in intel's favor.

Now if AMD would follow suit and donate similarly to major open source datacenter projects, it would be a real win-win for everyone.

There's logic fail with your argumentation. What does AMD Zen have anything common with routers and firewalls? You said (and you're probably mistaken) FreeBSD is the underlying OS for many of the top virtual datacenters, but it's not running on Zen, so what's your point?

[jacob]

I bet this situation comes out as a result of Linux beeing GPL2.. I'd prefer those guys supporting a linux based os for their consoles rather than a bsd and I don't see anything else than the licence to stop them to do so.

IMHO this has nothing to do with the religious licence wars. It's a no brainer that it's in Intel's best interest that as many OSes as possible offer first-class support for their CPUs and chipsets. Congrats to Intel, congrats to FreeBSD who gains an important partner, and Linux is not losing anything in the process.

[torsionbar28]

There's logic fail with your argumentation. What does AMD Zen have anything common with routers and firewalls? You said (and you're probably mistaken) FreeBSD is the underlying OS for many of the top virtual datacenters, but it's not running on Zen, so what's your point?

It sounds like you don't have much data center experience, if any. The datacenter world is very different from the tinker-toy desktop peecee world you're familiar with. Nowadays routers, firewalls, and other enterprise appliances are going virtual. Instead of a piece of hardware in a rack, it's a virtual machine running on a hypervisor. Many of these virtual appliances are based on FreeBSD - I manage several such virtual appliances from a variety of vendors, so no, I'm not mistaken. Today, intel dominates in the datacenter x86-64 virtualization space. The upcoming 32 core AMD Zen chip is aiming squarely at that market. AMD Zen server chips have not been released yet FYI, so no, nobody is running on them yet today. But once they do hit the market, their core density and power efficiency will be very attractive to these customers, who will presumably migrate their VM's from aging Xeon servers, to these new AMD Zen servers. Ergo, they will be running FreeBSD virtual machines on AMD Zen. Did I use small enough words for you this time?

[RickXy]

For $250K, getting improvements into a platform is dirt cheap.

[RickXy]

$250k and people praise Intel? They write off billions. The least they could do is toss in $20 Million for all platforms annually they leverage and contribute to. The cost of technically qualified pools of future development talent pays that back in spades.

And not just Intel. I'd extend this to all companies that have a vested interest in GNU and Linux, for their products. This includes IHVs (Intel, AMD, Dell, HP, Samsung, Lenovo etc), ISVs (Canonical, Red Hat, Suse), and then the consumers (Google, FB, Amazon, and many many many more).

I still meet many consumers that say, "Why should I spend a single penny when every thing is for free ?"
They end up paying double the money, when they get fucked in any issues.