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FreeBSD Made Progress In Q1'2017 On Linuxulator, Nearly 30k Ports

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  • #11
    Originally posted by Sonadow View Post

    WiFi on Linux is atrocious. It is almost six years and no 80211ac USB adapter works OOTB in Linux. Even old 80211g/n USB adapters have all kinds of unsolvable and unreproducible issues accross various chipsets with in-kernel drivers.
    My WiFi on Ubuntu 16.04 simply works out of the box.

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    • #12
      Originally posted by dragon321 View Post
      If FreeBSD gain support for Intel Skylake GPU and my WiFi - I really consider use it to replace Linux. I can use FreeBSD, it has all I need (yeah, without these 2 things) and I like it for simplicity, light weigh and architecture. For now I'm forced to use it only on virtual machine.
      Simplicity and lightweight aren't FreeBSD strong sides:



      How big is FreeBSD? The project's Subversion repository is currently about 3.1GB in size; a checked-out tree takes about 600MB. It consists of 71,100 files, about 32 million lines of code. It takes 20-30 minutes to build the whole thing, which is a big improvement from the old days, when it could take several hours.

      The project is old, having gotten its start in November 1993; it was based on the 1992 386BSD release which, in turn, was based on much older code. So there is a lot of history. FreeBSD developers have only recently discovered automated testing, he said, but, for such testing to work, the software has to be structured properly, and FreeBSD isn't. Testing the kernel in an automated manner is especially hard. They do have some tests, though, many of which were borrowed from NetBSD, but they are focused mainly on user-space code.
      So how can the problems with FreeBSD be fixed? Some of those problems are a function of the project's size, which is something that can't really be fixed. There are things that could be done, though. FreeBSD is still shipping sendmail, for example, which may no longer be necessary; taking it out would make FreeBSD a little smaller. FreeBSD is still a big, monolithic distribution, but there is some talk of splitting it up into packages.

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      • #13
        Originally posted by jacob View Post

        I think that's actually an important point and might be one if the reasons (not the only one) why Linux had such a huge buy-in from the community, even back when it was still a toy OS and FreeBSD was already a fully mature and capable platform (albeit primitive compared to today). You could just take your random Windows box and Linux would run on it.

        MacOSX is different, Apple has a cult-like following by a base of fans who make a point of buying every single product Apple puts out. AIX is... well... not exactly a community-driven, exciting, booming platform, is it.
        It was not quite like you seem to remember. It's probably case of analogous to some elder remembering "grass was greener and sun warmer in my youth days"..
        For most of the Linux history there were no open source drivers for Radeon and you had to fight it out with ATI binary drivers which often fucked up and simply did not want to work. You had to stick to certain distributions. Or use Nvidia. Not to mention there were bunch of other graphics "cards" around which for Linux had questionable or better support.. SiS, Matrox, Trident, VIA. Today it is yeah, three manufacturers left and all have some sort of Linux drivers in offer. Can't remember seeing any other than Intel/AMD/Nvidia gpu/video card in brand new machines.

        FreeBSD's primitivism.. Wanna share the thoughts? I am curious. As of primitive in which way?


        MacOSX fanbase - Strong bias. You seem to never have heard of "hackintosh". They like MacOS, they are not buying any hardware. Actually, they go out of their way not to buy any, up to flashing certain hardware with Apple-compatible hardware id's and such.. There are quite a lot of consumer "windows" hardware which can take MacOSX install, just needs some helping hand.

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        • #14
          I honestly never understood the "everything is in one bundle" mindset.
          While I get that it is easier to set up initially, it makes maintenance so much harder.

          Strangely, even projects that already have the necessary infrastructure for modular designs in place seem to prefer shipping monolithic behemoths ever so often.
          For instance, the Firefox Photon feature preview partly touches browser.xul to draw elements into the URL bar. Even though Firefox ships with an API that would easily allow offloading new UI elements to small, self-contained modules.

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          • #15
            Originally posted by Pawlerson View Post
            Simplicity and lightweight aren't FreeBSD strong sides:
            Yeah, and some of the responses to this article in FreeBSD forum. I posted link to this exact brainchild in FreeBSD forum some months a go. Feel free to check it up (Off-topic section, couple of pages into past, under the same title)

            Posted by gkontos
            The arguments that the author presents are not compelling at all. The article could be also considered as pure trolling.

            Last year, we migrated our email collaboration platform from Linux to FreeBSD. It didn't take much to convince the rest of the team as soon as I showed them how easy it is to use the latest stable software, without having to use third party repos. Eventually, they saw that with FreeBSD we had better performance and a much more stable environment. Everybody are also very happy because they can keep the systems up to date without the need of frequent reboots. Let alone that some had terrible experience with systemd, the process is a win-win situation.

            We are migrating our hosted services to our own clustered hardware this weekend. We have tested the new architecture using FreeBSD 11.0-RELEASE for over 2 weeks. For some it was really impressive that I could just shutdown one server and have VRRP take care of everything without the client noticing even a glitch. Well, welcome to FreeBSD were we do not use the latest bleeding edge technology but instead we rely on simple things that just get the job done.
            ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Posted by Tabs
            Yeah this article is just trolling - having come from Linux (after being forced off open solaris) it's so refreshing to move to something 'old' where people don't care for bling or change for changes sake. I think we'll see a steady increase in uptake of FreeBSD as others see Linux moving away from the UNIX principles and philosophies
            ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Posted by topcat
            Background: my workstation at work is the only FreeBSD install in the entire company. We are primarily a windows shop, with some Linux servers. It just feels solid, and gets out of my way. I love the old school UNIX look and feel. It's fast, with meager resource usage.

            Anecdote: I was presenting at a client meeting, and one of them noticed that the shell said FreeBSD when I logged on to my system to show something. She remarked: "Wow! You guys use FreeBSD!". Doesn't sound like a bad reputation to me .
            ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Posted by sidetone
            What a STUPID article!

            Perhaps there should be a poll on how stupid people think that it is. Ok, I was trolling the deserving article and "author" with my second statement.

            It is nothing but begging the question on some emotional baggage, for whatever insipid reason, that the author thinks is important.

            To blame the whole community because a user or two go into a political site, by the way, that I may disagree with. FreeBSD is about an operating system, not about the beliefs of a few users, or what they do that is not agreed by everyone.

            The author faultily undermines FreeBSD, and I've seen how FreeBSD's efficient design found flaws in GNU or Linuxism userland programs, which helped improved them. If FreeBSD is "monolithic", it is less so than most Linux distributions. I've pointed out in the past, that installing GCC added 16 hours of compile time, and a plethora of unneeded and unrelated programs, which did nothing but slow down programs that depended on it, when Clang (which was already in base) compiled it in about 5 minutes. Of course, the developers had to make the code portable and work on it for all features to work: credit to them. But that is a monument of how FreeBSD can find inefficiencies in other programs' code, and that the author doesn't have a clue what he's talking about.
            ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Last edited by aht0; 17 May 2017, 01:47 PM.

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            • #16
              Originally posted by Pawlerson View Post

              Simplicity and lightweight aren't FreeBSD strong sides:



              How big is FreeBSD? The project's Subversion repository is currently about 3.1GB in size; a checked-out tree takes about 600MB. It consists of 71,100 files, about 32 million lines of code. It takes 20-30 minutes to build the whole thing, which is a big improvement from the old days, when it could take several hours.

              The project is old, having gotten its start in November 1993; it was based on the 1992 386BSD release which, in turn, was based on much older code. So there is a lot of history. FreeBSD developers have only recently discovered automated testing, he said, but, for such testing to work, the software has to be structured properly, and FreeBSD isn't. Testing the kernel in an automated manner is especially hard. They do have some tests, though, many of which were borrowed from NetBSD, but they are focused mainly on user-space code.
              So how can the problems with FreeBSD be fixed? Some of those problems are a function of the project's size, which is something that can't really be fixed. There are things that could be done, though. FreeBSD is still shipping sendmail, for example, which may no longer be necessary; taking it out would make FreeBSD a little smaller. FreeBSD is still a big, monolithic distribution, but there is some talk of splitting it up into packages.
              And Linux's official test suite is where exactly? Oh... Oh right it doesn't exist, any actual testing occurs downstream, with the limitations in testing being for much the same reason.

              Furthermore I don't think you're really that stupid to believe that the size of the repo has anything to do with the lightweightness or simplicity of the OS but 2 can play at this game
              Linux Kernel FreeBSD OS
              Files 64,000 71,100
              Size 696 MB 600MB
              Geeze man the size of the repo of the Linux Kernel alone is almost 100MB more than the size of the FreeBSD kernel + userspace + core distributed software I would hate to think about what the size of it would be if we added in the GNU userspace, systemd, and other modern base necessities.

              Now that said the person you're responding to is being silly on those points. "Lightweight" and "simple" are meaningless buzzwords at the scope of comparing *NIX-like OSes, the same stacks running on FreeBSD instead of Linux will run no faster (not entirely true you're likely to see some variation between OSes but outside of very specialized cases it's marginal) and use no less memory, and the weight of the desktop and applications far outweighs the kernel. So what about simple? I would argue that yes things like all the knobs being in sysctl instead of spread over a bunch of config files, /proc, sysctls, and otherwise... is in fact simpler, the way the filesystem is laid out is certainly sane and simple to work with, but systemd is much simpler to work with than init scripts (an ini vs a script is no contest), and NetworkManager is much simpler than futzing about with wpa_supplicant directly. There's a lot of things that I think FreeBSD gets right that Linux doesn't but resorting to buzzwords gets us nowhere.



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              • #17
                Originally posted by unixfan2001 View Post
                I honestly never understood the "everything is in one bundle" mindset.
                While I get that it is easier to set up initially, it makes maintenance so much harder.

                Strangely, even projects that already have the necessary infrastructure for modular designs in place seem to prefer shipping monolithic behemoths ever so often.
                For instance, the Firefox Photon feature preview partly touches browser.xul to draw elements into the URL bar. Even though Firefox ships with an API that would easily allow offloading new UI elements to small, self-contained modules.
                So you prefer Linux From Scratch instead of using distros? No? I thought not.

                FreeBSD is developed as a singular OS, just like every other OS other than Linux, which promotes a very different mindset than the one that just pulling together packages from a million different sources promotes. if it's your software you have a responsibility to it and can guide it to a cohesive vision, such as great documentation, whereas if it's someone else's software... well fixing these sorts of things is Someone Else's Problem (TM). It's much harder to do things like Capsicum or libUCL without an organization steering such efforts. That's not to say there aren't such organizations in Linux space, but their names are Red Hat, SUSE, Debian, and Canonical, and their primary interest is in selling you servers and server accessories.

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                • #18
                  Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post
                  So you prefer Linux From Scratch instead of using distros? No? I thought not.
                  A distro is a completely different beast from a monolithic repository, which is what I'm referring to.
                  You can have a distro and still retain modularity.

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                  • #19
                    aht0

                    I missed it before. However, those responses sound like they're coming from fanboys and original article comes from the FreeBSD developer.

                    Comment


                    • #20
                      Originally posted by Luke_Wolf View Post

                      And Linux's official test suite is where exactly? Oh... Oh right it doesn't exist, any actual testing occurs downstream, with the limitations in testing being for much the same reason.
                      It's here:

                      LTP Main page. Just a wrapper that takes people straight to github.

                      Autotest Main page. Just a wrapper that takes people straight to github.


                      Furthermore I don't think you're really that stupid to believe that the size of the repo has anything to do with the lightweightness or simplicity of the OS but 2 can play at this game
                      It matters a lot when comes to development. Bigger, monolithic repo means slower development and harder bisecting. There's a significant difference between Linux and FreeBSD here:





                      In Linux you have nearly everything nicely structured while FreeBSD is monolith. So, when comes to Linux you only check interesting tree. Be it scheduler, boot, wifi, drm, usb and so on. A real life example: how much time does it take to bisect problem with just released FreeBSD version? I found a bug in Linux 4.11-rc8. It was introduced in rc-1, but I started bisecting from rc-8. It took about 14 steps to find it = few hours of compiling.

                      Ps. When comes to LoC Linux 4.11 is about 18 million and FreeBSD about 32 million. You said FreeBSD includes some additional software, but it's additional bloat. Imagine Linux kernel with systemd, sendmail etc. It's the case with FreeBSD!
                      Last edited by Guest; 16 May 2017, 11:31 AM.

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