FreeBSD Along With The Other BSDs Had A Pretty Good Run This Decade

While not attracting as much interest as Linux in the cloud, AI, and other growing markets, the BSDs have seen their share of adoption in many of these areas too as well as the likes of powering some of today's video game consoles. FreeBSD is also well known for powering much of the networking infrastructure of Netflix and other large enterprises. The BSDs advanced a lot from hardware support to new security features and other capabilities this decade setting them on a good trajectory as we get into the 2020s.

Though not many websites cover BSD news, on Phoronix during the 2010s we wrote more than 750 articles on their progress and that is not counting our many BSD benchmark articles with still seemingly being the only site or so serving widespread BSD benchmarks. With that said, below is a look at the most popular BSD news items on Phoronix during the 2010s for those wanting to relive those memories.

Let us know in the forums where you hope to see the BSDs head in the 2020s.

Sony's PlayStation 4 Is Running Modified FreeBSD 9
The operating system at the heart of Sony's PlayStation 4 is FreeBSD 9.0.

FreeBSD 10 To Use Clang Compiler, Deprecate GCC
As indicated by the Q1-2012 FreeBSD Status Report, LLVM's Clang compiler is quickly replacing GCC for this popular BSD operating system. The developers are also making much progress in a GNU-free C++11 stack. For FreeBSD 10 they're aiming for Clang as the default C/C++ compiler, deprecate GCC, and to have a BSD-licensed C++ stack.

Why Should You Use FreeBSD? Here's Some Reasons
FreeBSD is wondering why are you using FreeBSD.

The 10 Best Features Of FreeBSD 10.0
With a bit of luck FreeBSD 10.0 will be released in the next few days so here's a look at the arguably ten best features of this next major BSD operating system release.

Netflix Optimized FreeBSD's Network Stack More Than Doubled AMD EPYC Performance
Drew Gallatin of Netflix presented at the recent EuroBSDcon 2019 conference in Norway on the company's network stack optimizations to FreeBSD. Netflix was working on being able to deliver 200Gb/s network performance for video streaming out of Intel Xeon and AMD EPYC servers, to which they are now at 190Gb/s+ and in the process that doubled the potential of EPYC Naples/Rome servers and also very hefty upgrades too for Intel.

FreeBSD Is No Longer Building GCC By Default
As of last week, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) is no longer being compiled by default as part of the FreeBSD base system.

PC-BSD Is Developing Its Own Desktop Environment
The PC-BSD project is developing its own desktop environment from scratch! The ultimate plan is for Lumina to become a full-featured, open-source desktop environment that may ultimately replace KDE as its default desktop environment.

Reasons Why You Should Not Use FreeBSD
After a few days ago sharing a list of why you should use FreeBSD as said by FreeBSD developers and community members who use the BSD operating system, here's a list of reasons for why not to use FreeBSD or missing functionality.

The PlayStation 4 Does Use The FreeBSD Kernel, Mono
In the forum discussion from yesterday's article about Sony using the LLVM/Clang compiler for the PlayStation 4 with its game development kit, some readers questioned whether the PlayStation 4 was really powered by FreeBSD. FreeBSD can be found on the PlayStation 4 along with Mono and other open-source components.

My 10 Minute Experience With PC-BSD 10.0
With FreeBSD 10.0 having been released and the final release of the PC-BSD 10.0 coming this week, I decided to try out the PC-BSD 10.0-RC5 ahead of the final release. While I intended to run some benchmarks of FreeBSD/PC-BSD 10.0 against its predecessor and compared to Linux distributions, this initial PC-BSD 10.0 encounter was cut short after about ten minutes.

Netflix Open Connect Network: FreeBSD, Not Linux
This week Netflix announced their Open Connect Network as their own open CDN (Content Distribution Network), but rather than using Linux as the base for this open-source platform, they decided to use FreeBSD.

UFS vs. ZFS File-System Performance On FreeBSD 9.0
Back in January I posted some ZFS, HAMMER, and Btrfs file-system benchmarks and in July of last year FreeBSD ZFS benchmarks, but for those wanting a new look at the ZFS file-system under FreeBSD 9.0, here are some updated numbers.

OpenBSD Foundation At Risk Of Shutting Down
The OpenBSD Foundation is running into a situation of lack of funding to the point that they can't even cover their electricity costs and may be forced to suspend or reduce their operations without additional help.

Arch BSD: Arch Linux Atop The FreeBSD Kernel
The Arch BSD operating system is moving forward, an attempt at a BSD platform that's inspired by the Arch Linux distribution and using its package-set.

Trying Out The FreeBSD-Powered TrueOS With Its Custom Qt Desktop
While I've been running PC-BSD on some systems for years I hadn't tried out any of its rolling-release FreeBSD 11.0-based spins under the new TrueOS brand nor had I tried out the project's Qt-based Lumina Desktop Environment since it reached 1.0. That changed today with trying out the latest weekly spin of TrueOS x64.

Lua Scripting Support Being Added To NetBSD Kernel
Support for the Lua scripting language is being added to the NetBSD kernel so that it's possible to interact with the BSD kernel's various subsystems using this popular scripting language. With a Lua interpreter being added to the kernel, it's even possible to extend the kernel's subsystems in this scripting language.

OpenBSD Sucks? Thoughts From One Of Their Developers
AsiaBSDCon 2015 happened last week in Tokyo, Japan. Besides learning about OpenBSD's custom-built HTTP/web server, there was also a presentation entitled "OpenBSD Sucks" by one of the OpenBSD developers.

UbuntuBSD Brings Ubuntu Atop The FreeBSD Kernel
The inaugural release of UbuntuBSD is now available, which the developers have codenamed "Escape From SystemD", and pairs the Ubuntu userspace with the FreeBSD kernel.

The State Of FreeBSD's Bhyve Virtualization
This week in California was a one-day FreeBSD Vendor Summit and during the event was an update on the Bhyve virtualization hypervisor that is playing an important role in FreeBSD 10.0.

Debian 7.0 GNU/Linux vs. GNU/kFreeBSD Benchmarks
Up this morning are benchmarks comparing the performance of Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 to Debian GNU/kFreeBSD 7.0, the version of the Debian operating system that ships the GNU user-land but replaces the Linux kernel from that of FreeBSD 9.0.