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on Gopher (inofficial)
URI Visit Hacker News on the Web
COMMENT PAGE FOR:
URI A year of funded FreeBSD development
nithssh wrote 1 hour 9 min ago:
Very enlightening piece on how corpo sponsorship of OSS work. Thanks to
the author for writing this.
irusensei wrote 8 hours 24 min ago:
I remember the time around version 7 or 8 when FreeBSD had better
drivers than Linux for stuff like Atheros wifi cards.
I favored FreeBSD until around 2021 when computers with different CPU
mixed together started to become common. I first bought a RockPro64
with 2 big and 4 little cores and then an Intel Alder lake. As far as I
understand FreeBSD scheduler to this day don't know how to properly
play with these so it brings the system to the lowest denominator of
the slower cores.
LAC-Tech wrote 16 hours 7 min ago:
This does not paint a good picture for FreeBSD development. An
operating system of that size and complexity surely needs someone
company to sponsor the release manager full time, not part time for a
year.
I don't say this to besmirch FreeBSD, FWIW. I think it's very important
that Linux is not the only game in town.
alanpearce wrote 11 hours 40 min ago:
40 hours/month. Not week.
xedrac wrote 17 hours 11 min ago:
I wanted to use FreeBSD for my home gateway/firewall/dns/dhcp server,
but unfortunately my 10 GbE NICs didn't seem to have drivers, so I
ended up going with Nix instead. I used FreeBSD many years ago as a
workstation, and found the experience to be quite memorable. It's nice
to see that it's still chugging along.
dazzawazza wrote 11 hours 22 min ago:
I use FreeBSD for all my (and my companies) infrastructure. I only
use hardware with Intel NICs because they are 100% reliable on
FreeBSD. Anything with Realtek seem to crap out under load despite
the hard work of the FreeBSD engineers who maintain the drivers (I'm
not complaining and I respect their efforts).
It's a small price to pay and it stops me having to install less
stable operating systems.
commandersaki wrote 18 hours 59 min ago:
Out of curiosity, who are the top users of FreeBSD/EC2?
cperciva wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
I have no clue. Seriously, the users who talk to me are maybe 0.1%
of the total FreeBSD/EC2 user base.
I would love to know who is using FreeBSD in EC2.
broken_broken_ wrote 16 hours 15 min ago:
I can tell you some financial services I have worked for do use
FreeBSD on EC2 as well as on the metal in data centers to do
millions of transactions a month.
I like the OS, thanks for your work.
temp0826 wrote 18 hours 44 min ago:
Does netflix only use it on their edge boxes?
cperciva wrote 18 hours 33 min ago:
Yes, their CDN is FreeBSD but last I heard all of their cloud
operations are Linux.
johnnyjeans wrote 20 hours 27 min ago:
Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills in
the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far simpler
and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia
drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux? I'm well aware of the problems with
GNU, but do you have problems even with something like Musl Void?
I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow
realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that
keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote 7 hours 48 min ago:
For me, who's daily driven FreeBSD in the past, and switched back to
it again recently. FreeBSD serves as a refuge from systemd, and the
only BSD that is a fairly drop in replacement for linux in terms of
software compatibility, as well as the only game in BSD town in terms
of support for modern hardware.(though it does significantly lag
Linux in this regard still, so YMMV).
As to why I use it over the various systemd free linux distros? Well,
there's a couple things. First lot of those distros, like Artix linux
say, actually have smaller communities than FreeBSD(I'm guesstimating
based on the activity level in their irc channels). The Linux
community might be much, much larger than the FreeBSD community, but
it's also extremely fragmented.
triggerwarning, hyperbole incoming. Don't bother correcting me, it's
a polemic, not a scientific paper
Secondly, for someone like me, who's been using various unix like
OSes for two decades, FreeBSD is just a nice, batteries included,
well integrated system. Things like jails, Dtrace, ZFS, Bhyve, pf
etc. All being in the base install means they're just better
integrated with the kernel, and eachother. Most of those things exist
for linux, or have equivalents, but they're not all part of the same
project. Obviously Dtrace and ZFS originated in Solaris, but they've
been made first-class citizens. There's a harmony to FreeBSD that
Linux distros lack. Documentation is also very good, all accessible
via manpages(no GNU INFO...). And, as I mentioned briefly before. It
doesn't have a lot of the cruft that's been added to linux distros
over the years(though some of it is available in ports if you want
it). In FreeBSD, my experience is actually useful. Things I remember
how to do from 5 years ago, 10 years ago, 15 years ago, still work.
If I'm on some modern, plug and play linux distro, I have no idea
what's going on under the hood any more. All I know is it's not what
was going on 5 years ago, which isn't what was going on 10 years ago,
which isn't what was going on 15 years ago. The amount of pointless
churn going on in the linux space is ridiculous. When I started using
linux, what I loved about it was that it was transparent. I could
change anything. The system was easy to understand. Yes, it was
janky, but it was understandable jank, whereas Windows was janky in
an opaque way. 20 years later, Linux is still janky, but nothing is
understandable, at least not to my greybeard brain. Systemd takes
over a new daemon every distro upgrade. DNS resolving now involves 4
different daemons with 15 different configuration files, there's two
display protocols, both broken in different ways, /etc is full of
long files written in strange, alien languages, and every file has
its own bespoke language. There seems to be 54 different ways to make
any change to your system, and all of them are somehow unsatisfactory
in a unique way. I just can't, anymore. Enough already.
LeFantome wrote 2 hours 24 min ago:
I both agree and disagree with comments about Linux choas and
churn. That is true of the overall ecosystem of course. But any
given Linux distro can be thought of as its own operating system.
You can choose a Linux distro that reflects your own preferences in
terms of pace of innovation. Sure Arch has 100 package updates a
day and 30 ways to do everything. However, RHEL (or its
compatibles) is not that way. You can go 10 years without changing
your config files. Precisely because there are so many distros with
so many different curated experiences, you can find a Linux distro
that matches your own preferences.
And yet all Linux distros give you the hardware support and things
like the OCI ecosystem that only the Linux kernel can provide.
Given the above, I wonder sometimes why you would choose FreeBSD
over a Linux distro. But your statement that FreeBSD has more users
than many Linux distros is a good one. It is also true that, while
distros like Arch or Debian have more software in their repos than
FreeBSD, the FreeBSD ports collection has a much larger selection
than most distro repos. So, overall, FreeBSD does achieve a nice
balance. So, that makes sense to me.
MrArthegor wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
Iâm agreeing with your description.
The mains issues with Linux is itâs just the kernel, and anything
is developed in their corner without taking account of the rest.
Also, I tend to think the Linux folk in general seem to want to
reinvent the wheel every 6 months, where FreeBSD and BSD in general
have tendency to make things better from previous work in
comparison
LeFantome wrote 1 hour 14 min ago:
I hear this a lot when people talk about FreeBSD but I am not
sure about it.
A LOT of the core Linux ecosystem comes from Red Hat developers
for example. If I look at RHEL as an operating system, they have
a definite vision for the OS, they take a long-term view, and
they invest in development to get it there. My guess is that Red
Hat alone employs more devs than work on FreeBSD.
Red Hat contributes heavily to the kernel, the core C library
(glibc), the userland (GNU utils), the system supervisor
(systemd), the compiler (GCC), the desktop environment (GNOME),
the GUI framework (Wayland now, Mesa, etc), the sound system
(pipewire), the hypervisor system (KVM, libvirt), and the
container system (podman and Flatpak). Red Hat heavily influences
the direction of all this stuff with a common vision and they
work to implement it as a cohesive expression in their distro.
This is a broader swath of what makes the operating system than
FreeBSD considers its scope and it is all built to work together.
If you use RHEL, you know it is very stable (static). When Red
Hat makes changes, they tell you about them years in advance.
I honestly do not think you can say that FreeBSD is more
cohesively developed or better documented than RHEL. FreeBSD
arguably has less control over key aspects of the OS than Red Hat
does.
I am not advocating for Red Hat here by the way. I am not even a
RHEL user. I use Chimera Linux which rejects quite a lot of the
Red Hat vision including SystemD and pretty much the whole GNU
system (userland, glibc, gcc).
My point is that Red Hat is truly a maker of their own destiny
and their distro reflects their vision. They want to move to
SystemD. They introduced DRM and KMS instead of the traditional
Xorg driver model. They want to move to Wayland. They have
heavily embraced the OCI container model. It is all part of their
vision and design.
Pragmatically, FreeBSD has to create tools like Linuxulator.
FreeBSD is adding support for OCI containers. FreeBSD is adding
Wayland support and, as popular desktop environments abandon X11,
may have to move to Wayland as the preferred display server. Even
the FreeBSD utils have added many options over the years to be
compatible with the userland that Red Hat developed. Was 'ls
--color=auto' a FreeBSD design? In other words, the Red Hat
agenda drives the evolution of FreeBSD (but not much the other
way around).
So sure, FreeBSD is more stable and cohesive than the universe of
Linux distros. But even BSD has fragmentation. GhostBSD is close
to FreeBSD but not quite and would be more different if they had
more devs. DragonFly BSD certainly has its own agenda (and again,
is held back more by bandwidth than solidarity). The free-for-all
in the Linux world is an expression of its size and collective
innovation. But how much of this you want as a user is up to you.
As many have said, you don't use "Linux", you use a Linux distro.
Again, my main distro is Chimera Linux. The whole point of the
name is that it pulls together things never designed to work
together (including the FreeBSD userland on Linux). And yet, the
Chimera Linux dev team has a very strong vision of what they want
their OS to look like and they work very hard to build that into
a cohesive implementation. They choose components that fit their
vision. Where changes are required, they make them. Where they
deem good options not to exist, they invent them (eg. Turnstile,
cports). As a user, I get that "solid, cohesive, well-designed,
intentional, and heavily curated" experience that FreeBSD users
talk about. More to the comment above, Chimera reeks of "looking
to preserve tradition while striving to make things better". Of
course, it is also still a niche distro with a tiny community (at
this point). As somebody said above, FreeBSD may be a better
choice for this and other reasons. But Chimera Linux is still
Linux and that has its advantages. The box I am typing on uses
bcachefs and Distrobox. For me, it is perfect.
Anyway, I apologies for the length. When you talk about FreeBSD
vs "Linux", you really have to choose a specific Linux distro for
the comparison to be meaningful. Depending on which one you pick,
the statements made by @MrArthegnor may or may not hold. At
least, that is my view.
tuna74 wrote 2 hours 56 min ago:
Linux is "just" an OS kernel. If you want to compare FreeBSD to
something you can compare it to Fedora, Debian or Arch etc.
MrArthegor wrote 1 hour 37 min ago:
Yes I know, but maybe my initial message wasnât clear enough.
But for me the fact Linux is just the kernel doesnât make the
previous criticisms invalid. The first concerning the
development of the different components in sort of echo chamber
where no one seem to communicate with each other is directly
taken from the Linux Kernel philosophy, the maintainer have
expressed in multiple time they donât care what happen
outside of the kernel, in contrast with FreeBSD developers for
example
The second point is more towards distribution I admit
LeFantome wrote 45 min ago:
To make my long-winded point more concretely, the core
diference is really just that there are "so many" Linux
developers.
Linus has a pretty firm hand on the tiller of Linux
evolution. I counter "don't care what happen outside of the
kernel" with his many, many public "never, ever break
userland" rants. And many kernel devs and maintainers are
employees of companies like Intel, Red Hat, Google, IBM, and
AMD that absolutely care about coordinating kernel dev with
the bigger picture.
Something like 250 devs contribute to FreeBSD each year. For
just the Linux kernel, the number is closer to 5000. There
are just way more people working on way more stuff. It is not
a surprise to see a more significant halo of chaos around
Linux. Coordinating the Linux kernel is herding cats and,
even when everybody eventually lines up, there are going to
be periods where it seems like everybody is talking past each
other.
And while the Linux kernel does have a "release early,
release often" mantra, it also touts "trust but verify" and
has a strong meritocracy and hierarchy. So I am not sure "no
one seem to communicate with each other" is fair. Not just
anybody can drop whatever they want into Linux. We also need
to remember that shipping the Linux kernel is not the same as
shipping a Linux distro (operating system). Actual Linux
distros bring kernel versions in according to the philosophy
of the distro. Many are very stable and conservative. Others
are a whole lot less so (but that is users choice).
broken_broken_ wrote 16 hours 4 min ago:
I have worked for financial services companies that used FreeBSD both
in EC2 and on the metal in data centers (self managed).
The two features we used all the time were zfs and jails.
Each service ran in its own jail for isolation. One (not even beefy)
server could run all the services which was insanely cost efficient.
A cloud migration was undertaken at some point to have a hybrid
setup, using a mix of Linux (k8s) and FreeBSD, and costs skyrocketed.
Itâs a trade off because in the data center we had to buy and
replace our own disks, react to fires taking place, being only in one
country etc.
AWS gives you multi region, and tons of good stuff, and that has a
price.
ZFS was not leveraged that much but it saved our beacon once when a
table in the production database was accidentally dropped and we
could instantly rollback to the previous zfs snapshot (there was a
tiny bit of data loss as a result but this did not matter too much
for this application - uptime was more important). ZFS was also used
for backups I believe.
A few times I used dtrace in production to troubleshoot.
When we introduced Linux to our fleet of FreeBSD servers, every team
picked a different distro organically so it was a bit of a zoo. With
FreeBSD on the server you only have the one variant.
I still use and like both, but I must say I really like that FreeBSD
is a kernel+OS integrated together.
LeFantome wrote 3 hours 4 min ago:
Your "zoo" comment is an important one.
It really makes sense to think of different Linux distros as
different operating systems. At the very least, the ones from
different "families".
There are a lot of differences between Debian and RHEL. Suse,
Alpine, Void, or Chimera Linux are completely different again. In
some ways, they are almost as different from each other as FreeBSD
is from them.
Compared to that "zoo", using FreeBSD everywhere is far more
cohesive. But if you use RHEL, Alma, Rocky, and even Fedora, things
are still going to feel pretty consistent. Or Debian, LMDE, and
Kali. I am not advocating an ecosystem.
toast0 wrote 18 hours 37 min ago:
FreeBSD is throughput oriented in a way that OpenBSD certainly isn't,
and I don't think NetBSD is either (although, I haven't really
looked, I feel like NetBSD competes on portability and doesn't spend
a lot of time making sure networking throughput is high).
All of the BSDs tend to have a lot less churn, for better and worse;
so IMHO, they make a nicer platform to integrate on.
johnnyjeans wrote 18 hours 9 min ago:
Very interesting. Doing more reading on FreeBSD's presence in the
HPC space. Thank you.
toast0 wrote 17 hours 57 min ago:
If you want a high profile example, look at what Netflix CDN
does.
Could you do that work with Linux? Probably --- but nobody who
does is talking about it as much.
This kind of high throughput service has been a FreeBSD niche
since forever too. Walnut Creek CDROM, Inc ran what was
reportedly the world's busiest ftp site, ftp.cdrom.com on FreeBSD
in the early days of the internet.
Yahoo ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2004-2011) WhatsApp ran on
FreeBSD (I worked there 2011-2019) Both were leaving FreeBSD when
I left, but sadly, I didn't leave to work somewhere else with
FreeBSD :p
AdieuToLogic wrote 18 hours 58 min ago:
> Can someone who uses FreeBSD fill me in on the niche that it fills
in the Unix space? Why not use OpenBSD or NetBSD, which are far
simpler and coherent? If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS,
Nvidia drivers, ELF, etc. why not Linux?
My experience with FreeBSD is that it provides a nice balance of the
concerns OpenBSD and NetBSD specifically address. Historically,
FreeBSD prioritized Intel CPU's (where NetBSD had greater
portability) and had solid security (where OpenBSD had more of a
focus on it).
The FreeBSD ZFS support really is a game changer. I believe Nvidia
only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers - for a long time
FreeBSD's kernel Linux support was required.
> I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow
realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul
that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.
Again, for me, FreeBSD has proven to be a nice blend of the features
other BSD's provide as well as being incredibly stable on the h/w
platforms I tend to use.
assimpleaspossi wrote 8 hours 21 min ago:
>>I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers
When I first started using FreeBSD, in 2004, Nvidia had native
FreeBSD drivers for all their boards.
johnnyjeans wrote 18 hours 7 min ago:
I figured the goldilocks metric might factor in. Are you dealing
with non-x86 platforms? I've always been disappointed by the ARM
experience on Linux. It always feels second-class.
yjftsjthsd-h wrote 19 hours 32 min ago:
> If the answer is support for stuff like ZFS, Nvidia drivers, ELF,
etc. why not Linux?
FreeBSD has better ZFS support than Linux, because it doesn't have
the licensing issues.
wkat4242 wrote 19 hours 50 min ago:
FreeBSD has a much bigger userbase than openbsd or netbsd. Not even
comparable.
Its software catalog is also much bigger. It's a viable modern
desktop daily driver and I can't say that for the other two.
As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by
corporate interests.
mbac32768 wrote 2 hours 48 min ago:
> As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by
corporate interests.
This is a rather funny statement because at various points, high
level execs at Apple Computer (and on another occasion Sun Micro)
invited Linus Torvalds out to lunch and pitched teaming up together
to take on Microsoft. Linus turned them down.
Then a little bit later Jordan Hubbard announces FreeBSD would be
the UNIX layer of OS X.
johnnyjeans wrote 19 hours 39 min ago:
My impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS, they hold
a lot of soft power over it. I know the kernels are different and
obviously only part of the userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD
actually far enough away from Apple to say it's not bogged down by
corporate interests? I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all,
but it exists in a non-trivial way, no?
AdieuToLogic wrote 18 hours 48 min ago:
> My impression is that FreeBSD is Apple's shadow in FOSS, they
hold a lot of soft power over it.
Apple has no influence over the FreeBSD project.
> I know the kernels are different and obviously only part of the
userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD actually far enough away
from Apple to say it's not bogged down by corporate interests?
Yes.
OS-X (now macOS) is based on XNU[0], which itself has roots in
the Mach[1] microkernel. The Unix user-space programs
distributed with OS-X/macOS are those found in FreeBSD
distributions AFAIK. This is also conformant with FreeBSD
licenses for same.
So there is no "soft power" Apple has over FreeBSD. And FreeBSD
is not "Apple's shadow in FOSS".
> I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it exists in
a non-trivial way, no?
No. It does not.
EDIT: Just in case you'd like to verify any of the above
yourself, see here[2].
0 - [1] 1 - [2] 2 -
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
URI [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_(kernel)
URI [3]: https://github.com/apple-oss-distributions/xnu
cperciva wrote 18 hours 54 min ago:
I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power
over FreeBSD" thing from. Netflix is probably at the top of the
list given all their performance and stability work -- and, you
know, the fact they push a large chunk of all Internet traffic
using FreeBSD -- and NetApp and Juniper are somewhere up there,
but I'm not convinced Apple would even be in the top 10.
johnnyjeans wrote 18 hours 11 min ago:
> I'm not sure where you're getting the "Apple holds soft power
over FreeBSD" thing from.
The only thing I've ever heard from FreeBSD-land, not paying
attention to users, but the maintainers and the tools. Apple
comes up. In the same manner that RedHat and others come up for
Linux. How to explain? It's an abstract pattern. Transparent,
understandable.
I mentioned somewhere about the connection through ix systems.
And honestly to project, if I was a maintainer of something
used between Netflix and Apple, I'd prioritize Apple. Apple has
outlived IBM. If you know your history, you know how serious
that is. If you've got authority over something as large as
FreeBSD? Yeah, you don't ignore that kind of actual power
especially when it's personal. Like I say, all based on
guesses. But some things are hard to mistake.
wkat4242 wrote 8 hours 10 min ago:
I know some maintainers of the userland and apple never comes
up. Most maintainers have no commercial ties to anyone so
they don't really care abour corporate influence anyway. They
just maintain the software because they like using it. This
is exactly the kind of thing I like, in Linux there are too
many companies putting money into it because they want to
make money back (usually not from normal users but from cloud
instances, steering the project in a direction away from its
grassroots origins).
I'm sure if Apple wants something it would be considered but
there would be a strong validation of "what's in it for us"
on the freebsd side. There's also some pretty bad experiences
with corporate influence and this is reviewed a lot more
independently since the netgate wireguard disaster. [1]
Unlike in the Linux world where RedHat and canonical are so
embedded due to most of the devs working for them that there
will be a lot less questions. And not just those two, also
companies like Huawei are heavy kernel contributors.
I'm not saying it's bad to have such commercial influence.
But it's not what I want for the OS I run.
URI [1]: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/03/buffer-overr...
cperciva wrote 17 hours 44 min ago:
Apple did very important work making LLVM happen, but that
was a long time ago. At this point there are lots of
companies involved in that project.
As far as "power" is concerned... speaking as release
engineer, I don't give special treatment to anyone; nor have
I even been asked to. If anyone has a special relationship
it's Netflix but if anything that's the opposite way around:
"Can you please throw 10% of all Internet traffic at this TCP
stack patch and let us know if anything breaks" is a thing.
They're incredibly helpful with Q/A.
johnnyjeans wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
Consider me convinced. Like I say, it was never anything
but empirical skepticism. Neither for or against until
sufficient evidence has been collected, as painful as that
can be. Thank you for your work on scrypt.
wkat4242 wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
It's not. Apple (or rather NeXT) took some of the userland for
macOS but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much
influence. It's more like a fork a long time ago.
A few companies do. Skype and Netflix did but hardly use it now
(at least Skype left it, not sure about Netflix but I never hear
about it from bsd devs). Ix systems and netgate do but they're
tiny.. No, it's not influenced in a trivial way and certainly not
by apple.
This is a huge difference to Linux where the vast majority of
kernel commits come from big tech and have nothing to do with
things end users care about. Also there's nothing in the FreeBSD
world like the Linux Foundation which is basically a corporate
lobby group.
assimpleaspossi wrote 8 hours 16 min ago:
>>Netflix did but hardly use it now
Unless I misunderstood you, Netflix delivers all video content
via FreeBSD and contributes code back and money to the
foundation.
wkat4242 wrote 7 hours 58 min ago:
I had read they were migrating to Linux but I could be wrong.
I just never hear much about Netflix in FreeBSD circles.
If they still use it they are more of a user than an
influencer in its development.
johnnyjeans wrote 18 hours 23 min ago:
> but it's not contributing back and it doesn't have much
influence.
I understand the former. But with how Apple operates, it's
really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something
they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still
pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed?
>Ix systems
I did some reading and saw a FreeBSD contributor ended up going
to Apple until 2013 before he founded this company. [1] Apple
is listed here. Six degrees of separation and all, but probably
not a coincidence.
Nothing wrong with that, business is a social structure. This
is how they work. We make and keep friends, even if only
professionally. Backchannels are where real deals are made.
But this to me is not nothing. No corporate influence means
there's a lot of nice things you don't get. You just can't
afford the manpower. It looks more like 9 Front than a BSD that
has some serious billion-dollar problems under its belt.
That sounds harsh, not a judgement. Just very deep skepticism
of the assertion of no influence. I'm realizing there's not a
lot that can be done to sway that intentionally.
> This is a huge difference to Linux
This I'm well aware of. I just like having a perspective across
the fence. These days they're starting to get a little too
aggressive for my tastes. FreeBSD seems fine in comparison.
URI [1]: https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/
wkat4242 wrote 7 hours 56 min ago:
> No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things
you don't get.
Yes that is the flipside. But I don't mind that. If you
choose your hardware carefully it works fine.
Note that this is not too different from using Windows or
Mac. Your hardware is also chosen carefully to work with
those, just not by you but by the vendor. With FreeBSD you're
more involved with the nuts & bolts and this is exactly what
I want. I don't want my OS to be a black box I don't
understand.
toast0 wrote 18 hours 6 min ago:
> But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe
they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some
kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK?
Maybe that's changed?
Apple doesn't merge often. They basically haven't merged
kernel tcp since 2002. When I started using OSX in 2011, they
hadn't merged userland for several years, and when I stopped
in 2019, they had only merged once.
They famously stopped picking up bash when upstream changed
the license, and most of the FreeBSD userland doesn't change
that frequently, so most things you wouldn't notice a
difference. cal(1) started highlighting the current day at
some point, tar probably grew new compresion arguments, etc.
Apple certainly was a major contributor/driving force/etc of
LLVM for a while, not sure if they still are? And LLVM was
adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming
from?
johnnyjeans wrote 17 hours 47 min ago:
> And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where
this idea is coming from?
Partially, but after seeing the Jordan Hubbard connection,
there's a lot of layers to this. May have reinforced my
biases, but it's definitely non-trivial according to my
hippie-tier anarchist baseline. Oops. Worst case scenario
of answering your own question.
But your reply does give me actually contradicting
evidence. It wouldn't surprise me that distance has grown
to the point of total atrophy, given the general trajectory
Apple has been on since 2012 or so. This is why I ask these
questions, because the people on the ground give the most
informative answers.
As Ptahhotep advises circa ~2300BCE:
> Fine words are more sought after than greenstone, but can
be found with the women at the grindstone.
wkat4242 wrote 7 hours 51 min ago:
> May have reinforced my biases, but it's definitely
non-trivial according to my hippie-tier anarchist
baseline.
The definition of 'trivial' would come into play yes. I
would only consider it non-trivial if a commercial party
can (and does) influence the direction of development. I
don't think Apple does so. Even Netflix. In the Linux
world there's billions of investment and many
contributors are directly employed by big business. The
waters are much murkier there.
Again, I'm not saying it's a bad thing. It's just not
something I want which is one of the reasons I picked
FreeBSD. Other reasons were the great ports collection,
the division between OS and apps (you can have rolling
apps but a stable OS), the traditionalism (only change
things if it's really needed) and the single main flavour
of the OS which makes support much easier. Also the
excellent documentation.
SSLy wrote 21 hours 49 min ago:
colin, fix your encoding
cperciva wrote 21 hours 29 min ago:
Err, I'm happy to fix things, but can you elaborate on what is
broken?
SSLy wrote 12 hours 35 min ago:
The em-dashes were mojibaked. They seem fine now. Cheers.
cperciva wrote 1 hour 22 min ago:
Weird. I haven't changed anything, and the em-dashes were just
"—", not UTF-8.
jonhohle wrote 17 hours 27 min ago:
I may be wrong about OPs intention, but AFAICT, because no encoding
is specified, the client gets to choose. For someone not using a
default encoding that's a superset of ASCII (like ISO-2022-KR) the
page appears as a �.
Current practice is to put a meta tag with your encoding, use a
Unicode BOM, or less favorably, send the charset attribute in the
Content-type header.
net01 wrote 22 hours 50 min ago:
There is also a lot of work on the laptop front, I read that the BSD
foundation invested $750k for this
implementing: (S0ix Sleep State, etc )
you can find the project laptop here
URI [1]: https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop
cperciva wrote 22 hours 43 min ago:
Yep there's a lot of work going on. I was just writing about the
work I was doing. ;-)
msdrigg wrote 23 hours 17 min ago:
There are some hilarious tidbits in here
> Starting in the first week of 2024, the FreeBSD boot process suddenly
got about 3x slower. I started bisecting commits, and tracked it down
to... a commit which increased the root disk size from 5 GB to 6 GB.
Why? Well, I reached out to some of my friends at Amazon, and it turned
out that the answer was somewhere between "magic" and "you really don't
want to know"; but the important part for me was that increasing the
root disk size to 8 GB restored performance to earlier levels.
polskibus wrote 15 hours 28 min ago:
I wonder how long did it take to bisect such issue. Build image every
time and reboot a vm?
cperciva wrote 15 hours 20 min ago:
I can't remember exactly but it was a few hours. I already knew
which week the issue arose (from comparing weekly snapshots) so
that gave me a head start.
But yes, I built a lot of AMIs. And launched new EC2 instances for
each of them -- it wasn't just a matter of rebooting since the
first time an AMI launches there's different behaviour (both from
FreeBSD, e.g. growing the root disk, and from EC2, e.g. disk
caching).
polskibus wrote 7 hours 11 min ago:
Thanks for the additional information, a few hours sounds great,
I was expecting multiple days to narrow it down, given a lengthy
feedback loop.
jeffbarr wrote 19 hours 14 min ago:
The original object size limit for S3 was 5 GB, as noted in my 2006
blog post: [1] I do not know if this has anything to do with the
cliff that you saw.
URI [1]: https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_s3/
cperciva wrote 19 hours 7 min ago:
Pretty sure that's not related. For one thing I don't think EBS
snapshots are stored in S3 as 5 GB segments.
xandrius wrote 23 hours 10 min ago:
Now I really want to know though.
selimnairb wrote 9 hours 6 min ago:
Yeah, I am constantly curious about how the sausage that is cloud
services like AWS is made. It seems generally slick on the surface,
but whatâs holding it all together? I imagine it as a tangled
ball of tools like Puppet, Chef, etc. and custom glue.
arcfour wrote 7 hours 42 min ago:
A lot of AWS services are built on other AWS services. Like
Lambda, SQS, and other such "core services" are used by others
under the hood.
akdev1l wrote 8 hours 50 min ago:
At Amazon scale mostly everything is custom
Less puppet/chef
selimnairb wrote 7 hours 19 min ago:
Yeah, I would imagine they maybe started with off-the-shelf
tools that were then gradually replaced as the system grew and
matured.
cperciva wrote 22 hours 59 min ago:
My understanding is that EBS has some heuristics for deciding
whether to keep data cached; an AMI which has a cached snapshot as
its root disk will boot much faster than an AMI where all the data
needs to be pulled from S3.
JoshTriplett wrote 20 hours 33 min ago:
What's the smallest size for which those heuristics keep the
snapshot cached?
(I'm currently using 1GB snapshots, because my actual disk image
is a tiny fraction of that size. But if bumping that to 2GB or
4GB would make it faster, that's a small price to pay.)
cperciva wrote 20 hours 32 min ago:
I believe 1 GB is also fast.
JoshTriplett wrote 20 hours 19 min ago:
Thanks, that helps to hear!
Do you have any other wisdom regarding mysterious reasons for
fast or slow booting? EC2's boot process is deeply opaque,
and any insight at all is better than nothing.
cperciva wrote 19 hours 48 min ago:
Nothing comes to mind, but if you want to drop me an email
I can walk you through some benchmarking.
richardwhiuk wrote 1 hour 24 min ago:
At a guess, powers of 2 are fast?
cperciva wrote 1 hour 21 min ago:
5 is not a power of 2. ;-)
tedunangst wrote 22 hours 45 min ago:
Some huge customer chunked their data into 5GB pieces so now
there's a "if size == 5GB" in the cache code.
cperciva wrote 22 hours 42 min ago:
Maybe, but I don't think that would explain 8 GB also being
fast while 6 GB is slow?
MobiusHorizons wrote 4 hours 10 min ago:
Yeah, I found that pretty unintuitive when I read it. How did
you find 8GB worked? Trial and error?
0x457 wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
Customer started using 8GB chunks /s
AndyKelley wrote 23 hours 21 min ago:
Sweet! By the way we just added FreeBSD to the download page on
ziglang.org (as of today), so FreeBSD users can grab master branch
builds automatically built by the CI.
It's also now a first-class supported cross-compilation target,
including when linking libc, so you can do stuff like `zig cc -o hello
hello.c -target riscv64-freebsd`.
And then of course if you have any C/C++ dependencies, you can fetch
and build them with the zig build system, so it should be possible to
easily cross-compile even quite complex projects for FreeBSD now.
Hopefully that helps more projects decide to add FreeBSD support and
respective testing to their CI!
xedrac wrote 17 hours 16 min ago:
Zig's cross compilation is awesome, and it's nice to see FreeBSD on
the supported target list.
ksec wrote 23 hours 46 min ago:
I was rather hoping Amazon would spend and contribute more. But it
seems they basically only want to pay for the minimum FreeBSD support.
Amazon isn't even on FreeBSD sponsors [1]. And Google only sponsored
$9K last year. Apple isn't there. Edit: And Credit to Microsoft being
at least on the list! And forgot to mention Meta / Facebook missing
from it as well.
I would have expect them to sponsor FreeBSD and OpenBSD annually by
default given they use and continue to benefits the work out of both.
URI [1]: https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYear=...
oblio wrote 21 hours 33 min ago:
Amazon does the least for FOSS out of the FAANGs.
p_ing wrote 22 hours 15 min ago:
I wonder for what reason Microsoft funds them. Their Hyper-V
extensions are not as complete as Linux. There's no
Microsoft-supported port of .NET. I can't think of any services that
run on *BSD from Microsoft, cloud or otherwise.
petesergeant wrote 18 hours 28 min ago:
I wonder if this is a very, very, very long-term holdover from the
Hotmail team having some expertise, and Microsoft wanting to be
able to offer something a bit nix-y that wasn't Linux
ksec wrote 21 hours 56 min ago:
My thought process was that it is such a small amount of money for
Advertisement or marketing to have your logo on some prominent Open
source project to at least try and redeem / make themselves look
good.
voidfunc wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
There are customers that run FreeBSD on Azure and Microsoft
officially supports it:
URI [1]: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/azure/virtual-machines/l...
cperciva wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
I don't know, but Microsoft has some developers working on Hyper-V
for FreeBSD. They've even come to FreeBSD developer summits.
vitorsr wrote 22 hours 52 min ago:
This comment does not present the full picture.
First, it presents the snapshot of donations within a given year to
the Foundation. The history of donations is not represented by
definition.
Second, it does not present contributed development. Those are
typically summarily available on the release notes of each release
[1]
URI [1]: https://www.freebsd.org/releases/
hackernoops wrote 19 hours 19 min ago:
Has Amazon donated more to FreeBSD than Notch the Minecraft guy?
cperciva wrote 23 hours 38 min ago:
I'd love to see Amazon contribute more, of course; but the fact they
don't show up as donors to the FreeBSD Foundation doesn't mean
they're not supporting FreeBSD. The money they paid me didn't flow
through the Foundation, for example; I'd guess that Foundation-funded
development is maybe 10% of all corporate-funded FreeBSD development.
(It's an important 10%, especially because it can be focused on
"what does FreeBSD need" rather than "what does company X need" --
but it's still a small minority.)
tiffanyh wrote 1 day ago:
Lots of respect for cperciva.
Donât know how he manages all of this + Tarsnap.
cperciva wrote 1 day ago:
It turns out that at a certain point, money can buy time. Do I fix
the leaky tap myself, or hire a plumber? After electricians rip up
my basement drywall (perfectly reasonably -- I was getting solar
panels installed and the electrical panel needed to be upgraded) do I
fix it myself or do I hire a professional drywaller?
To be fair, some of the time I spent on this came away from Tarsnap.
But less than you might imagine.
AlienRobot wrote 22 hours 16 min ago:
At a certain point money can even buy money.
The other day I had the opportunity to get a 10% discount on a
fridge if I could pay the whole thing in one payment. If I didn't
have the money I wouldn't get the discount, so in a way being poor
means everything is more expensive.
phonon wrote 20 hours 59 min ago:
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was
because they managed to spend less money. Take boots, for
example. ... A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty
dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK
for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard
gave out, cost about ten dollars. ... But the thing was that good
boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty
dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry
in ten years' time, while a poor man who could only afford cheap
boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same
time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of
socio-economic unfairness."
URI [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory
naikrovek wrote 22 hours 7 min ago:
Being more poor is always more expensive than being less poor.
All poor people know this in their bones because they face this
every day of their lives.
Alupis wrote 23 hours 35 min ago:
> or do I hire a professional drywaller
When it comes to drywall, always hire a professional. Learn from
other's mistakes... it's not as easy as you think and it won't turn
out well.
firesteelrain wrote 11 hours 43 min ago:
Itâs really not hard. I added onto a house I owned back in 2009
after returning from Iraq and saving a bunch of money. IRS also
gave me a huge refund that year. Something with GWOT vets and
taxes with combat pay. Anyhow, converted a covered porch to a
room, had permits, raised the floor, added electric, energy
efficient Argon gas windows, etc. You give 84 lumber the blue
print plans from the architect and they tell you how much
material you need. After I got to the stage to add furring strips
for the concrete block part and insulation (which is easy too), I
was ready to add the dry wall. Just lift it up to the wall then
screw it in. Dry wall tape, corner bead, and mud to cover the
seams. Orange peel can hide imperfections. Then paint. Pretty
straightforward
jonhohle wrote 19 hours 0 min ago:
Dry wallers are amazing. As a diyer, itâs one of the few things
I can never seem to get right. Iâm happy to put holes in it,
but seeing professionals patch it is another level.
firesteelrain wrote 11 hours 48 min ago:
My wall has orange peel on it so I just spray it with orange
peel after getting the spackle smooth and sanded. Never know I
patched it.
bluGill wrote 21 hours 2 min ago:
I know how to do drywall as well as a pro - it just takes me 6x
as long. It is easy to do, but you can't do what the pros do
without a lot of practice. By planning on 6x longer you can slow
down, do thiner coats and such (pros do 3 coats of mud, I do 6
for the same thickness). Which falls into the do or hire.
cperciva wrote 23 hours 23 min ago:
True. In this case it was drywall in a poorly lit basement, so I
wasn't all that concerned about it turning out perfectly -- but
it absolutely did turn out much better than it would have if I
tried to do it myself.
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