[HN Gopher] FreeBSD from a NetBSD developer's perspective
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FreeBSD from a NetBSD developer's perspective
Author : jayp1418
Score : 99 points
Date : 2021-06-06 18:21 UTC (4 hours ago)
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| cosmotic wrote:
| Users perspective? This specific user is a developer; I'd say
| this subject is quite misleading.
| dang wrote:
| Ok, we've promoted the user in the title above.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > On the other hand, QEMU is this huge piece of software with
| documentation scattered all over the web and no man pages.
|
| On every Linux distro I can recall it has manpages, and glancing
| at the AUTHOR section on Ubuntu implies that it's upstream and
| not a local distro-added thing. Anyone know what's going on
| there?
| motiejus wrote:
| > On the other hand, QEMU is this huge piece of software with
| documentation scattered all over the web and no man pages.
|
| My frequent resource: https://manpages.debian.org/jessie/qemu-
| system-x86/qemu-syst...
|
| Not available for BSDs? Maybe that's a mishap by the distro?
| toast0 wrote:
| I've got several man pages for qemu (FreeBSD 13.0, qemu-5.0.1)
| $ apropos qemu qemu(1) - QEMU User Documentation
| qemu-img(1) - QEMU disk image utility vdeq, vdekvm,
| vdeqemu(1) - Virtual Distributed Ethernet wrapper for QEMU/KVM
| virtual machines qemu-block-drivers(7) - QEMU block
| drivers reference qemu-cpu-models(7) - QEMU CPU Models
| qemu-ga-ref(7) - QEMU Guest Agent Protocol Reference
| qemu-qmp-ref(7) - QEMU QMP Reference Manual qemu-ga(8) -
| QEMU Guest Agent qemu-nbd(8) - QEMU Disk Network Block
| Device Server
|
| OTOH, there's no manpage for qemu-system-X, so maybe that's the
| confusion.
|
| Also, >the pw man page is much scarier than NetBSD's useradd.
|
| FreeBSD has an adduser(8), which is a bit more friendly than
| pw.
| andix wrote:
| I never understood why you would use BSD instead of Linux. It it
| just a preference, or is there really a benefit?
| selfhoster11 wrote:
| Preventing software monoculture, for one. The same argument
| could have been made about using Linux instead of Windows not
| that long ago.
| Koshkin wrote:
| To be fair, when faced with a need to make a practical
| decision on whether to use a Linux or a BSD preventing
| software monoculture is the last thing on my mind. (In fact,
| my decision would often be influenced by wanting to keep the
| infrastructure as uniform as possible.)
| nix23 wrote:
| The terrible 1995-2000, where Dec and Solaris boxes where
| thrown away and shiny windows servers run everywhere, not one
| day without a hard reset.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| FreeBSD has superior:
|
| - package management (pkg & ports)
|
| - file system (native ZFS)
|
| - instrumentation (systat & dtrace)
|
| - documentation (handbook & examples in most man pages)
|
| - event notification interface (kqueue vs broken by design
| epoll & inotify)
|
| - license (BSD, no GPLv3 at all)
|
| - stability (POLA)
|
| - quality control (no shellshock, no dataloss on fsync)
|
| - network performance (200gbps TLS encrypted traffic on a
| single socket at Netflix, millions of open connections per
| server at WhatsApp)
|
| - scaling (there is no cliff when resources get saturated just
| a bit of a "back pressure")
|
| It adds up to the point where I see some companies keep their
| use of FreeBSD secret as a competitive advantage.
|
| On the other hand I really like what Alpine Linux is doing.
| kiwijamo wrote:
| Agree with all except the package management part. I switched
| to Debian after 15 years using FreeBSD simply due to how much
| better apt is. I don't have much time so unattended-upgrades
| is a live saver for me. I do miss FreeBSD though, it is
| really well designed and thought out but it is more suited to
| people who are happy to maintain the packages regularly
| especially when there are major upgrades. A recent example is
| the change in the default version for Python which needed
| some manual intervention to sort out the packages. Somethjng
| that honestly apt does much better.
| rwaksmunski wrote:
| I agree, apt is a path well traveled and python2 -> python3
| migration had some opportunities for improvement. On the
| other hand I can custom build nginx with a TUI and have
| package registered as an actual package instead of just
| being dumped into /usr/bin & /etc/ like with a manual build
| on Linux. That feature alone makes me believe FreeBSD
| packages are a tiny bit better as I use it all the time.
| drewg123 wrote:
| Whatever happened to debian built around FreeBSD? (debian
| kFreeBSD?). Did systemd kill it?
| drewg123 wrote:
| As a FreeBSD user, the pkg/ports system is the biggest
| frustration I have. I run -current and update every few weeks
| (using zfs boot envs and beinstall and pkg upgrade). Every
| few months, there is some breaking change. Something suddenly
| wants to uninstall KDE, or cannot find a path forward, etc. I
| ran ubuntu for years and updated as- or more-frequently and
| never encountered these problems. Even updating from LTS to
| LTS was smoother.
|
| I think part of the difference is that ubuntu is a fixed
| release, while FreeBSD is a rolling release. I wish there was
| a fixed release of FreeBSD. The best I've been able to do is
| using -stable quarterly pkgs on FreeBSD-current. This way, I
| only get security updates except for 4 times a year..
| nix23 wrote:
| Yes it's a massive benefit (for me), but i don't tell you which
| one, because would you believe me that linux is better for
| server and development then windows without testing it out for
| yourself?
| pjmlp wrote:
| BSDs actually descends from UNIX and had it not been for the
| AT&T litigation, most likely Linux kernel wouldn't have had the
| uptake it had.
|
| Additionally we don't need UNIX monoculture.
| toast0 wrote:
| Why do you use Linux instead of BSD? It's the same question.
|
| Some potential reasons for using FreeBSD:
|
| It's the same three firewalls forever, not a progression of
| different firewalls.
|
| Old knowledge still works, for example, netstat is still the
| way to list socket connections and ifconfig is still the way to
| configure interfaces. I did some work with FreeBSD in 1999, and
| then nothing until 2004, and all the knowledge transferred,
| then in 2011 I changed jobs and skipped ahead several versions,
| and again all the knowledge transferred. But I kind of stopped
| using Linux heavily in 2013, and when I had to work on it at
| work in 2016, all the tools had changed, so I had to relearn
| (or just avoid the Linux part of my job, which I had the luxury
| of doing).
|
| Official kernel support for ZFS.
|
| Receive side scaling support is nice, if you need it; although
| I guess not a lot of people do.
|
| Different positions on philisophical arguments like an
| integrated source repository with the kernel and the base
| userland software, or init systems.
| bombcar wrote:
| The "old knowledge" thing is a huge one - I know there are
| reasons why Linux keeps changing which firewall manager
| you're supposed to use and now we do ip addr show instead of
| ifconfig eth0 but it is annoying to keep up.
|
| I know Linus has a "don't break userland" theory which causes
| some of the above, but it breaks MY userland memory when I
| have to learn new tools.
|
| Of course if you stay with Ubuntu you'll find fifty thousand
| posts on whatever question you have.
| AshamedCaptain wrote:
| > I know Linus has a "don't break userland" theory which
| causes some of the above
|
| And the worst part, Linux actually breaks userland _way_
| more often than any of the *BSDs...
|
| "Moving what should have been dev nodes to sysfs since 2010
| (TM), then reorganizing sysfs every couple years..."
| Koshkin wrote:
| The way I see it, there's a bigger difference between some
| Linux distributions than between, say, Slackware Linux and a
| BSD, so one could also ask why someone would use Arch instead
| of Ubuntu (or the other way around).
| linguae wrote:
| I use FreeBSD on my servers and for research for the following
| reasons:
|
| 1. The documentation is excellent. The man pages are well-
| written and have useful examples, and the FreeBSD Handbook and
| Developer Guide are great resources.
|
| 2. First-class support for features such as ZFS and Dtrace.
|
| 3. This is a preference, but I like the BSDs' conservatism when
| it comes to adding new features. It seems that new features in
| the BSDs seem to be more in line with the Unix philosophy
| (similar to the Solaris and Joyent communities' attitudes),
| while the Linux community seems to be more willing to add
| features that may solve problems, but not necessarily in the
| way that some diehard Unix users would (e.g., PulseAudio,
| systemd).
|
| With that being said, I use Linux for work and in the WSL
| environment on my Microsoft Surface tablet. Linux is also a
| great operating system, and sometimes I need to use Linux
| instead of FreeBSD for hardware and software support reasons
| (for example, I use CUDA for my job, which needs Linux).
| linguae wrote:
| I wonder how close NetBSD's design is to 4.4BSD, the last version
| of BSD from UC Berkeley's CSRG? My understanding is that FreeBSD
| has a lot of features that are exclusive to it, such as jails and
| Capsicum, and FreeBSD also has some Solaris-derived components
| such as ZFS and Dtrace. I'm under the impression that NetBSD's
| specialty is in providing a BSD that is easily portable to a wide
| range of architectures. Because BSD is not just a kernel, but an
| entire operating system, NetBSD's portability makes it attractive
| when choosing a Unix for "exotic" hardware.
| Koshkin wrote:
| > _Because BSD is not just a kernel, but an entire operating
| system_
|
| To my chagrin, I've never understood this. (A Linux
| distribution is not just a kernel, either.)
| nieve wrote:
| It just means that the BSDs have both their kernel and their
| full userland maintained by the same team whereas Linux to a
| certain extent splits responsibilities between the kernel
| devs and a bunch of other projects.
| enriquto wrote:
| the bsd kernel is made by the same team as the rest of the
| system, and follows the same release schedule. Thus they can
| add a new syscall (e.g., pledge in openbd), and update all
| the programs at once to use it. That wouldn't really be
| possible in a linux distribution.
| livueta wrote:
| > FreeBSD Ports sometimes shows me a text menu for configuring
| package options, while pkgsrc just uses text configuration and
| tries to make it so you don't need to reconfigure packages. I'm
| the kind of person who prefers text configuration, but I can see
| how others wouldn't.
|
| Posting because it took me way too long to run into this on my
| own: make config-recursive lets you get all the ncurses per-port
| menus out of the way at once. Not a full fix, but it does take a
| rough edge off of the default port config/building experience.
|
| e: Real lovers of text config could also use Poudriere to build
| their own packages since it takes per-port config options files.
| I think you can do something similar with portmaster as well.
|
| ee: now I think about it, the choices from the ncurses menus just
| get stored in /var/db/ports, so you could probably edit it
| directly as text if you felt like it.
| throw0101a wrote:
| See _ports(7)_ which mentions "config-recursive" and other
| targets that may be useful:
|
| * https://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?ports(7)
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| I played around with freeBSD for a couple of days recently. I
| quite liked it until it came time to updating the system (I
| delibearely installed 12 to test this). Missing .so libraries
| everywhere. I suppose if I was more of a unix pro I would have
| figured out the problem, but trivial updates are a big deal for
| me.
| liveoneggs wrote:
| jmmv and jmcneill (probably more) work on both NetBSD and FreeBSD
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