Re: The case for FreeBSD

You omitted one of things that I think makes FreeBSD one of the best open
source operating systems:

The very careful attention to POLA.  It's incredibly comforting to
everyone in my department here that we have successfully run binaries
originally compiled against FreeBSD 2.2 on our FreeBSD 5.3 systems.

This sort of conservatism is incredibly valuable to organizations with
1) lengthy acquisition and validation processes
2) a mix of in-house and commercially contracted software for which it is
   not always even possible to simply recompile from source

While a few linux distributions attempt this as well (notably Red Hat),
in my opinion they are not nearly as successful as they are often forced
to act in a rear-guard fashion against changes introduced by the many
disparate development groups that comprise the linux community.

Moreover, FreeBSD has delivered this consistency while still continuing
rewriting and updating.  Kudos, to your special and careful attention to
versioning.  I wish every open source development organization had your
commitment to only changing ABI and API alongside major version bumps.

Jon


On Sun, 6 Feb 2005, Scott Long wrote:

> All,
>
> There has been a lot of recent talk and advocacy for NetBSD 2.0 from the
> NetBSD team.  Most recently there were a series of articles posted my
> Chritos Zoulas describing why NetBSD is relevant and why it's a better
> choice than either FreeBSD or OpenBSD.  While I strongly applaud the
> accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is
> a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of
> their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD.
>
> First of all, the last decade has been ripe with cooperation between all
> three of the major BSD projects.  Each projects gives and takes from the
> others, and there are a number of developers that have commit
> privileges to multiple BSD projects.  Drivers, infrastructure,
> bug fixes, and features readily flow between projects.  This benefits
> everyone, especially since it allows each group to focus on unique
> aspects of the system without having to be bogged down with other
> aspects.  As the old saying goes, FreeBSD is about performance, NetBSD
> is about platform portability, and OpenBSD is about security.
>
> So is that still the case?  The NetBSD advocates are quick to claim that
> NetBSD 2.0 now beats FreeBSD in both performance and features.
> Fortunately, that just is not true.  There is a very long list of
> reasons why FreeBSD is an excellent operating system and an ideal choice
> for the enterprise and the desktop.  Briefly:
>
> - Netgraph provides unparalleled flexibility to build complex network
> environments.  Netgraph modules are available for packet filtering,
> tunneling, redirection, inspection, and injection at any point in the
> network stack in a transparent and quick fashion.  Modules can be
> stacked together like bricks to meet just about any need.  Developing
> custom modules is also easy and very well documented.  There simply is
> not anything else in any other OS that is as flexible, easy to use, and
> full-featured as netgraph.
>
> - GEOM provides to the storage stack what netgraph provides to the
> network stack.  Transformations like mirroring, striping, spanning, and
> encryption can be configured for any storage object from the filesystem
> on up.  The vinum volume manager was recently converted to use GEOM and
> now provides high-availability and high-reliability redundancy to any
> storage object.  While NetBSD recently imported Vinum, it took the
> older, less stable and less functional version that has since been
> deprecated by its author in FreeBSD in favor of GEOM-Vinum.
>
> - Advanced network features and protocols such as SACK, NFSv4,
> SYN-cache/SYN-cookies, compressed TIME_WAIT, and accept filters allow
> for fast, secure, and scalable network operations in an ever-increasing
> hostile and busy Internet.  Packet filters like IPFW and PF provide
> advanced filtering, shaping, and NAT sharing.  FreeBSD continues to run
> some of the busiest and most important network sites in the world with
> these technologies.
>
> - Outstanding desktop and laptop support is provided by a number of
> technologies.  Nvidia develops and distributes native 3D drivers for its
> graphics cards for FreeBSD.  A team of FreeBSD developers works closely
> with engineers at Intel to provide the best ACPI power management
> support available in an open source operating system.  The Gnome and KDE
> desktop environments work flawlessly under FreeBSD thanks to another
> team of volunteers that work closely with those projects.
>
> - The "Ports" collection provides one-step support for over 11,000 3rd
> party application.  Compile-time and run-time dependencies between
> applications and libraries are tracked and handled automatically,
> eliminating conflicts and incompatibilities.  Pre-compiled binaries are
> available for nearly every supported package for quick and easy
> installation.  This system continues to be one of the crown jewels of
> FreeBSD and has been copied by other OSes due to its overwhelming
> popularity.
>
> - Many commercial vendors also support FreeBSD.  Companies like Intel,
> AMD, LSI, Adaptec, and 3Ware, just to name a few, provide development
> staffing, direct developer resources, and end-user support for many of
> their products.  The result is high quality drivers, applications, and
> platform support for a wide range of modern hardware.
>
> - Continuous testing and QA is performed by a number of teams within the
> FreeBSD community.  Tests are runs every day that range from simple
> full-tree compile runs to intensive network, I/O, and computational
> stress tests.  Developers receive status emails and bug reports to help
> identify, track, and resolve defects.  While no amount of testing is
> perfect and bugs do slip through, the testing that exists vastly exceeds
> the efforts of most other open source projects and contributes towards
> every FreeBSD release being high quality.
>
> NetBSD 2.0 is a significant step forward for NetBSD, but the large
> amount of stagnation cannot be overlooked.  Their claim at high
> portability should have been leveraged years ago to make them the leader
> in embedded OSes.  It's great that NetBSD is committed to supporting
> legacy architectures, but how does the effort to do so benefit modern
> architectures or encourage wider use and more adoption of NetBSD?
>
> And while NetBSD now supports SMP, it uses the same low-efficiency model
> that FreeBSD used previously.  Scalability is significantly limited
> because only one CPU at a time can access kernel services or drive
> hardware devices.  The whole point of the 'SMPng' project for FreeBSD
> 5.x is to eliminate this problem and provide fine-grained parallelism in
> the kernel.  Converting the traditional BSD design to this model is not
> trivial, but the work on this is very much alive, and each FreeBSD 5.x
> release is faster, more scalable, and more stable than the previous release.
>
> All of the open source BSD's have a place, whether it's OpenBSD, NetBSD,
> or FreeBSD.  Each continues to excel at what they've shown to be good
> at, and I expect the sharing and goodwill between them to continue.  And
> in that vein, FreeBSD is still the 'silent workhorse' that runs
> corporate networks and powers advanced appliances.  However, it's time
> to drop the 'silent' part and start loudly advocating it.  FreeBSD is an
> outstanding OS, and developers and users should be proud of it.
>
> Scott
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