Closed What Would You Like to See FreeBSD Do Differently?

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...MIPS has sailed - MIPS Technologies has no intent to provide non-blob drivers and Broadcom has scaled back MIPS greatly.
What's the point in using 32bit hardware...

Both of those technologies/architectures live well for example in the networking. When you are in environment requiring industrial temperature range, long term support (also in form of actually producing given design) from vendor in periods like 7-15 years etc. you don't base your strategic decision about future support on what CPU/SoC is the latest Raspberry Pi based or what is cool this week in the desktop computing. Industrial controllers are another such example.
 
What's the point in using 32bit hardware, when it's slow compared to what's available? At least switch out the CPU. Maybe it's not so easy to upgrade a 32bit CPU to a 64bit CPU in different geographical markets? I guess someone has to cross-build source-code for others.

The idea of supporting various architectures is good, and that's interesting information.
You can not change the CPU in laptops, and I have several ones using 32 bits. Performance is enough for the job, and changing them costs money and adds pollution to the environment. There should be a very good reason to throw away a working system and getting a new one.

Also, for those who want to read it - SUN did some interesting stuff to some SPARC cpus before they had to hand over the shop to some well known database vendor. They stuck a "GPL" sticker on it. Details can be found on the wikipedia page. The verilog source makes for some interesting reading, if one has such interests. Also, there is a page about loongson, which is the chinese MIPS chip. I would like to see FreeBSD run on the 16 core version, maybe on the 64 core version also. This is what I would use for a *BSD Box hardware.
 
Loongson, coming from a guy whose been to China, not even Chinese people can get them. I called their Shanghai centre when I was in Shanghai and spoke Chinese with the receptionist about any Loongson based systems for sale - long-story short outside of industrial or government contracts there's nothing available and they don't know when they'll have them.

MIPS is still around yeah, but for our use, it's not worth it. POWER, ARM64, and maybe RISC-V if they make any soon would be worth it. MIPS, not so much if everything is gonna be frigging blobs.

Fujitsu is sticking with SPARC64 for the present but I'd not count on it to last forever.
 
Dell Laptops allow CPU changes. Intel chips use a socketed PGA989A/B/C and with Sandy/Ivy Bridge I have swapped dual core cpu for quads.
There are also many ITX motherboards that take mobile cpu as well. Mainly embedded stuff. Kontron and Advantech.
So for laptops you have to look at the CPU. Some are infact BGA (Ball Grid Array) which are soldered and not upgradable. Mostly cheap Celerons and ultralights use BGA.
Dell Latitudes are defiantly upgradable as are the Alienware's. Its really down to the bios that manufacturers use. The newest socket version is called G3 for Haswell and I have not experienced them yet.
Now if you have an Celeron N2910 HP laptop you are not upgrading. If your using a tablet it uses a BGA chip. Even some of the baby embedded systems are using SOC which are also BGA. So cheaper things are moving away from CPU upgrades but I wouldn't declare it dead yet. Quality systems are still upgradable. Manufacturers who regulate what Wifi card works in your laptop are defiantly not allowing CPU upgrades. So its a mixed bag.
 
Maybe to better grasp some yet unrealized future path it may be beneficial to rule out undesirable characteristics. The following rant is probably already company policy but subtle changes can slip through, unnoticed, and then, due to a 'mind set' you will have arrived at an alternate FUTURE! For what it's worth:

I like my O.S to do what I want, when I want, for as long as I want, and not morph itself into what someone else wants. I do not want an 'experience'.

Please increase size of /var in initial installation instructions for users who install fully blotted desktops. I would highly recommend nothing less than 15gb. This would eliminate any maintenance of this partition, for a while.

Thank-you FreeBSD developers
 
As a FreeBSD desktop user, I would like to be able to:

1) access CD/DVDs right after install
2) access USB devices, especially thumb drives, right after install
3) access NTFS drives, at least to read, without a lot of trouble
4) install Flash more easily.

Maybe some option to do those things? I would think that some of that might even be useful for servers.

I know about PC-BSD. I even tried it. But I found it noticeably slower, and I don't think it solved all those issues.
 
walterbyrd I don't understand what the issues are but I've never had any of them.

I am surprised to learn that. Which version of FreeBSD are you running?

I am running 10.3 AMD-64 with ZFS and fully encrypted disk.

According to you, you can access a NTFS drive right after install? Do the drives auto-mount? Because that has certainly not been my experience.

Thumb drives, DVDs, and CDs, all auto-mount right after install?

Using Firefox, Adobe Flash seems iffy. Some sites, which I think use Flash, seem to work. But I often get the message that I need to have flash installed.
 
If you need things to automount then FreeBSD might not be the best for you.
FreeBSD is an advanced operating system that does not assume anything for you.
You can freely mount any device on your system right after install.
NTFS is a native Windows filesystem. Why should FreeBSD directly support it.
It has virus features built right in with Alternative Data Streams, use FAT32 if you must.
Flash was dead 3 years ago with html5 introduction.
 
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I am running 10.3 AMD-64 with ZFS and fully encrypted disk.
. . .
Using Firefox, Adobe Flash seems iffy. Some sites, which I think use Flash, seem to work. But I often get the message that I need to have flash installed.

Firefox et al are not part of FreeBSD. I agree that it would be nice to have all the desktop environments, and various GUI programs which we might wish to install, integrate seamlessly. FreeBSD developers however have other priorities. I can't see the benefit of getting on their case for something which is not really part of their mandate.

There are also a few developers for the FreeBSD port of KDE https://freebsd.kde.org/ (for example), but I don't believe they have the resources to make things perfect in the way that you suggest. As it is, FreeBSD does all these things right out of the box in the way that it is intended.
 
1) access CD/DVDs right after install
2) access USB devices, especially thumb drives, right after install
3) access NTFS drives, at least to read, without a lot of trouble
autofs(5) provides this but you need to enable it yourself. Maybe the installer could have an option to enable it automatically, like with the new hardening options in FreeBSD 11.0.
 
So yeah, you seem to be getting the general idea...


And you lost it. There's other blocking issues here and there, yes but the big one glaring at us in the face at the moment is the fact that you still need to reimplement the kernel features. You still seem to not understand that neither AMD nor Intel provide us with kernel drivers. They don't. I've looked into this. So no matter what, the people in FreeBSD maintaining the graphics stack have to play persistent game of catch-up with Linux - Linux releases a new kernel with new merged AMD/Intel code, and we have to reimplement that. Which may be trivial or not. I'm not a graphics developer, so I am not sure.

And you seem to be stuck on AMD. AMD sucks on FreeBSD. Use Intel or Nvidia. I've never had a single AMD card work properly *and* perform well. I've had the former, never the latter. I blame AMD's crappy GPU and CPU architectures, as of late, and their complete and utter disconnect with the gaming community. Nvidia may not be open source friendly but the hiccups they've given are zilch. Ditto for Intel.
Well I just downloaded the new NVIDIA driver for FreeBSD for NVIDIA's web site. So I would say they are a little bit Open source friendly. BTW, I have an Intel Q35 graphics card that DOESN'T work with FreeBSD -11 but works with TrueOS and OpenBSD !!!
 
OpenBSD often seems a bit ahead of FreeBSD in supported desktop and laptop hardware. NVidia drivers are available, both as port and package, through FreeBSD which makes installation easier. (Though if using pkg, you will have to enable Linux support.)
Glad to hear it's working with TrueOS as that usually means it will eventually work with FreeBSD.
 
As a network engineer in Internet Service Provider, I really would like to see:
  • Improved dummynet as traffic shaper/limiter by mask: integrate it with pf as it does with ipfw (it's extremely useful for shaping per ip/customer).
  • Make NAT! Seriously, there are a bunch of NAT mechanisms: pf nat, natd, ipfw nat, ng_nat, but all of them has various weakness. pf nat, for example, still needs in ftp-proxy to FTP work, natd obsolete due works in user-space, ipfw nat needs multiple instances for works at multi-processor systems, ng_nat is far from ideal when you needs in dynamic configuration of it. What I want is something works at SMP, in ipfw, configuring via tables (something like " ipfw table add $number $srcip $dstip", ipfw nat to dst-ip table($number,dstip) from table($number,srcip) to any"
  • Improved ng_netflow or similar: supports v9, IPFix, Network Event Logging/Network Security Event Logging.
  • Added ipfw states synchronization mechanisms, like it done with pfsync or Linux's conntrackd. Improved dynamic rules/sessions management instruments - not only current ipfw -d show, but instument with any manipulation, like Linux's conntrack
  • Added software configuration management tool, like Puppet. I'm currently use Puppet for management of ~30 servers, but it's supported limitedly.
  • Added MPLS support.
  • Improved network routing/forwarding performance.
  • Documentated netmap-related things. According to documentation, it's a perfectly good, but there is almost none of production examples. Seems like no one understand (sorry, Luigi Rizzo) how it uses!
 
Would like to see a straightforward SD card reader port for digital photography applications.

also, keep i386 architecture support for ports and packages.
 
Would like to see a straightforward SD card reader port for digital photography applications.

That's normally just USB. In any case, that's a hardware thing. You can buy SD readers if your box didn't come with one.
 
I can't see the benefit of getting on their case for something which is not really part of their mandate.

Please do not misunderstand me. I am not trying to get on anybody's case.

The question was "what would you like to see FreeBSD do differently?" Since somebody asked, that was my two cents.

As a server, I don't see any problems with freebsd. But, as a desktop, it is a little surprising that I have to make special efforts to get freebsd do, what has been taken for granted in mac, windows, and linux, for the last 20+ years.
 
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