Credit where credit is due

D

donallen

I am a retired software developer/manager with a lot of hands-on OS experience, especially in the scheduling and memory-management areas.

I have a checkered history with FreeBSD. I've tried multiple times over many years to use the system and have always run into show-stopping problems. And I have not been shy about describing my negative experiences in this forum.

I've been running 13.0 for months on my primary system and while it is not absolutely flawless (what is?), the system has really performed well and been absolutely reliable. This has not been the case recently with my favorite Linux distribution(s). And there are some things about FreeBSD that I really value that I can't get from Linux:

- I don't like the idea of journaled file-systems on SSDs, because they require writing all meta-data updates twice. And sequential journals provide no performance advantage on SSDs. So I use UFS with non-journaled soft-updates enabled, which works very well (I can't resist noting that the late, great Ray Tomlinson, the man who sent the first email across a network and who invented the '@' notation, added the exact equivalent of UFS soft-updates to the Tenex file-system 50 years ago; Tenex was the predominant OS on the Arpanet; I ran the Tenex project at BBN in those days and Ray was a close colleague and did this work when I was involved in the project; he had written the original Tenex file-system, which was much like UFS async at first). I don't have this choice with Linux. So I'm forced to either run a journaled file-system or run ext4 without a journal and do frequent backups, to guard against the theoretical possibility of fsck being unable to restore file-system correctness in the event of an unsafe shutdown.
- Speaking of backups, I really like the ability to back up a UFS file-system while the system is running and still get a consistent snapshot. With Linux, I am forced to shut the system down to do my backups without the system wiggling around while they are happening.

Since I've posted my share of complaints here in the past, I thought it was my obligation to acknowledge the fact that the current release is the first I've encountered that does the job better than the alternatives (and I've tried them all). And it's nice to use a system that doesn't feel like it was put together by shopping at a chaotic street market.
 
I personally also like FreeBSD a lot, I'm using it since 4.9 version. It was almost love at a first sight (I was Slackware user and I liked it).
If you'd like to credit where credit is due you could donate some money to the FreeBSD's foundation. I think that's the best way to pay respect.

Bashing Linux on FreeBSD forums doesn't help much in my eyes. Most of the time if you have problems on Linux (in production environment) it's administrator's fault. It's becoming a trend that anybody can be a guru Linux administrator nowadays if they have Ubuntu installed. And be a hacker if they go Kali Linux.

We have big international production environments (I wish I could specify this a bit more). Windows, Linux, HP-UX (with a tear in my eye - Solaris) co-exist in the same environment serving people and big machines. Yes you get crash now and then, bugs do exist in software. But obeying strict standards we setup we created a very solid and reliable environment. And neither of the OS has big issues.

As you are retired software engineer/developer -- do look at OpenBSD source code when you'll have time. It's so beautiful, almost as if you're looking at a picture.
 
_martin said:
Bashing Linux on FreeBSD forums doesn't help much in my eyes.
Click to expand...
That didn't happen much in days of yore--back in the days of the original FreeBSD forum from 2004 when I first joined. We considered Linux to be a friendly cousin with whom we'd share technical notes. Other than the occasional snide remark someone would refer to coming from that side, it was pretty friendly altogether until social media destroyed it all and it became easier for kids to install software and become experts in "computers and stuff".
 
Just two things:

1. Linux has F2FS. This is a file system developed by Samsung especially for SSDs, which basically is a log structured file system. Since Samsung produces a lot of SSDs, they probably are knowing quite well what they are doing there. So there is more choice under Linux for using SSDs than you probably knew.
2. File system snapshots can produced by a variation of different tools under Linux as well, be it LVM, Btrfs or ZFS.
 
hardworkingnewbie said:
Just two things:

1. Linux has F2FS. This is a file system developed by Samsung especially for SSDs, which basically is a log structured file system. Since Samsung produces a lot of SSDs, they probably are knowing quite well what they are doing there. So there is more choice under Linux for using SSDs than you probably knew.
2. File system snapshots can produced by a variation of different tools under Linux as well, be it LVM, Btrfs or ZFS.
Click to expand...

I am well aware of f2fs. I much prefer the well-proven UFS/soft-updates approach for my use. And this was not my only reason for my preference for FreeBSD vs Linux; it was not the determining factor.

As for being able to take file-system snapshots with Linux, look what you suggested -- LVM, BTRFS or ZFS. LVM is extra setup (I've done it) and probably extra overhead. BTRFS has a very questionable reputation to this day and I don't trust it. ZFS? I didn't mention it, but one of things that led me to tried-and-true UFS in my FreeBSD setup was that I found that sqlite performance with ZFS is pretty bad. Yes, I can do a bit of a research project to figure out how to fine-tune ZFS to improve the performance with no guarantee that it will match sqlite under UFS, but why would I want to do that when UFS/softdeps do the job for me with minimal effort? Those of you offering unsolicited advice are missing the point and are wasting network bandwidth -- I've got a setup that works well for me and my intention here was just to express my thanks to the FreeBSD developers for a job well done.
 
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