Is FreeBSD good?

[ralphbsz]

Are there any supercomputers running FreeBSD?

No there are not.

If you define "supercomputer" as "on the top500 list", for the last ~9 years (since 2017), all 500 of them have run some flavor of Linux. There has never been a FreeBSD machine on that list. The last one that was "BSD based" (whatever that means) was turned off in 2013.

If not, why not?

Because lots of people, companies and organizations invest effort to make Linux run highly efficiently on these machines. There are specialized compilers (Portland Group for example), highly tuned libraries (MPI), fast file systems (Lustre, Ceph, GPFS), and proprietary network interconnects. Not to mention the libraries required these days for GPU/TPU usage.

In a nutshell the answer is: Someone who spends a few M$ on a supercomputer will run whatever makes that machine most productive. They don't have time to experiment with an operating system that is less developed and tuned for that application. The effort required to port and tune/optimize the set of tools described above is a large team (dozens of dedicated people) for many months or a few years.

I wonder how many of those decisions are made based on familiarity alone.

At the M$ to B$ level of investment and spending, these decisions are made very much based on numbers and evidence, not familiarity and emotion.

 

[Maturin]

Because

Thanks for your elaborated answer.

 

[Cedric62]

That sounds like a job I feel jumping into sysadmin should be fun: I can't imagine asking an online community about an OS before installing; I'd just install it if it sounds cool.

Sometimes I also like to play around and experiment with things, but for me the definition of a good operating system is a system which allows the user to do boring tasks such as scanning - printing, maintaining spreadsheets, typing letters, creating PDFs, or just basically any sort of mundane work related task. I've been experimenting with FreeBSD for approximately one month, and so far it seems completely capable of doing all of the things I need a computer to do, so I have to say it's a great, but somewhat intimidating operating system.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

They don't have time to experiment with...

Well, that's my point about familiarity. Netflix had time to decide FreeBSD was best for their video distribution. They had the time but...I don't know about the others.

 

[hedwards]

Well, that's my point about familiarity. Netflix had time to decide FreeBSD was best for their video distribution. They had the time but...I don't know about the others.

The usual way that that's done is as a pilot project with a subset of the users that are more technically inclined. It's an opportunity to both establish that as well as identify anything that needs to come up during training. But, most of the people actually using computers at work know nothing about anything beyond a handful of programs and the rest is a matter for IT to get up and running. In that respect. systems like FreeBSD that have robust tools for things related to that are often a good choice.

Now whether or not FreeBSD is an acceptable choice is really going to depend on the specifics, much of what I personally have used computers at work for would run just fine on FreeBSD as it's either browser based or just an RDP client of things running on a remote server.

 

[ralphbsz]

Well, that's my point about familiarity. Netflix had time to decide FreeBSD was best for their video distribution. They had the time but...I don't know about the others.

And there were good reasons for that decision; the person who made that choice (I know them a little bit, and their former manager is a neighbor of ours, matter of fact I see their house right now through the window) looked at the pro and con. The biggest driver: the content serving machines were individual servers, not clustered, who needed a very stable and "experienced" network stack, and had good support for fast and reliable upgrades, plus a few other characteristics. Since the engineer was knowledgable about BSD and the alternatives, that was their choice, and (IMHO) a fine choice.

But that decision doesn't transfer to other uses, such supercomputers. Very different technology and problems.

 

[cracauer@]

Because lots of people, companies and organizations invest effort to make Linux run highly efficiently on these machines. There are specialized compilers (Portland Group for example), highly tuned libraries (MPI), fast file systems (Lustre, Ceph, GPFS), and proprietary network interconnects. Not to mention the libraries required these days for GPU/TPU usage.

Nitpick: Ceph is anything but fast.

 

[atax1a]

sounds like something they'd have to give you antibiotics for

 

[hedwards]

No there are not.

If you define "supercomputer" as "on the top500 list", for the last ~9 years (since 2017), all 500 of them have run some flavor of Linux. There has never been a FreeBSD machine on that list. The last one that was "BSD based" (whatever that means) was turned off in 2013.

IIRC, you can thank Sony for that. People used to have PS3 based clusters that may not have hit the top of the list like that, but could likely have scaled to something rather monstrous.

It's not clear to me whether the difference between a "super computer" and just a massive cluster is that important.

 

[Charlie Brown]

Welcome to the final destination of UNIX world!

 

[lgrant]

No there are not.

If you define "supercomputer" as "on the top500 list", for the last ~9 years (since 2017), all 500 of them have run some flavor of Linux. There has never been a FreeBSD machine on that list. The last one that was "BSD based" (whatever that means) was turned off in 2013.

A lot of supercomputers use Modern Fortran, including the PGI CUDA Fortran compiler (now part of the NVIDIA HPC SDK), that lets you do parallel programming on an NVIDIA CUDA GPU. Although CUDA support on FreeBSD is apparently getting better, it still does not support parallel programming with CUDA Fortran.

And even when FreeBSD finally supports CUDA Fortran, the supercomputer sites, with years of experience configuring Linux systems, and dealing with whatever weirdnesses Linux throws at them, will probably not jump over to FreeBSD just because of its inherent betterness.

 

[lgrant]

On question of whether Windows users should switch to FreeBSD, I think there is still too much "some assembly required".

I just ran into a good example tonight. I wanted to turn on IPv6 privacy, where it changes the host part of the IPv6 address periodically, to make it harder to track your device.

I had to add this to /etc/rc.conf:

ipv6_privacy="YES"

and this to /etc/sysctl.conf:

net.inet6.ip6.use_tempaddr=1
net.inet6.ip6.prefer_tempaddr=1

I am used to modifying various FreeBSD configuration files, so for me, it was not a big deal. But Windows just uses IPv6 privacy by default, so telling a Windows user that they need to modify these scary looking files to turn it on may be overwhelming.

 

[Monti]

FreeBSD is not good. It's very good.

Seriously:
Point is, you need to answer truely for youself:
What you really want/need to do with your machine?

......
It's no rocket science neither. As MG said: For an experienced user a system capable of working like some turn-key OS it's done with a dozen simple commands, or so, plus all the time to download and install, could be done under two hours.......

You got me thinking here. Comparing it to Win10/11 tweaking for performance and privacy/telemetry I always use at least 10 hours. A lot of things that I don't need to do with FreeBSD.

FreeBSD? Love it

 

[drhowarddrfine]

On question of whether Windows users should switch to FreeBSD, I think there is still too much "some assembly required".

That's why I don't own a custom built house. Too much tinkering involved. I'd rather buy one somebody else put together and just put up with what they give me. Don't want to deal with all that hacking.

 

[hasbeen]

FreeBSD is good to me, for me, my olden laptop and desktop. That said, I also have and use box with M$OS for PC gaming. But, when I'm in Windows I can always access my FreeBSD over LAN, and when I'm on FreeBSD I can always connect to my Windows 10 Pro, as well

 

[lgrant]

That's why I don't own a custom built house. Too much tinkering involved. I'd rather buy one somebody else put together and just put up with what they give me. Don't want to deal with all that hacking.

Exactly! I use to be an IBM mainframe systems programmer, so I kind of like tinkering with the OS a bit. But I am not going to recommend FreeBSD to my wife, who is a programmer, but considers the OS just a tool.

 

[drhowarddrfine]

I am not going to recommend FreeBSD to my wife, who is a programmer, but considers the OS just a tool.

You should always get the best tools you can afford. Harbor Freight is OK if you only need something a few times but if you are going to live with a tool for a lifetime then FreeBSD is an excellent choice.