I come from 18 years on AIX and 10 years on Solaris. Presently my everday laptop is FreeBSD and my web/mail servers run on OpenBSD but I am going to move the web/mail servers to either FreeBSD or OpenIndiana, but I have pros and cons for each.
FreeBSD positives:
FreeBSD negatives:
OpenIndiana positives:
OpenIndiana negatives:
Other questions:
If anyone cares to give their opinions or thoughts, I'd like to hear.
FreeBSD positives:
- Large community support
- Large number of applications
- Jails
- vnet Jails
- netgraph (although lacking compared to dladm)
- Security team that is active
- Good documentation
- zfs
- Performance
FreeBSD negatives:
- vnet Jails because they have a severe memory leak.
- Jails configuration gets large in rc.conf with more than two or three.
- zfs because I've read that 2GB isn't really enough and that is all I have.
OpenIndiana positives:
- Crossbow network virtualization.
- Zones.
- zfs is in the base install and even works on my test server with 512MB of memory.
OpenIndiana negatives:
- Not a large community and I wonder if they will exist in two years.
- Security. They have a web page on their wiki which was created in 2010 I believe that said it would be updated with advisories, but it only contains an email address to send concerns to. Although Bryan Cantrill (formerly of Sun and creator DTrace) who is VP of Engineering at Joyent did put in a patch for sysret that was picked up upstream by OI.
- Not a lot of packages and some are outdated.
- Documentation compared to FreeBSD is lacking, but Solaris documentation is large and mostly suffices for OI, so this is mostly a wash.
Other questions:
- FreeBSD Jails and unionfs. It doesn't appear that unionfs is widely used for Jails when it would simplify patching of multiple Jails, so why is it not commonly used?
If anyone cares to give their opinions or thoughts, I'd like to hear.
