Linux v. FreeBSD

A

ameoba

Supreme [H]ardness
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Jan 9, 2001
Messages
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There seems to be a general impression that FreeBSD is superior to Linux for server purposes. Is there any real justification (concrete feature lists / benchmarks) for this or is it just one of those left-over things from some of the earlier releases of Linux (I remember suffering through the mess that was the early 2.4 kernel...)?

Discuss.
 
I'd say both are good. Properly configured, both should provide nearly infinite uptimes (minus a kernel upgrade here or there).

FreeBSD is simpler in that there are much fewer choices by default. This might lead to the perception of better reliability. Personally, I'd choose Linux, but depending upon your needs, FreeBSD is fine. There are some more advanced features in Linux that allow it to run on fancier hardware than FreeBSD. I'm confident that a well configured Linux box will beat the pants off any FreeBSD host (especially on high end hardware).... but it's relative. The difference isn't that significant between either... both are light years ahead of Windows with regards to stability.

With Linux, there is always the "suffering" factor... you definitely need to be prepared to go the extra mile to make things right. FreeBSD is ... well... FreeBSD. No suffering.. it is what it is... warts and all.
 
My understanding is that to programmers, freebsd is, and I quote here a friend, Linux fanatic and co-worker, "more elegant" code.
 
Being that FreeBSD is based on BSD 4.4 Lite, which has ties to the original UNIX(T) Devloped by AT&T/Bell Labs, it has a much older bases, and often more mature code. Also the BSD variant of unix was the first to have TCP/IP. At first Linux I believe used part of the ip stack from BSD's codebase, but later reimplemented it. Both have there uses, same goes for the BSDs (Open,Net,Free,etc.).
 
I wrote a little webpage a while back about why I prefer FreeBSD to Linux.

I'm confused by the statement that FreeBSD has "much fewer choices by default." Choices about what?
 
I prefer freebsd. I like it better than any linux distro that I tried for a variety of reasons. Can I cite studies showing its better? Nope its a boxers or briefs thing.
 
I like FreeBSD better. I've tried 3 linux distros ( redhat, debian, gentoo ) and none of them seemed to have the stability and rigidness of BSD.
 
People really need to understand what they're saying Linux. It's pretty much just a kernel.
All the other stuff is GNU utilities, and open--source software. Some die-hard BSD users complain of the Linux link spaghetti. In some distros the filesystem is in utter disarray, but not all.

Linux has made some GREAT leaps forward compared to BSD though.
For the most part you can install Linux on brand-new hardware and have everything work if you can get it configured. There are a few things that take awhile to work our, but not many.

I haven't tried BSD in awhile, so I have a couple questions for BSD dieharders:
How is firewire support?
Do you have an nForce ethernet driver?
How is USB 2.0 support?
Do you have 3D with a Radeon 9XXX series, or GeForce 5XXX series?
How is SATA support?
 
I hope you mean FreeBSD. There's the original 4.4BSDLite-2 code base, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, BSD/OS, earlier SunOS releases...There's lots of *BSDs. Be specific.

There's firewire support, but I've never tried it.

I believe there is an NForce Ethernet driver now, but I've never tried it.

Not sure about USB2, I've never tried it.

I use DRI with my Radeon 9100s all the time. :) I don't know about the faster ones, cause I've never tried it. I believe the NVIDIA driver supports the 5xxx cards, though. What are you planning to do, play games?

SATA support is there for some controllers, but I've never tried it.

I use FreeBSD on servers and some workstations, but generally not with bleeding-edge desktop hardware. Server hardware is a different story. Just about all of the information you wanted was about desktop hardware, which doesn't surprise me at all.

Notice how all of your questions are about "desktop" hardware, except maybe SATA? Typical. I think Linux users are missing the point...We don't care if FreeBSD is "hip." It's the unfashionable workhorse that gets the job done in just about the most direct means as possible. I'm perfectly happy using FreeBSD on my servers, avoiding distribution wars, nasty file system organization, etc.

Linux has buzzword status. Eventually that'll wear off and things may change.

I see people moving from Linux to FreeBSD quite often. I never see anyone go back. Most of the time it's more experienced sysadmins that move to FreeBSD...Hell, I used Linux for five years before switching to FreeBSD four years ago.
 
I have tried FreeBSD some myself, but currently don't have a use for it. I agree it is very stable, and pretty easy to understand after working with most other *nix like OSs. One of the reasons I like using Slackware is that is uses simple shell scripts for boot scripts, instead of the SVR4 style init scripts. This is similar to the BSD variants that I have played with (OpenBSD and FreeBSD), although they usually have the rc scripts, then an rc.conf for configuration, or something similar to that. Where Slackware just has a rc.d directory holding all the scripts, and you simple enable or disable the script by changing its execute perms.
 
[H]EMI_426 said:
I hope you mean FreeBSD. There's the original 4.4BSDLite-2 code base, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonFlyBSD, BSD/OS, earlier SunOS releases...There's lots of *BSDs. Be specific.

There's firewire support, but I've never tried it.

I believe there is an NForce Ethernet driver now, but I've never tried it.

Not sure about USB2, I've never tried it.

I use DRI with my Radeon 9100s all the time. :) I don't know about the faster ones, cause I've never tried it. I believe the NVIDIA driver supports the 5xxx cards, though. What are you planning to do, play games?

SATA support is there for some controllers, but I've never tried it.

I use FreeBSD on servers and some workstations, but generally not with bleeding-edge desktop hardware. Server hardware is a different story. Just about all of the information you wanted was about desktop hardware, which doesn't surprise me at all.

Notice how all of your questions are about "desktop" hardware, except maybe SATA? Typical. I think Linux users are missing the point...We don't care if FreeBSD is "hip." It's the unfashionable workhorse that gets the job done in just about the most direct means as possible. I'm perfectly happy using FreeBSD on my servers, avoiding distribution wars, nasty file system organization, etc.

Linux has buzzword status. Eventually that'll wear off and things may change.

I see people moving from Linux to FreeBSD quite often. I never see anyone go back. Most of the time it's more experienced sysadmins that move to FreeBSD...Hell, I used Linux for five years before switching to FreeBSD four years ago.
Click to expand...


Precisely my point. Most people asking this question are implying use for a desktop machine.

I have no arguments that FreeBSD is very stable, but I've got Linux servers that hundereds of days of uptime. I actually migrated my MySQL server from FreeBSD to Linux. It's just as stable, and it's faster. Not magnitudes faster, but enough to notice.
 
[H]EMI_426 said:
I use FreeBSD on servers and some workstations, but generally not with bleeding-edge desktop hardware. Server hardware is a different story. Just about all of the information you wanted was about desktop hardware, which doesn't surprise me at all.

Notice how all of your questions are about "desktop" hardware, except maybe SATA? Typical. I think Linux users are missing the point...We don't care if FreeBSD is "hip." It's the unfashionable workhorse that gets the job done in just about the most direct means as possible. I'm perfectly happy using FreeBSD on my servers, avoiding distribution wars, nasty file system organization, etc.

Linux has buzzword status. Eventually that'll wear off and things may change.

I see people moving from Linux to FreeBSD quite often. I never see anyone go back. Most of the time it's more experienced sysadmins that move to FreeBSD...Hell, I used Linux for five years before switching to FreeBSD four years ago.
Click to expand...

I'm actually looking at a server that we're planning on rebuilding; I'm just getting sick of the ports system (I shouldn't have to read through makefiles to figure out how to get PHP built to use IMAP over SSL); Debian's package manager makes it 10x easier to keep packages up to date.

Considering that we've standardized on Debian for all things here, pretty much all the 'issues' that have been cited with Linux go away. It seems to me that using FreeBSD on servers is just a hip sysadmin thing to do, unless there's a definate advantage to using it.

If I can't convince my boss to move away from FreeBSD, the package system is going out the window & I'll just use
pkglink
to keep everything straight.
 
How'd you manage to screw up php? I just had to select a few options when php asked some questions during a ports build. I just used portupgrade to update Squirrelmail, php, imap-uw, cclient and a bunch of other stuff without issue...

Either I'm doing something right or I'm just lucky, cause all the major gripes people seem to have about the FreeBSD ports system have never been problems for me.

The ports system is great once you figure out how to make it do what you want. It's not hard at all.

Use what you want. I like FreeBSD and will continue to use it. I have no compelling reasons to move away from FreeBSD, and I certainly don't encourage desktop-jockeys to bother switching from Linux. I like dealing with a userbase that has a very low noob:experienced user ratio.

I don't view uptime as a good measure of system stability. Uptime could just mean you're lazy. Leaving a machine running isn't all that difficult.
 
Give us more details on your ports problem, we can probably work it out. I love ports with portupgrade and now portaudit. Great tools and they work quite well really.

As far as bleeding edge support, I dunno. I use windows for my desktop and freebsd for my servers. The right tool for the job for me.
 
Longest uptimes/stable machines? Look at netcraft.com. The top 10 sites are all BSD-based sites.

99.9% of all Linux variants to the ports system are total ripoffs. Debian, Gentoo, etc - all ripoffs.

It took me one hour to upgrade all 10 of my FreeBSD boxes from 4.9-STABLE to 4.10-STABLE. Gotta love buildworld.

One thing that Linux has that FreeBSD doesn't? The sponsorships. That speeds up development on Linux nicely. It also speeds up the 'another linux kernel exploit' on slashdot though.
 
why are we arguing? We all know this whole thing goes no where. Every one needs to make there own choices, as no one is the same.
 
The problem with ports was that, in order to get imap/ssl in PHP some IMAP library needed to be compiled with SSL (part of imap-uw). imap-uw wasn't compiled from a port (it looked like it was installed from binary... maybe at install time?) so I had to track down the line in the PHP makefile that checked this library file for SSL support and then track down which package provided that library. Once I'd done all this, it was a simple job.

I'm sure a lot of my distaste for the ports system comes from the jackass that built these servers (who has since left the country). He has things built from source that depend on things in ports & then there's things in ports that depend on those packages. Trying to upgrade/recompile the ports tree took down the mail server for about 1.5 days, until we could figure out how he'd had everythign built.
 
Yeah, that's just poor administration. No wonder you don't like ports; you had a cowboy running the machines before you. That sounds a lot like the headaches I had under Linux that helped drive me towards FreeBSD.

I used to run a FreeBSD server for some friends. Every now and then they'd see fit to just rebuild something from source cause they simply didn't understand how the FreeBSD ports system worked, and that would just fuck things right up. They eventually got tired of me telling them were doing things wrong and decided they didn't want to listen any more, so they run the machine without my help any more...Never mind that they can't upgrade anything very easily and the machine is generally problematic, while the machine I set up for my stuff after parting ways with them has been rock-solid.

Don't blame the ports system cause the previous admin was a fucking idiot.
 
There is indeed support for the nForce2 ethernet controller.

I run FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE-p8 on a A7N8X DLX mobo and right now I am using the nVidia controller as a test.

The problem is that the support for the controller is not out of the box. Have to install it from the ports at /usr/ports/net/nvnet. It's a .ko and it works like a champ so far.

There is also support for the nVidia onboard sound (2 channel I believe, not 4 channel support) with the pcm driver.

Support for the onboard 3Com controller was out of the box (it wasn't always this way for the 3Com controller on the A7N8X DLX).

If the system is built properly the first time and all programs are installed from ports properly there shouldn't be much of an issue with installing/upgrading using cvsup and portupgrade.

I just with the ATI and nVidia drivers were better supported. Sure, nVidia works (for the most part). Support for a Gigabyte FX5200 sucked and I had to drop back to a PNY GF4MX400 to get decent support with the nVidia drivers.

The X ATI drivers are good for 2D. I can use my ATI 9700 pro dual head without any problems but the 3D support sucks.

In the past I built a FreeBSD system with GF3 Ti 200 that ran awesome and I could play the Linux version of UT2K3 without any problems. I considered taking the GF3 Ti 200 back from the wife but decided it would be too much of a PITA.
 
I use Linux on only one machine at work. This is for two reasons:

1) Samba or NFS under BSD can't mount an AS400's QDLS folder share (This is with 4.10-STABLE, Samba 3.x, and V5R1 on the AS400). It's a no go. I constantly get "resource not available" even after using the correct username and password.

2) No driver support for the internal 8-port modem I use for customer needs.

Give me #1 and #2 under *BSD and Linux will once again be out the door. I could fix #2 by just sticking an 8-port modem WIC card in one of our Cisco routers and using ACLs to keep traffic out of everything else but the internal 8-port modem card was unbeatable in price (~$100 on eBay). Even then I still would have been left with problem #1.

My Linux distro of choice is Debian. Gentoo went out the door after taking more than 1 hour to install.
 
NewBlackDak said:
I have no arguments that FreeBSD is very stable, but I've got Linux servers that hundereds of days of uptime. I actually migrated my MySQL server from FreeBSD to Linux. It's just as stable, and it's faster. Not magnitudes faster, but enough to notice.
Click to expand...

Chances are you bumped your head into the useless filesystem. UFS does its job, as does UFS2, but neither are particularly good compared to alternatives. Just think that somewhere, over the rainbow JFS looms.
 
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