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Comment by philjohn | Hacker News Reader

Netflix have been heavy users of FreeBSD for a long time.

It also had very good tracing tools before Linux did, so reasoning about performance bottlenecks is much easier.

The networking stack has also handily beat Linux for as long as I can remember.

From an objective standpoint, the Linux stack is actually better in a lot of ways. They are generally much, much, much tighter in terms of cache misses and per-packet costs. They have a lot of features that FreeBSD doesn't, and a lot of innovation happens there (BBR).

And they have a huge number of very smart people working on it. I've had the privilege of working with some of them at Google, and have nothing but respect for them.

So basically from an Kernel / System programmer standpoint, There are no reason to use BSDs today apart from License?

From a business perspective, I think it's easier to pick up *BSD talent. Although the pool is smaller, the pool is more talent dense. If you can afford to not care about the kernel (serverless etc) Linux is fine, if you have to care about the kernel and hardware I'd pick FreeBSD 100% of the time. Also much easier to influence overall project direction and get patches integrated.

>"The networking stack has also handily beat Linux for as long as I can remember."

Can you quantify what "beat" means here? Do you have a citation for this? I am doubting this is true in 2017.

> The networking stack has also handily beat Linux for as long as I can remember.

None of the TOP500 use FreeBSD [1]. I would have thought this would be a primary consideration for a supercomputer. Most of them are using Linux (99.6%!).

1. https://www.top500.org/statistics/details/osfam/4

HPC generally doesn't use IP, so they're using Linux but not the Linux network stack.

Yeah I don't see FreeBSD entering the HPC market ever, except maybe for I/O nodes. Nothing explicitly wrong with that, you have to choose battles.

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