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Comment by UI_at_80x24 | Hacker News Reader

I've had the chance to meet several of the developers at the BSDCan conferences; kudos people, you really deserve it.

I moved to BSD world when Debian adopted SystemD and I am happy that I did. It is often said that Linux is more stable then Windows, well BSD could be considered like Granite compared to Linux. I really love it. OpenBSD for the edge, and FreeBSD for internals and workstations.

The driver updates are very welcome too, getting my video card to work 4k@60Hz was a bit of a task finding the correct driver, but I see this update addresses that too.

Once again, thank-you to everybody who contributes.

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As someone who hasn't used BSD, but is considering it for a small server (not mission critical, so OK for me to be learning with), could you expand on the major differences to you between OpenBSD and FreeBSD (vs possibly other options)? When you say you like OpenBSD "for the edge", do you mean cutting-edge, or edge network equipment? Thanks!

Well, they contracted "edge" with "internal", so I think they mean network edge?

NetBSD is for network edge.

and your toaster

OpenBSD is more conservative and security-minded, so I'd say network edge. Interestingly though, its laptop hardware support has historically been better.

OpenBSD devs actually tend to use OpenBSD on their own systems (and most of them own ThinkPads), which, weirdly, is not the case with most FreeBSD devs, who run something else on their desktop.

This isn't necessarily a fair characterization of FreeBSD devs, although it's probably pretty close. I'd guess about 50-50 FreeBSD vs Mac users.

This has noticeably changed in past years. More and more thinkpads, more and more dogfooding

I'm guessing this is because macOS pulls from FreeBSD on a semi-regular basis.

Maybe they pull some things sometimes but I get the sense their command-line tools in general are just unmaintained and collecting dust. Do you have a citation that they pull regularly?

FWIW:

~ man rm | tail -n1

BSD January 28, 1999 BSD

They pulled at least once, historically, but don't seem to pull on a regular basis. Anyone who wants newer tools than the few they keep updated installs homebrew.

I would use OpenBSD for my network "edge" and FreeBSD for my general purpose servers and desktop.

FreeBSD is focused on being a good server and appliance operating system and OpenBSD is focused on security and correctness of their code base.

> It is often said that Linux is more stable then Windows, well BSD could be considered like Granite compared to Linux

Not your quote, but I would add: ... and think of OpenBSD to FreeBSD as diamond to granite, 'rock solid' is understatement :)

"We have fixed many simple and obvious careless programming errors in code and only months later discovered that the problems were in fact exploitable." https://www.openbsd.org/security.html

Given the symbiotic use of C on the UNIX world, the way OpenBSD devs care about security is quite valuable.

I had a completely opposite experience with freebsd. It felt like a fossil from the past, the boot time was immensely bigger than that on linux with systemd, drivers are old (drm drivers are very old and mostly backported from linux).

The init system is lacking, service maintenance is basically absent. There are also no killer features over linux, beyond zfs and (doubtfully) jails. Even if you are a systemd hater (which is imho unreasonable), you could stick to linux without systemd and have a better hardware and software support.

{Open,net}bsd are another story, though.

>drivers are old (drm drivers are very old and mostly backported from linux).

The ones in base are fairly old, but the ones in ports are equivalent to Linux 4.16, so about six months old. Yes they're ported from Linux, I don't see why that's a problem.

The rest of your post can be summed up with "I like systemd." That's fine, other people disagree.

>The ones in base are fairly old, but the ones in ports are equivalent to Linux 4.16, so about six months old. Yes they're ported from Linux, I don't see why that's a problem.

Is this matrix outdated?

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics/AMD-GPU-Matrix

>The rest of your post can be summed up with "I like systemd."

It's not about systemd in particular, it's about modern service and system management in general

https://www.freebsdnews.com/2018/08/21/benno-rice-the-traged...

You also forget about software argument, why to use freebsd if you would use linux-layer all the way.

>Is this matrix outdated?

I would guess that it is reflecting the drivers in base, the page above that gives directions on using this driver in ports.

https://www.freshports.org/graphics/drm-fbsd12.0-kmod/

I'm sure improvements could be made to FreeBSD init, but all you're saying is you'd prefer one more like systemd. Then you're free to use something else.

>You also forget about software argument, why to use freebsd if you would use linux-layer all the way.

You aren't using a Linux layer all the way, you are for video card drivers. As for why, they're free software. Using the Linux ones makes more sense than building new ones from scratch.

>4.16 DRM

I see. For 11.2 its 4.11, so it didn't support my vega card.

Upgrade to 12 leaded me to kernel panic on startup on my shitty laptop's cpu, this bug [1].

>You aren't using a Linux layer all the way, you are for video card drivers.

I was talking about lack of hardware and software support, so you need a compatibility layer for commercial linux software.

[1] https://bugs.freebsd.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=233534

> I was talking about lack of hardware and software support, so you need a compatibility layer for commercial linux software.

The linuxkpi kernel API compatibility layer is for open source software (e.g., dual-licensed BSD/GPL Linux DRM drivers), not for commercial Linux software.

The linuxemul syscall ABI layer can be used to run commercial Linux software, but is an entirely different and unrelated component. It has nothing to do with hardware support. This is like claiming that because WINE exists, Linux uses Windows for hardware support.

> the boot time was immensely bigger than that on linux with systemd

FreeBSD dev here. This is a totally valid criticism of FreeBSD. Systemd has done a lot for Linux despite the controversial nature of way it has done it, as well as the continued scope creep that draws hostility. One thing it did from the very beginning was provide first-class service management and real on-demand service launch, in parallel. We could learn some lessons from systemd.

> drm drivers are very old and mostly backported from linux

They're completely backported from Linux; that's true. You can install drm-kmod from ports and automatically get an appropriate drm depending on your installed FreeBSD version: fbsd11.2 for 11.1, fbsd12.0 for 12.0, current for CURRENT (head).

fbsd11.2 is on Linux 4.11; the rest are on Linux 4.16. That's not super old (April 2018).

There is also the drm-legacy-kmod, which contains the ancient Linux ~3.8 drm drivers backport. It isn't suggested for most users and is mostly present for very old, insecure hardware that Linux no longer supports (e.g., mach64, mga, r128, savage, sis, tdfx, via) and proprietary ARM products (mmel@ wrote an angry screed to a private mailing list his TEGRA-based product absolutely depended on these obsolete Linux drivers) that have not yet updated to newer DRM versions.

> The init system is lacking, service maintenance is basically absent.

Totally agree.

> There are also no killer features over linux,

That isn't quite true, as you point out. ZFS and jails are significant features. Capsicum is a significant security feature.

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