Is FreeBSD ever going to be hip and trendy? Probably not, it's not 1994 anymore. But, I don't need a hip amd trendy OS, I need an OS that provides a stable base for me to work upon and supports enough hardware that I can chose decent parts. As a bonus, I've found it easy enough to muck with the internals when it has benefited me or my employer.
It reminds me that in my hometown, opening a communal door of a condo from your flat is called "pulling", because people used to pull a cord to do it when electricity "didn't exist". Nobody has had to pull a cord to open a door in probably 80 years, but everyone there still says "I'll pull it".
I'd pick up FreeBSD in a heartbeat if I knew that the investment in learning the platform would help me be productive in production. But like you said, it's not 1994 anymore and modern deployment and maintenance of an application stack is docker and k8s. A trend where the OS is abstracted away as much as possible. So why invest in FreeBSD? Okay, so maybe it's a nice OS for appliances; though so is Linux and I can continue to leverage my knowledge.
At home I run an appliance and thought I'd deploy FreeBSD on it to run my storage server. I was really excited to deploy ZFS, the BSD killer app. The justification for this getting more difficult to make since ZFS on Linux is production ready.
I want to use FreeBSD. I don't care that it's not mainstream. The unfortunate issue is that it's falling behind in my use-case, by a lot and that's a bummer.
I can only tell you, whatever scary differences you expect between Linux and FreeBSD are probably no more than between any two Linux distros with different packaging systems.
Ten years ago, fresh out of a failed stint at university, I applied for a junior position at a Linux shop. Would nowadays probably be called junior system engineer or so. The night before the interview, I read around a bit in Stevens' TCP/IP Illustrated as well as Design and Implementation of BSD (to calm my nerves). I told them honestly, I had maybe 15 lifetime minutes on a Linux shell. But I started with FreeBSD4.4 and had by then already 8'ish years of experience on general *nix administration.
I'm still there. Pivoted around and upward a couple of times internally. But I still run FreeBSD on my workstation to get things done. And we're still fundamentally a Linux shop.
But the root cause of my career is a friend at university handing me a FreeBSD 4.4 CD. It is a tremendous system if you want to learn about the services a kernel offers to its userland. If you care to make the dive, it not only tells you the what and how, but the why and all the compromises that had to be made along the way. And that understanding is universal.
FreeBSD may be well known as a solid production platform. It's true strength is as the foundation for not only a lifetime of learning, but a lifetime of understanding.
Boot on Linux laptop now looks like:
- power on
- wait for recovery shell
- `zpool import -a`
- `exit`
In all my years I have never observed this on FreeBSD and... as I have said, I expect from FreeBSD to be rock solid and it never dissapointed.
ZoL? I wouldn't be running it on my linux servers for a while. The basic mistakes that they are doing are not something that apriciate from file system that is meant to be as reliable as possible.
The process of booting up looked like hit power button wait for desktop to show up. The "basic mistakes they are doing" are completely a function of your distro not having a way to easily set this up and you not knowing how to use it correctly. As far as I know the only distro that supports zfs on root via its installer is at
You might try it in a virtual machine.
Also, me and hundreds of other people have been booting off of ZFS on Linux for years. Your issue is most likely in your distro's initramfs setup or you must have botched the initramfs config yourself. If you're just used to FreeBSD, just stick to commenting about FreeBSD without maligning other operating systems.
That's an initramfs bug; the initramfs scripts are not actually supplied by the ZoL project. You should file a bug report against your distro's initramfs package.
I've been using this as a server backup solution for over a year, I assure you zol snapshots work, including access via the .zfs directory.
What do you mean by this? I’m using ZoL and snapshots seem to be working fine.
This is imho, the killer feature of zfs, maybe matching only by VMS or DragonflyBSD hammer filesystems. They were/are both better at it (`undo`!) but zfs comes closely.
And it is broken for months now.
This guy speaks without knowing.
I just tried going in my .zfs/snapshot on my CentOS 7 system running kernel 3.10 and ZoL 0.8.3 and it's working. I can list snapshots and cat file off a snapshot.
what the actual f*?
tag name v3.10 (bc1b510b8979ecc322f8d930dde56658967b7355)
tag date 2013-06-30 15:13:42 -0700
By now the CentOS 7 kernel is probably closer to mainline 4.x and 5.x than the original 3.10
otherwise you're just talking about stuff (zfs on gnu/linux) you know little about.
if you use zfs on freebsd then good for you, but that doesn't mean you can spread disinformation about zfs-on-linux.
btw: freebsd dropped its own implementation of zfs and is rebasing onto zfs-on-linux (from 2018: https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-fs/2018-December...). that's how good zfs-on-linux is.
Are you absolutely sure this isn’t something you’ve misconfigured yourself?
For what it’s worth, I do prefer FreeBSD over Linux but not not for any reasons relating to ZFS.
$ cat /saspool/debian/master-buster/.zfs/snapshot/ci/etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 10 \n \l
(Yes my "tank" is named "pool"; /saspool/debian/master-buster is a template for my containers, "ci" is one of the containers.)
sudo zpool --version
zfs-0.8.4-1
zfs-kmod-0.8.4-1
uname -a
Linux xxx 5.6.0-2-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 5.6.14-1 (2020-05-23) x86_64 GNU/LinuxAre you using a distro supplied zfs (potentially old) or rolling something more bleeding edge?
root> zpool --version
zfs-0.8.4-1
zfs-kmod-0.8.4-1
root> ll /.zfs/snapshot
total 0
drwxrwxrwx 2 root root 2 jun 15 08:48 ./
drwxrwxrwx 1 root root 0 jun 10 07:53 ../
root> cat /etc/yum.repos.d/zfs.repo
[zfs]
name=ZFS on Linux for Fedora $releasever
baseurl=http://download.zfsonlinux.org/fedora/$releasever /$basearch/
enabled=1
metadata_expire=7d
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zfsonlinux
[zfs-source]
name=ZFS on Linux for Fedora $releasever - Source baseurl=http://download.zfsonlinux.org/fedora/$releasever/SRPMS/
enabled=0
gpgcheck=1
gpgkey=file:///etc/pki/rpm-gpg/RPM-GPG-KEY-zfsonlinux
But nevermind, this is something that was working since zfs as root was brought into FreeBSD (and we are talking about FreeBSD not ZoL), never had issues about it.
one is really piece of s*, full of beginner mistakes, lasigna/spaghetti/ravioli mixed in horrible way, done in java, wasting resources like olympic games. But with polished webui, full of colors, nice icons etc.
Second one, c++, with kernel module for linux, driver for windows, really nice and clean code (I was surprised). Not really nice webui but it did do the job well. Passed the benchmarks with flying colors, almost once faster than the first project.
At the end: the first one was a bestseller. There is no technical reason to be better selling, they both were doing the same task, from technical perspective, the second one was far better. Benchmarks, way of doing its work. Just far better. But the worse product with better "colors" won.
Marketing, marketing, marketing. The pestilence of our time and probably the Dark Ages of technology. I doubt I will see the Renaissance.
> A trend where the OS is abstracted away as much as possible.
It seems like you're asking about following trends.
Having said that, we use OS to run things. I feel FreeBSD is lacking there, and despite being incredible, that incredibility seems less attractive. Its hard enough to write things that work correctly in different Linux environments, I'm not sure how much more work would it be in FreeBSD land (hardware drivers, software outside Portage repo, and support) -- specially considering a lot of software is written with Linux (or Win/macOS depending what we are talking about) support first in mind, and anything else is more or less a "checklist" thing.
So from a user perspective, it comes down to -- do I want to spend time tackling software/configuration issues that I'm very likely have if I run this on FreeBSD vs. should I run in a slightly less cleaner OS that just works 99.99% of the time.
And for server deployments, cloud and language runtimes make the underlying OS kind of meaningless, other than for those doing low level performance optimizations.
I am missing an updated version of "The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System", though.