Evaluating FreeBSD Current for Production Use
klarasystems.com
klarasystems.com
I took conservative approach and I always run -RELEASE version, not even -STABLE. I'm glad Klara is evaluating -CURRENT branch, good read.
Btw, once - several years ago I bought an new system and network card was not supported in the -RELEASE branch, so I took the driver from -CURRENT, compiled and loaded as kernel module. Worked flawlessly :)
For a home server I have no problem with this, but if it's something I want to leave in production and have security updates for, I'm more at-ease using Debian or Ubuntu with their 3- and 5-years' worth of support.
Is there something I'm missing about using FreeBSD in production, or is anything outside of the base system just supposed to be more hands-on?
Same goes for packages (pkg), they are rolling release.
No idea where you're getting this 90 days release stuff from :) (Perhaps there's a LTS 'release' for ports? I don't think many people use it if there is. Trust me, you're safe enough with rolling ports).
https://wiki.freebsd.org/Ports/QuarterlyBranch https://pkg.freebsd.org/FreeBSD:13:amd64/ https://svnweb.freebsd.org/ports/branches/
That said, I don't have any problems with rolling-release. I've ran stuff like openSUSE Tumbleweed for years, and back in my dabbling days, plenty of Gentoo and Arch.
My issue is that for non-personal and longer-term deployments, FreeBSD has never been a contender for me because of having to keep on top of Ports upgrades. For example for a project at work, I wouldn't want to return to a FreeBSD deployment months later to add a feature, and then have to update all my packages on that system.
I understand chances are the upgrades would likely be hitch-free, or would only require a little bit of fixing around, but I still really don't want to hold my breath every 3 months.
$ cat /usr/local/etc/pkg/repos/FreeBSD.conf
FreeBSD: { enabled: no } # disable the default config
FreeBSD-latest: {
url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/latest",
#url: "pkg+http://pkg.FreeBSD.org/${ABI}/quarterly",
mirror_type: "srv",
signature_type: "fingerprints",
fingerprints: "/usr/share/keys/pkg",
enabled: yes
}I was talking about Quarterly since it seems to the most stable way to get packages not in the base system.
Under the current support model, each major version’s stable branch
is explicitly supported for 5 years, while each individual point release
is only supported for three months after the next point release.
Unlike some debian-ish distros I don't think there's any security-update-only repo for ports/packages to track. Meanwhile freebsd-update(8) handles security updates for the base system.
Same with systems like Ports, and in particular, NetBSD's pkgsrc. I've personally been using pkgsrc on my MacBook (and sometimes on Linux too) for years, and have really enjoyed using it as a cross-platform system to add my own little packages that'll work across macOS/Linux/NetBSD (I use NetBSD on my Pi). And I have no problems doing upgrades every 3 months, since I want my shiny new software.
So I definitely see and appreciate Ports/pkgsrc's benefits - but I still feel uneasy using stuff like FreeBSD+Ports on non-personal projects, like for projects at work.
Part of it was the simplistic support for binary packages that felt entirely like an unwanted afterthought. Compile everything from source just doesn't scale especially if you want to use complex, slow-to-compile projects like gcc or firefox.
The other part is that make(1) is SLOW and simply does not scale to the size of something like the ports tree. It's also a bit tedious to use out of your ports tree and the documentation was kinda meh. There were a number of hacks layered on top that sort of eased the pain (I want to say portupgrade?, I never got into portmaster) but always felt really brittle and things were always getting out of sync. Even pkg(8) is a bit funky (and I don't particularly like the reliance on srv records no matter how elegant a solution it may seem).
> I still feel uneasy using stuff like FreeBSD+Ports on non-personal projects, like for projects at work.
I would never use ports in a production environment without some detailed justification. The binary packages are the way to go. Building your own ports (as in your own software not building your own copy of an existing port) is also a bit of a trial by fire thing involving a lot of hair pulling. Dunno what the update quarterly stuff is about tho, I run pkg update weekly to keep on top of things – but I track the latest repo not the quarterly one.
Honestly one of the few things I miss about Linux is the Debian package ecosystem. But as I learned with fink on OSX it's not just the infrastructure that matters.
pkg-ng is indeed a godsend, and I think I just got PTSD thinking about what Ports management was like before it. Currently getting flashbacks to the salad of utilities I used to use from ports-mgmt/.
>make
Yes, the Makefile infrastructure for both Ports/pkgsrc is clunky and slow, and the documentation is also terrible too. Took quite a bit of suffering to learn the dark art of properly authoring packages in pkgsrc.
For what it's worth, there's also the Gentoo Prefix project, but I haven't ever been able to use it because the bootstrap for it has failed every time I tried it on macOS or Linux.
At least for pkgsrc using it is as simple as: $ git clone https://github.com/netbsd/pkgsrc --depth 1 $ cd ~/pkgsrc/bootstrap && ./bootstrap --unprivileged $ cd ~/pkgsrc/misc/tmux && ~/pkg/bin/bmake install $ ~/pkg/bin/tmux
As flawed and janky as pkgsrc is, it has at least worked consistently for me on macOS/Linux for years.
>compiling from source
Yeah, I agree. Compiling everything from source and using it in production is for insane people. Should have clarified that when I said "Ports/pkgsrc", I meant using official binary pacakges, and not necessarily building from source.
>latest and quarterly
The point of quarterly releases is to serve as a base for stable package versions, backported security fixes, and as a chance to fix package runtime/compilation issues before being generally available - something harder to do if you track bleeding-edge packages, where things can shift under people's feet.
It's also useful when building from source, like I do with pkgsrc for macOS, because lots of random things will break if there's too large of a rift between what's installed and what's in bleeding-edge pkgsrc. In these cases, you'd usually have to do mass rebuilds, and/or deal with dependency hell (eg, pkg X you have installed needs need <=libsomething-1336, but pkg Y in pkgsrc needs >=libsomething-1337).
I use the packages installed via pkgsrc pretty much daily on my MacBook, and it'd be really annoying having things possibly breaking after an update just a week apart, especially if I'm in a rush and need to get something done for work. So using a quarterly branch is useful, since it's a cadence I can stomach, and there's a higher likelihood that the devs had more time to polish the packages in that release.
>Fink
Never heard of this before. I'll give it a gander sometime soon.
At this point my biggest qualms about FreeBSD in production aren't really around the ports themselves but more around how much stuff has become Linux only (e.g. dockerify everything).
At megacorp we had to use an old version of CentOS (ugh) and the whole "keep updating ancient versions of third party software" thing came with plenty of caveats and frustrations. Regardless of the operating system it's not an approach I'd recommend.
Edit: Fink is the OSX port of dpkg more or less.
This is exactly how I feel about OpenBSD. While part of me is happy that it's a niche OS, another part of me wishes that it had more support by being a more mainstream OS.
The iwlwifi driver just landed in FreeBSD 13.1-RELEASE, and I have yet to have any luck with it there, either. Neither Gentoo nor FreeBSD seems to want to load the correct cc-a0-66.ucode blob for my AX200 chip. I think the downstream developers can only bear so much blame; Intel could surely do a better job helping to clear up edge cases like this.
For who isn't into FreeBSD, release is like debian stable and current is the upcoming dev release. Like debian sid but not rolling
What is the downside to using Stable, or maybe even... Stable from two whole number versions ago? Honestly, adding features to production is, as a grey beard once said to me, paraphrasing, as useless as nailing jelly to a bull, or something along those lines.
great learning experience!
By late 00s, if you were running FreeBSD and pushing it to its limits in terms of performance or features, you'd probably be running current and have at least one committer or active contributor on the team, upstreaming as many business-specific improvements as possible while keeping track of incoming commit stream.
While most jails usually start the init system inside the jail, you can set the "entrypoint" of a jail to just one app and run only that in the jail. That would be a little closer to a typical docker container.
The tooling around jails is not like docker. There is no central "hub" with different images centered around specific usecases, you mostly have to roll your own. There have been various efforts to improve that, but I haven't had the impression that I could rely on anything that isn't in FreeBSD base when it comes to jails. Too much abandoned wrappers and helpers out there.
The infra my projects work on are all heavily based on docker so that’s a hard requirement.
The capitalization is important, since it makes it very clear it's talking about the CURRENT branch.
When FreeBSD cuts a release the code is handed over to a releng team (e.g on GitHub you'll see releng/13.1 atm) who handle security fix back ports and suchlike. Development then continues on master (or whatever the svn equiv is) until they cut another release.
So, this would be building from master. Or main. Whatever. Instead of using a release branch
:}
(Of course there's always cooperation between the two teams -- the security officer has to get permission to commit to the release branch prior to the release but in practice that conversation consists of "we have a security advisory affecting the upcoming release" "go ahead". Theoretically the answer might come back "please wait a few hours because we're in the middle of builds right now" though.)