FreeBSD Status Report 2023 Q4 | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD Status Report 2023 Q4

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48 pointsvermaden12 comments

I can't help but think that Podman for FreeBSD [1] reaching stability will cause the popularity of FreeBSD to rebound quickly. The flexibility of container orchestration on the stability and power of FreeBSD is too good of a combination to ignore.

[1] https://podman.io/docs/installation#installing-on-freebsd-14...

How does it work without cgroups? And what are the differences from the Linux containers?

I heard someone describe FreeBSD jails as what cgroups want to be when they grow up. I don't think that's fair, but would imagine that just about anything you could do with cgroups you can also do with jails.

Sounds exciting, any resources you'd recommend for reading more about jails?

The FreeBSD handbook is wonderful, as always: https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/

The FreeBSD answer to containers is jails, but I'm not sure how the capabilities of jails maps to the functionality provided by cgroups.

Actually its the other way around.

FreeBSD Jails are here since year 2000 - 24 years ago.

The Linux answer to FreeBSD Jails is Docker - from 2014 - and later Podman.

Hope that helps.

Regards, vermaden

If the docker ecosystem can't be used, it's not even an answer.

Sounds huge and big deal!

Slightly off topic but I found this interesting: I saw something the other day that freebsd plans to drop support for most 32-bit architectures in the next major version. Of which 32 bit arm is currently the most relevant but also shrinking in relevance. But they will keep armv7 for now. They'll still be able to run 32 bit binaries on a 64 bit kernel for a while.

The ARMv7 will be kept in 15.x version as supported while all other 32bit archs will not be TIER 1.

The ARMv7 will be dropped in 16.x.

To show here some time span ... FreeBSD 15.0-RELEASE will be released in about 2 years from the release of FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE and after that FreeBSD 15.x will be supported for 5 years.

That means there is still 7 years of official FreeBSD support for 32bit ARMv7 devices.

IMHO its more then enough to move to something more relevant.

No mention of the planned end of 32-bit? Packrat looks interesting. Removing ports that build and work fine but are "unmaintained" is pretty irritating.

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