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lifeisstillgood

quick summary for the impatient:

- drop GCC for CLANG.

- introduce VPS (more virtualised approach to jails)

- introduce bhyve (native hypervisor on common standards)

- replace BIND

- Can be run on raspberry pi

- major speed ups in SMP, and networking

FreeBSD Is taking a fairly big leap forward in its sweet spot of the workhorse of the data farm. BSD has always had great jails virtualisation support (it's what LXC or docker is following) but now that's being expanded and complemented with the run-another-OS-on-my-host-OS of "virtio" style VMs

Raspberry pi of course is what the world has been waiting for - never mind all the rest :-)

edit: tidy ups

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FreeBSD 10 is also going to have much-improved support for Xen [1][2] and newly-added support for Hyper-V [3]. I'd love to see AWS and Azure support first-class FreeBSD instances. (You can currently run FreeBSD instances using cperciva's AMIs [4], but that's not the same as Amazon supporting FreeBSD in the same way they support Linux).

[1]: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-xen/2013-June/001...

[2]: http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Testing_FreeBSD_PVHVM

[3]: http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=38019

[4]: http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-on-ec2/

http://aws.typepad.com/aws/2012/11/aws-marketplace-additiona...

edit: we're about to launch pfSense on EC2, too.

Can you send me an email about this? I like to keep track of how FreeBSD/EC2 is being used and I might be able to help you.

Ah, I hadn't seen that -- thanks for the link.

You can currently run FreeBSD instances using cperciva's AMIs, but that's not the same as Amazon supporting FreeBSD in the same way they support Linux.

The only "lack of support" which concerns me is the fact that on older EC2 instance types HVM (which FreeBSD uses) is only available by paying for a Windows license. I wouldn't want Amazon to start publishing their own "FreeBSD" images -- those should be provided by the project.

That's what I mean -- having to pay for a Windows license you're not using is a strong deterrent to using FreeBSD on AWS; people who might prefer a FreeBSD server end up using Linux instead simply because of the cost difference.

You're far more knowledgeable than I (or pretty much anyone else!) about building FreeBSD AMIs, so if you say they should be provided directly by the project, I'm happy to go with that. I would just like to see 'FreeBSD' appear as a "mainstream" option when choosing the OS for a new EC2 instance. (See gonzo's link -- the dialog shown in the picture has 15 Linux distributions available; it'd be nice for FreeBSD to be on that menu.)

Will the licensing issue for the smaller AMIs go away once the PVHVM drivers are fully implemented? I don't know a whole lot about Xen, so I'm curious to know what needs to be implemented to fix that problem.

I would just like to see 'FreeBSD' appear as a "mainstream" option when choosing the OS for a new EC2 instance.

That is now fixed in the AWS Marketplace -- although the only AMIs in the marketplace running FreeBSD are my FreeBSD image and Citrix's NetScaler and CloudBridge products.

Will the licensing issue for the smaller AMIs go away once the PVHVM drivers are fully implemented?

No, PVHVM is still a variety of HVM, and on the old instance types that's only available with a "Windows" label attached.

agreed with AWS and freebsd. although there is hardly the demand - each year I have a debate whether to forego BSD entirely (especially on the desktop) but its just that too good to lose.

it looks like I'm going to get saltstack working with VpS and keep with Rackspace :-)

> although there is hardly the demand

It's a chicken/egg problem -- Amazon won't be motivated to implement additional support for FreeBSD without more people asking for it, but the additional visibility FreeBSD would gain from better support on AWS (and/or Azure) would definitely increase the number of people using it. It seems like FreeBSD has seen an upswing in interest over the past couple of years, and if interest keeps growing I think it'd eventually hit some threshold where Amazon is willing to implement better support for FreeBSD and then put some marketing behind it.

On FreeBSD + saltstack: I saw an interesting article a few weeks back (on the saltstack website, no less) about them implementing better support for FreeBSD, specifically w.r.t. jails:

http://intothesaltmine.org/blog/html/2013/08/30/bootstrappin...

What is the status of ZFS? I have been running Solaris for years only because ZFS is so incredibly good as fileserver for mid sized company and for personal use.

I'm no expert, but ZFS support on FreeBSD seems to be pretty solid (more or less on par with Solaris). FreeNAS seems to be quite popular and it's based on FreeBSD and ZFS.

If you have a question about a specific ZFS feature, drop by the FreeBSD forums (http://forums.freebsd.org) and ask; the FreeBSD community is generally quite friendly and I'm sure you'll get a good answer to your question.

For general information about FreeBSD + ZFS, check out these links:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/fi...

https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS

Thank you. FreeNAS seems good.

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