Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by atmosx | Hacker News Reader

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Some main differences:

- LLVM/Clang (it's a matter of taste, but it's also the feature :-) )

- FreeBSD Jails and Mac (These are extremely strong security features if implemented correctly. Especially jails are really undervalued/misunderstood IMHO.)

- State-of-art network stack (faster than any other BSD or Linux. Supports technologies like NetMap)

- ZFS support (important for both desktops/servers)

- PF version runs on multiple cpus (OpenBSD's version is more advanced though)

- DTrace (although not mature enough IMHO)

- Better hardware support (e.g. wifi cards)

- BHyve (virtualisation)

- Capsicum (security)

Other little things like:

- Unmapped VMIO buffers - Variable symlinks (used under jails)

Now generally speaking, choosing an operating system due to bigotry and what-not is stupid. Most of the times, engineers go with what they need: If you need a secure bastion, OpenBSD gives you more although FreeBSD can be turned virtually impenetrable as can Linux. OpenBSD comes with more bells and whistles on this particular area though.

So all in all, it boils to what you need. The major reason why people choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD is because the 'security level' of the OS is more than acceptable while retaining a much better hardware support.

Don't forget that only FreeBSD has the nVidia binary drivers, too. (Neither have nouveau anymore.) So if you have such a card, OpenBSD defaults to the "nv" driver, which somehow manages to be about 20x slower than the VESA driver, before MTRR write-combine tweaking (side tangent: OpenBSD also lacks an MTRR tweaking tool, like memcontrol.) Moving a window literally locks up your desktop for 30-90 seconds as you see it slowly redrawing its way along. How they managed that one I will never know, but they did.

I'm all for open source all the way, especially on a secure system, but OpenBSD+nVidia is basically unusable on the desktop. And that's a huge class of systems. You can't buy Intel PCIe cards; and AMD drivers are always a buggy mess.

> PF version runs on multiple cpus (OpenBSD's version is more advanced though)

I really hate the trade-off of FreeBSD SMP support, or OpenBSD queuing support. (yes, you can compile a FreeBSD kernel with ALTQ, but it's said to be buggy with SMP.)

> PF version runs on multiple cpus (OpenBSD's version is more advanced though)

What is "more advanced" about it?

> (yes, you can compile a FreeBSD kernel with ALTQ, but it's said to be buggy with SMP.)

not that we've seen in 300,000 installs.

I will admit to not having tried it. This is what I read when I was researching why it wasn't enabled by default.

Any thoughts on why they leave it off out of the box, then? I know it's not crazy hard to build a kernel (used to have to do it to get sound support in the 4.x series), but I'd rather not build kernels if I don't have to =)

ATLQ slows down throughput and ads CPU overhead, that's why is disabled by default... Because most users don't need it anyway.

Can't argue with that, although:

> - FreeBSD Jails and Mac (These are extremely strong security features if implemented correctly. Especially jails are really undervalued/misunderstood IMHO.)

Aren't these are only necessary if you let people you don't trust into your system?

> - PF version runs on multiple cpus (OpenBSD's version is more advanced though)

Personally I dislike running PF on FreeBSD as it requires me to resort to old docs and use old syntaxes.

> - Capsicum (security)

Isn't this being ported as we speak?

> Aren't these are only necessary if you let people you don't trust into your system?

They also provide an additional layer of protection if you're running server software which gets exploited.

Jails also have resource limits, so you can have a group of processes that are related, but not started from the same executable, be held to a certain amount of CPU, memory, etc usage. They're also useful in testing/debug situations; coupled with ZFS' copy on write features, they let you quickly create identical environments which can be real helpful in trouble isolation.

Jails provide some protection to the base OS even if the network exposed service running in the jail is compromised. It for much more than local exploits.

Also, and this is perhaps weird to non-users, but true, FreeBSD has a well supported base AMI in AWS EC2. It's an edge case, but it's a big reason I rely on FreeBSD over OpenBSD.

you're right on quite a few things, but bhyve is no where near production quality -- alpha at best. and openbsd has a wider and stronger support of wifi cards.

Does FreeBSD have system-wide ASLR nowadays?

I think FreeBSD 11 will have it. See this - http://www.bsdcan.org/2014/schedule/attachments/259_introduc...

> - BHyve (virtualisation)

For me, not being able to run a current kernel-accelerated qemu is a real problem. Is there anything preventing this work from being done, or is it just a matter of bhyve having the momentum so nobody's bothering?

> - DTrace (although not mature enough IMHO)

Can you be more specific about that comment?

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