I recently installed FreeBSD on a home server and was very pleased both with the process and the result. Also, the documentation is just impressive (that goes, in my experience, for all the BSD systems).
I think the justifications were better support for running on Linux (storage drivers, Java, MySQL, oracle), better support for virtualization (although bsd jails are better than virtualization in my opinion, and a better fit for Y!), and it would be easier to support one os instead of two and acquisitions (including inktomi) really wanted to run on Linux.
The drop dead date for getting off FreeBSD kept getting pushed back, but I'd guess they've moved almost everything by now.
That said, when a young upstart was trying to sell me on Linux superiority and described Docker to me, all I could do was snicker.
As I was my own jailer, lack of resource limits wasn't a real problem. I greatly benefited from the lack of performance penalties; everything ran at the same speed in or out of the jail. I had one or two systems running in VMs and they were terrible: a) things were clearly slower, b) virtual disk provisioning is terrible, c) timekeeping (hopefully things have gotten better since 2011)
Of course it is.
Then there is a bug and you fix it just like any other security layer.
No it is not. Like Norton Anti-Virus, it has a much bigger user base. Other than that...
> Docker is available on FreeBSD (as of June this year) and uses jails.
Huh? I wonder why?
^sarcasm.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrHW7Vvbie4 for a demo of what lxd can do. Maybe that will clear it up for you.
lxd has absolutely no relevance to this discussion. They are not jails, they are not like jails. As noted in my OP in this thread, jails are not a replacement for hypervisors.
> They are not jails, they are not like jails.
That's what I've been saying.
> That's what I've been saying.
No, you've been saying Docker is so much better than jails. Either you don't know jails or docker or both, I can't tell. Just you really want Docker to be awesome.
I don't completely agree with the reasoning, but it mainly came down to driver support, maintenance cost, and debugging tools.
Inktomi (YST) was acquired in 2003, later Overture (YSM) and both were linux shops. YST was the biggest property by far and we didn't have any kernel developers. We were doing just fine with stock debian, then stock RHEL. (I did a few very minor patches for 32-bit, like splitting user-space/kernel to 3.5/0.5G instead of 3/1G, and some caching improvements for /proc, but I wasn't a kernel developer). Linux just worked. Drivers were available and supported for the HW we needed. Oprofile, systemtap worked fine for the most part. We later hired one kernel developer to help Mail move to linux, but we always had more freebsd kernel developers.
For freebsd you needed to write the drivers and the tools. That took time and money. The community was also smaller and it was harder to hire people with experience. Acquisitions were running on linux too.
The decision was not easy. Y! already had great freebsd engineers. By announcing that linux would be the supported platform going forward it was a given that many of them wouldn't be happy and leave. Fortunately not all of them left. For example Peter W. still works there.
In any case I don't think there was really an alternative.
Note that Yahoo! was employing a few very bright freebsd kernel engineers but when the decision was announced that linux was the future many of them decided to leave. That made the path forward even clearer. It wasn't just a matter of integrating new acquisitions easier, and the fact that it was easier to hire people with linux experience than with freebsd experience. That was around 2008 IIRC. I left in 2010, and Rick less than a year later.