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Comment by inopinatus | Hacker News Reader

"Feedback from our customers that they want broader and timelier support".

Absent volume, you and I don't get to be direct customers of Intel. I wonder who they meant. My first guess was Sony or Nintendo, since both have recent consoles with FreeBSD-derived OS, but fact checking indicated that neither have an Intel CPU.

Maybe at the behest of Apple, or the router/NAS/appliance manufacturers, many of whom run a FreeBSD-derived OS. Or perhaps it was simply effective lobbying by the FreeBSD project / foundation.

This is all speculation so if anyone knows who really prompted this I'd be interested to hear it.

(edit: grammar & fact check)

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I have the exact question in mind. Who, Why, and Now?

Sony - If Intel wants the next PS5 CPU to be from Intel. But Intel lacking any decent GPU, and their reluctance to low margin business may suggest otherwise.

Yahoo - some have suggested, but as much as I want to believe it is true, last time I heard they have been switching to Linux since Marissa arrival. Most of their BSD people has since left.

Netflix - FreeBSD usage is limited to their own CDN Appliance, which as the name implies, working like a appliance and needs not much tweaking. Their main, encoding and core Network is on AWS with Linux. And if Netflix is that much a big customer for Intel?

Router / NAS / Appliance? Gosh they have been here for more then a decade and only now Intel decide to listen to them? One reason could be they are switching to ARM + Linux. For them to stay on x86 they will have to better support for FreeBSD, but I still think this is a weak argument.

Apple - Despite OSX's close relationship with the BSD community. Apple doesn't use any FreeBSD on their Cloud Servers. And Airport uses NetBSD which is something different enough.

May be it is Whatsapp?

WhatsApp is completely absent from FreeBSD development. The donations from Jan Koum have been from his personal finances. In kind, it's a shame FB/WhatsApp don't do development.

And while the FreeBSD Foundation provides governance and services around the periphery including a couple full timer contributors, almost all significant code contributions are coming from a small quorum of commercial users. If Intel follows through on higher quality and more timely HW enablement, that is going to be a lot more worthwhile than this donation.

NF was able to leverage some connections built over several people's careers to wake Intel up to the extant market share of FreeBSD users. By my naive estimation this is approaching $1B/yr.

The other conjecture I will offer is that Intel may see any of AMD Naples, ARM64, OpenPOWER as a realistic threats now and dots were connected between Intel's marketing driven culture and Intel's software services group which has a mission to make sure software runs best on Intel.

>> In kind, it's a shame FB/WhatsApp don't do development. Someone posted on HN a long time ago about FB tries to force / persuade Whatsapp team switch to Linux. I couldn't google it though.

Well I hope the NF story is true. FreeBSD desperately need some love.

> working like a appliance and needs not much tweaking

Uh, excuse me? They literally rewrote the whole sendfile system call to make it faster (and to make it possible to add in-kernel TLS for, well, sending files over TLS). I'm sure they would welcome, say, driver improvements for the Intel 10/40Gb Ethernet cards.

Sorry I dont mean they are not contributing. But not actively developing it, by that i mean compared to other companies on Linux. And the Sendfile(2) sys call was, 24 months ago?

Also not saying Netflix dont love more improvement on FreeBSD. I bet they do!. But they don't seem to be key customer for Intel to do this.

I have insider knowledge of most large FreeBSD shops and I have to be careful to not overshare so I will use my current employer, which has publicly disclosed 10^4 machine count in shareholder earnings reports and technical talks. Using that public data, you would be able to extrapolate gross annual revenue of intel SKUs (CPU, chipset, NIC, SSD) is on order of 10^7 dollars/yr all running FreeBSD. This is just at my small 500 person company. There are several users with 10^5 machine count, and you can't forget about !US. I hope that helps put things into perspective.

Thanks, nice to know there are lots and rather large usage of FreeBSD companies sticking around.

They've also done some interesting research on I/O scheduling and storage in general: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WqOLolj5EU. They seem to frequently present at BSD conferences and I think are genuinely interested in advancing FreeBSD from what I can see.

> My first guess was Sony or Nintendo, since both have recent consoles with FreeBSD-derived OS

Switch OS isn't FreeBSD-based.

https://twitter.com/qlutoo/status/838702899014217729

https://twitter.com/qlutoo/status/838666432774692864

https://twitter.com/ylws8/status/838777665498853376

Though the network stack may be partly taken from FreeBSD.

https://twitter.com/qlutoo/status/838786008380420096

My guess was Netflix, and then someone reminded me of Nintendo now that the switch is out. So those would be my two guesses as to who is leaning on them. Perhaps iXsystems as well.

Netflix, Netgate and Yahoo had an extended meeting with Intel and several members of the Foundation board during MeetBSD last year.

Yahoo? I thought they abandoned ( or forced to switch to Linux ) under Marissa.

> My first guess was Sony or Nintendo, since both have recent consoles with FreeBSD-derived OS, but I don't think either have an Intel CPU.

It's a fair bet they were considered as design candidates. Perhaps their community engagement was a factor in them losing the designs. (Though IMO that seems like it would be weighted much lower than other factors).

> you and I don't to be direct customers of Intel.

Speak for yourself, thank you very much.

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