Hacker News Reader

Comment by floatboth | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

View on HN

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.

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com