Who uses FreeBSD those days? As a company that runs on the cloud, AWS/GCP/Azure you run windows/linux, and on desktop people mainly run MacOS/Windows/Linux.
I am really asking as for what is the main use case of FreeBSD in 2022?
I am really asking as for what is the main use case of FreeBSD in 2022?
That's why this has been frustrating - we have a history of committing real money[2][3] to the project in an attempt to make investments ... but there is never a fixed target to make those investments in.
It is a matter of fact that our own use of FreeBSD - in live production for a business - is completely divorced from the experience and day to day usage of FreeBSD developers.
[1] rsync.net and, previously, JohnCompanies
[2] https://www.rsync.net/resources/notices/2007cb.html
[3] USD 50k donation offered - https://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2012-Jan...
Cool to see people still building on FreeBSD, sad to see that it's an uphill battle to stay relevant with it.
That was 21 years ago ...
"Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD" https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#/med...
Plus how long did MacOS diverge from FreeBSD? 20+ years ago? Does it even resemble current FreeBSD enough that this observation makes sense, except from a software history perspective?
Edit: Actually, considering that the divergence started with NextStep in 1988, from 4.3 BSD and not FreeBSD, and that Unix was created in 1969, this becomes a bit like comparing Unix 1969 to Linux 1999... so not really relevant anymore.
You'll always find people who'll say that Android and ChromeOS are Linux distributions and MacOS is based on FreeBSD. I guess it makes them feel good.
They are, but they are not GNU/Linux...Alpine is not Gnu/Linux too, but BusyBox/musl/Linux, maybe it makes others sad that you don't know the difference.
>MacOS is based on FreeBSD. I guess it makes them feel good
For years exactly that was written on Apples own macOSX page, but you know it better right?
https://web.archive.org/web/20090207062005/https://www.apple...
>>Mac OS X Server is based largely on the FreeBSD distribution and includes the latest advances from this development community.
https://web.archive.org/web/20090205151917/http://images.app...
>> Kernel based on FreeBSD and Mach 3.0
https://web.archive.org/web/20081230112742/http://images.app...
>>The Mac OS X kernel at the heart of Darwin is based on FreeBSD 5 and Mach 3.0
Have Fun :)
I'm more concerned with the practical significance of calling Android or ChromeOS a Linux distribution than being pedantic for the history books.
Sure, Alpine doesn't use the usual userland you'll find on most Linux distributions but it isn't an alien experience and you can use it mostly like any other Linux distribution out there. You'll still find a POSIX shell and a package manager to install packages. There's Xorg or Wayland for the GUI and you'll find familiar desktop environments and window managers.
Unlike Android, you won't find absence of root access on Alpine. There's no restriction on placement of data on directories like /usr and /var. You won't find dozens of UIDs for different processes running at the same time on a single user system. You can't just slap Android on any hardware x86_64 hardware you want and expect it to work fine. Hell, you can't even do that on ARM devices if you're not using out-of-tree patches and firmware blobs. The bluetooth and audio stack on Android is completely different than what you'll use on any Linux distribution.
So yeah, if we're being pedantic, sure, Android is a Linux distribution because it uses the Linux kernel. Good luck using it like a typical Linux distribution though.
> For years exactly that was written on Apples own macOSX page, but you know it better right?
What I wrote above. Sure, pages written decades ago indicate that the Apple used FreeBSD as its base for its kernel but I doubt their kernel is anything close to upstream FreeBSD at this point. The same goes for their userland and graphics stack. Would you call OrbisOS, used by PS4, a distribution of FreeBSD? Can you do anything meaningful with it like you can with FreeBSD?
No one said that, and no one said MacOS is a FreeBSD distribution, you where wrong an now you try too put your half-knowledge into other mouths.
You can stop now.
> you where wrong an now you try too put your half-knowledge into other mouths.
> You can stop now.
Nice job being condescending and rude.
>>It was also the first BSD-based OS to receive UNIX 03 certification
No one said that ever....
A "linux distribution" just requires the kernel, and the version they use isn't that modified.
If you want a wrong statement, it would have to be more like saying they're the same distribution as the internal builds used by Android Inc. in 2005.
I don't like Mac nor do i like gnu-coreutil...but that's my personal taste, and not my problem.
>Plus how long did MacOS diverge from FreeBSD? 20+ years ago? Does it even resemble current FreeBSD enough that this observation makes sense, except from a software history perspective?
I said what kernel it uses (FreeBSD and Mach) and i don't know if Apple re-bases their code on current FreeBSD-Code...you can look that for for yourself. Don't start twisting facts because you didn't knew better, at least now you know.
Well, it's not your problem, but when millions of developers like GNU coreutils over BSD coreutils, then it kind of becomes everyone's problem :-)
There's a reason GNU became popular when there were other tools available before it appeared.
I don't care if they cannot install Gnu/Linux on their machine, but being forced to use a proprietary system like Mac. Not my problem. Don't want bsd-core-utils? Don't buy apple, it's so easy.
>There's a reason GNU became popular when there were other tools available before it appeared.
That's not the reason and you know it, stop with that half-knowledge you think you have.
Something to read for you:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....
And yet they do, by the millions :-) Anyway, I don't really have a bone to pick on this topic.
However:
> That's not the reason and you know it, stop with that half-knowledge you think you have.
Yes, it is. They were full of features and that's why they became popular.
Please enlighten us with your rest-of-half-knowledge, otherwise.
>FreeBSD is Just macOS Without the Good Bits
>This is as much a myth about macOS as about FreeBSD; that macOS is just FreeBSD with a pretty GUI. The two operating systems do share a lot of code, for example most userland utilities and the C library on macOS are derived from FreeBSD versions. Some of this code flow works in the other direction, for example FreeBSD 9.1 and later include a C++ stack and compiler that were originally developed for macOS, with major parts of the work done by Apple employees. Other parts are very different.
>Darwin - which consists of the XNU kernel, IOkit (a driver model), and POSIX compatibility via a BSD compatibility layer - makes up part of macOS (as well as iOS, tvOS, and others) includes a few subsystems (such as the VFS, process model, and network implementation) from (older versions of) FreeBSD, but is mostly an independent implementation. The similarities in the userland, however, make it much easier to port macOS code to FreeBSD than any other system - partially because a lot of command-line utilities were imported along with the BSD bits from FreeBSD. For example, both libdispatch (Grand Central Dispatch in Apple's marketing) and libc++ were written for macOS and worked on FreeBSD before any other OS.
>Apple's kernel programming guide goes into more extensive detail about the similarities and differences.
https://developer.apple.com/library/archive/documentation/Da...
>The BSD portion of the OS X kernel is derived primarily from FreeBSD, a version of 4.4BSD that offers advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility features. BSD variants in general are derived (sometimes indirectly) from 4.4BSD-Lite Release 2 from the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California at Berkeley.
I did find this benchmark which maybe helpful https://redbyte.eu/en/blog/postgresql-benchmark-freebsd-cent...
I use PG on both and have never had issues (systems only sorta busy (200 connections, less than 2TB on disk))
I think that only one or two of those environments were heavily used production instances, so if there is a serious gotcha here it might not have been apparent to me.
As for CoW, we just turn it off on the postgres config and rely strictly on ZFS. We also turned off checksumming and compression in postgres and use Zstd:3 on the file system. Beyond that we just followed your run of the mill tuning guide you’d find on Google.