[Andys]

I see virtualisation as a promising way forward for FreeBSD. Hardware support has always lagged Linux (and still does). The limited resources of BSD hackers could be more appropriately concentrated on needed areas instead of constantly playing hardware catch-up.

[cperciva]

Hardware support has always lagged Linux (and still does).

Not everywhere. Last I checked we do considerably better for 10GbE, for instance. We certainly consistently lag behind Linux for desktop hardware support, but I think we hold our own pretty well in the server space.

As a BSD hacker who hates anything hardware-related, however, I do love the idea of outsourcing such irritants, though.

[Andys]

I held this view ("hold own in server hardware") until I actually tried to run FreeBSD on modern server hardware. The Intel 10G NICs worked, but slower in benchmarks than Linux and Opensolaris.

SCSI/SAS support has been rotting slowly, with the now industry-standard LSI cards I tested, working, but without interrupt coalesce and thus using more CPU and reaching only 60% of the speed of the same card in Linux or Opensolaris. Infiniband support is nearly all happening in Linux.

Then there was the problems with the new Core i7 CPUs and Turbo Mode. NUMA support has been missing until 9.0(unstable), and even now its only for the allocator and not the scheduler. The final straw was when I had USB issues (modern server motherboards have mostly dropped PS2 ports) which meant keyboard wasn't working at all on a server.

ZFS is less stable and slower than in OpenSolaris, and for all these years FreeBSD has lacked a journalling filesystem. Which I consider basic stuff, after all, Linux has had XFS for 10 years now. Linux has several virtualisation options, and while VirtualBox has been ported to BSD, it isn't really suited for server use. FreeBSD Jails have stagnated for years and still cannot handle running multiple copies of PostgreSQL because of SYSV support.

I believe FreeBSD is the best and most enjoyable OS for hacking on, but this was 2 years ago, and things have further stagnated since then, so like many others, I have been forced to give up and move on.

[cperciva]

The Intel 10G NICs worked, but slower in benchmarks than Linux and Opensolaris.

That's interesting. Which NICs are these? For most 10GbE cards we blow linux out of the water.

ZFS is less stable and slower than in OpenSolaris

That was true a couple years ago; I don't think it's true any more.

for all these years FreeBSD has lacked a journalling filesystem

True, but we've had softupdates, which is better in most circumstances. (And in HEAD we now have journalled softupdates, which gives you the best of both worlds.)

FreeBSD Jails have stagnated for years and still cannot handle running multiple copies of PostgreSQL because of SYSV support.

You have an interesting definition of "stagnate". Jails have recently gained full network stack virtualization, for instance. I can't remember if SYSV has been virtualized yet, but if not it's certainly coming soon.

I believe FreeBSD is the best and most enjoyable OS for hacking on, but this was 2 years ago, and things have further stagnated since then

Personally I'd say that the past 2 years have been the most exciting years of FreeBSD development for a long time. Maybe when 9.0 is released you'll give FreeBSD a chance again.