[shimont]

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?

[rsync]

We[1] have our entire infrastructure on FreeBSD - and always have.

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...

[bojo]

Whoa, I recall spinning a box up on JohnCompanies back when you guys first popped onto the scene.

Cool to see people still building on FreeBSD, sad to see that it's an uphill battle to stay relevant with it.

[rsync]

Did you learn about us from our kuro5hin ads ?

That was 21 years ago ...

[bojo]

That must have been it, used kuro5hin quite a bit back then.

[cerved]

there's a small startup called Netflix that does some internet thing with it

[belter]

Yeah, they are small but growing...

"Serving Netflix Video at 400Gb/s on FreeBSD" https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2021.pdf

[andai]

Also WhatsApp, Yahoo!, and many others [1] including Sony (playstation's OS), Apple (macOS) and Microsoft (Azure).

https://freebsdfoundation.org/freebsd/

[edgyquant]

MacOS isn’t FreeBSD. I believe they forked the FreeBSD userland a long time ago but used GNU for their shell and toolchain (and the kernel etc is completely different.)

[nix23]

MacOS is mostly a FreeBSD-Kernel plus a MACH-Kernel together called XNU, and most "core"-utils are still from FreeBSD:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darwin_(operating_system)#/med...

[andai]

https://wiki.freebsd.org/Myths#FreeBSD_is_Just_macOS_Without...

>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.

[oblio]

And those core utils are generally seen as a hindrance by developers using it.

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.

[ayushnix]

> 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?

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.

[nix23]

>And those core utils are generally seen as a hindrance by developers using it.

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.

[robbomacrae]

It's funny you wrote that because when browsing HackerNews, for me the 3rd item above this was: We're migrating many of our servers from Linux to FreeBSD (dragas.net)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30057549

[stragies]

The (currently) top-voted comment of that thread is somebody describing, how they went back to Linux after the honeymoon-period with FreeBSD, among others because of systemd.

[bojo]

I imagine rsync posted this as a reminder to what's in store. There were roughly 4-5 FreeBSD related posts which hit the main page on HN today.

[LeoPanthera]

Domain-specific derivatives of FreeBSD are still very popular, such as TrueNAS, pfSense, OPNsense, and so on.

[yyyk]

The BSDs always had a following in network-related roles, since Linux has had some issues in the past (e.g. accept filters used to be useful, iptables more complicated than pf), and OpenBSD cultivated a security-minded reputation.

[rubyist5eva]

We run everything on Linux except our PostgresSQL database which is FreeBSD and ZFS. Have nothing but good things to say.

[mulmen]

Have you done any writing about that experience and setup? Both Postgres and ZFS are COW, I seem to recall some warnings back in the day about conflicts between the two systems but I have no first hand experience.

[djbusby]

I've been told (in like 2006) that PG is "best" on FreeBSD - but I don't have a link to that IRC channel log.

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))

[mulmen]

Best on FreeBSD is one thing but best on ZFS on FreeBSD? IIRC the (oldschool?) guidance was UFS for Postgres.

[caffeinated_me]

I've seen ZFS being used with Postgres in a few different environments. Seems to work fine for the most part- surprisingly good compression (~8X in one case, usually lower), with the major downside being increased CPU usage when taking advantage of said compression.

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.

[rubyist5eva]

No we’re kind of a lean shop so we don’t do much tech blogging - it’s something we’re thinking of doing soon though.

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.

[heavyset_go]

It's used to build and distribute closed source operating systems and devices to users. Every Mac and iPhone user has a little bit of 2003-era FreeBSD running that provides XNU its BSD "flavor".

[accrual]

Nintendo Switch

[edgyquant]

SwitchOS is not based on FreeBSD. It has a net stack forked from FreeBSD code but if that makes it a FreeBSD than Windows and Linux are both BSDs I guess.

[astrange]

And PS5, FreeNAS and some smaller appliances, and macOS uses some of the userland.