[stingraycharles]

Yeah I would love to use FreeBSD jails with ZFS and everything, it’s just that the whole cloud and containerization thing happened based on Linux and FreeBSD just never made it into that ecosystem.

You’ll be sacrificing a lot and have to hand-roll a lot if you want your organization to switch from Linux+docker to FreeBSD+jails

[kbenson]

It's all just history now for all I know, but there was work in the past to make Linux containers work on a Solaris fork (SmartOS, specifically) by emulating the Linux syscall table and presenting that to the containers. Joyent did work on this (alas, and there's an excellent and entertaining talk from Bryan Cantrill[1] that goes over it.

I imagine FreeBSD could do something similar if they aren't already. IIRC FreeBSD has a Linux emulation layer (but I don't know how much attention it still gets), and it's had containerization primitives longer than linux, so some amount of filling in the gaps in containerization features and syscall tables (if needed) could possibly yield an OCI compatibility later (for all I know all this already exists).

The problem, and the reason if this doesn't exist why people probably weren't as interested in doing the work, is it would always be "mostly" compatible and working and there would be no guarantee that the underlying software wouldn't exhibit bugs or weird behavior from small behavior differences in the platform when emulating something else. Why open yourself up to the headache when you can just run Linux with containers or build what you want on FreeBSD with jails and their own native containerization primitives.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=coFIEH3vXPw

[lukeh]

Yeah, emulating syscalls is fine until it isn’t. See WSL1.

[baq]

Some kernels are more similar to others, some are less. Turns out NT is less similar to Linux than required for good performance. I wouldn’t be surprised if Solaris was similar enough given that Linux tries to be Unix-like and Solaris is actually Unix.

[jonhohle]

What about FreeBSD+OCI containers https://freebsdfoundation.org/blog/oci-containers-on-freebsd...

[nesarkvechnep]

In my opinion this is the path forward. I can already imagine Hashicorp Nomad orchestrator, with the podman driver, running fleets of FreeBSD containers.

[randmeerkat]

Hacker News serves +4M requests per day using nothing but two FreeBSD servers…

[delian66]

4M requests/day is ~46 requests/second , for content, that could be cached a lot. Even if you have spikes that are 100x bigger than the average, that would be 4600r/s which does not seem like much in 2025.

[toast0]

I think there's FreeBSD images for all the clouds now.

You would need to do more work yourself to fetch and run jails probably, and I don't know if there's a hosted repository of 'jail images', but in return, you'd probably have a nicer system (at least, I'd like such a system more than running containers on google container optimized linux)

[righthand]

Bastille has “templates”: https://bastillebsd.org/templates/

[badgersnake]

Not Hetzner, sadly.

[MathiasPius]

You can always upload your own, it's pretty simple doing so in a reproducible manner using something like Packer, but even without it you can just boot a VM into a rescue system, write your OS of choice to the VM disk and reboot.

[tiltowait]

Is it doable on a VPS? The documentation made it sound like it was for dedicated only. I went with OVH for this reason (which was cheaper anyway).

[MathiasPius]

It is, yeah, the process is the same: boot into a rescue system running in memory, and do whatever you want with the disk.