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Path: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!nntp.coast.net!news.net99.net!news.alt.net!news1.alt.net!news.u.washington.edu!olsenc From: olsenc@kodiak.ee.washington.edu (Clint Olsen) Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.advocacy,comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc,comp.unix.advocacy,comp.unix.misc Subject: Re: Linux vs FreeBSD Date: 30 Nov 1995 10:18:21 GMT Organization: University of Washington, Seattle Lines: 125 Message-ID: <49k0dd$pfg@nntp5.u.washington.edu> References: <489kuu$rbo@pelican.cs.ucla.edu> <4972bn$psq@bell.maths.tcd.ie> <49ijf9$9rc@tombstone.kent.edu> <30BD2617.23585C28@mcs.net> NNTP-Posting-Host: misha.ee.washington.edu NNTP-Posting-User: olsenc Xref: euryale.cc.adfa.oz.au comp.os.linux.advocacy:29417 comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc:9896 comp.unix.advocacy:11793 comp.unix.misc:19877 In article <30BD2617.23585C28@mcs.net>, Craig Bergren <cbergren@mcs.net> wrote: >When this thread started out, it was so promising. I thought I might >get some insight into the design differences that distinguish FreeBSD >from Linux. Unfortunately this discourse has rapidly degenerated into >noise. Yes, that is to be expected :) >Is there any way to bring this discussion back to a comparison of the >differences between Linux and FreeBSD that might make one choose one >over the other? Glad you asked! >I decided to run Linux for these reasons; none are very technical. It >all boils down to a support issue for me: > >1) There was a book with a CD ROM in Barnes and Nobel that I could buy > on impulse. There were no such books on FreeBSD, nor CD ROMS. When? Just curious. >2) There was tons of traffic on the Linux usenet news groups. For the > most part the discussion seemed to have a high signal to noise ratio. > This was in August before all the undergraduate riff-raff came back > to school. I find the majority of the traffic to be very uninformative and directed towards people who don't have that much experience with UNIX. >3) The FreeBSD news groups appeared disearted. Before 2.0, most FreeBSD traffic was contained within mailing lists. This appears to have changed. >4) Reading the Linux news groups I got a good idea of what hardware > was supported (before I bought my new Micron). Good point. I went out and asked amongst the mailing lists and newsgroups to find this info out. Generally, most decent hardware is supported by both FreeBSD and Linux. Linux may support a lot of funky hardware, but I would probably not be interested in running an OS on it. At some point, you have to decide whether or not you want to make an OS run on your hardware or select hardware to run an OS :) >Why am I still running Linux? I would like to dedicate this to "Why are we no longer running Linux?" 1) At the time of Linux's rise to fame, Slackware was the big distribution. It took us a lot of struggling to figure this out. SLS sucked. With FreeBSD, this is not a problem. One distribution, no ambiguity, no sweat. Most importantly, Slackware releases rearely synced with stable releases of the kernel!!! Separate distributions from the kernel caused us no end of grief. Slackware still gets quite a bit of criticism. Gee, is it a kernel or a distribution problem? What would Linus know about Slackware? :) If you ask the distribution owners, they'd say, "What kernel are you running? Maybe you should upgrade? I'm using 1.X.X and it works fine." 2) At the time of Linux 1.0.9, console hangs were prevelant, causing grief for users. The only solution was to upgrade, but there was only so far we could upgrade w/o installing a totally new Slackware and going through the same grief (ELF). 3) Linux NFS performance sucked. The only way to fix this was to go to a 1.3.X kernel (apparently), and we were not interested in screwing around with alpha kernels or upgrading daily. I couldn't even find out if this was being addressed at the time (see #5). 4) In general, Linux networking was unreliable with slow connections. See reason #3 for why we didn't want to upgrade. The kernel would get into some funky race conditions, and the load would shoot up beyond 30. We would either have to reboot or leave the machine alone for a couple of hours to sort itself out. 5) Linux does not seem to have an up-to-date kernel blurb page explaining enhancements or apparent TODO lists. For example, where would I look to see if they were fixing NFS performance? No apparent centralized WEB page (like www.freebsd.org). Although the HOWTOs are nice, they seem to be often out of date. 6) Linux's chaotic development scares me. This is probably largely due to the newsgroup exposure and all the OOPS I see posted on the odd kernel revisions. 7) Kernel drivers frequently get to alpha stages, but seem to be poorly supported after that. I've noticed that on a couple of occasions that a driver gets created and the author takes a "sabbatical". With FreeBSD, drivers that are submitted by more "seasoned" kernel hackers continue to get support and bugfixes throughout its lifetime . I won't point any fingers, but I have heard of some Linux hardware drivers ported over to FreeBSD, fixed, and then ported back to FreeBSD :) 8) One of the bigger things attracting us to FreeBSD was the fact that ftp.cdrom.com runs it. Pretty damn impressive serving 400+ simultaneous connections (and fast!). It's kind of humorous that the Slackware repository is actually a FreeBSD box :) Now, if you want to run a stable OS that gets plenty of hammering, why not follow by example? :) In light of our Linux problems, FreeBSD looked like something to give a whirl. In short, we were not interested in daily (or weekly) kernel upgrades. We are not in a situation where we can take down a machine for repairs. We needed an OS that runs reliably between releases with reasonable separation between major revisions. For us, that is FreeBSD 2.0.5. Although I haven't installed Linux for a while, the installation was much easier than Linux (we installed via ftp with FreeBSD w/o a hitch). NFS installs with Slackware was like pulling teeth! This is not to say Linux is bad. Linux is fine to use when the machine does not need to serve mission critical apps. Linux will likely get certain fancy features before other free OSs, and they would be interesting to try out. This is probably why Linux is frequently used in the home by people in single-node/single user mode. You obviously won't encounter networking problems w/o any network! This just doesn't match our application. Linux is likely going to mature over time and become very stable. BSD didn't get where it is today without lots of time in hackers' hands! :) Happy hacking! -Clint