Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 15:31:55 -0800 (PST) From: Nicole <nicole@unixgirl.com> To: Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org>, chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Venting my frustration with FreeBSD Message-ID: <774463.66161.qm@web51814.mail.yahoo.com> In-Reply-To: <200612041443.15154.josh@tcbug.org>
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Since you started the thread, I thought I might add my 2cents... --- Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org> wrote: > 10 years ago I thought it would be fun to upgrade my 486 from DOS > 6.22 > to windows 95. It took me about two weeks to realize what a horrible > > mistake I had made, and my general dissatisfaction led me to seek out > > a non-MS alternative. I talked to some friends and mentioned that it > > would be sort of fun to learn a unix of some sort. One of them > recommended FreeBSD and about a week later I had a set of CDs from > Walnut Creek in my hand containing FreeBSD 2.1.5. I've been using > FBSD ever since on my desktop and have even managed to make a living > at administrating FBSD boxes for others. I've run into other OS's > over the years. IRIX, Solaris, several linux distros, and am always > glad when I can get away from them and back to FreeBSD. :) I started at about the same time. Since then I have loved using FreeBSD and helping others do the same. > This email was sort of prompted by the news that the friend who > showed > me the wonders of FreeBSD has started migrating everything he runs to > > linux. I won't get into his reasoning, it's not really relevent to > what I'm going on about. > > I started thinking about what would force *me* into the corner of > having to move to a different OS and came up with a short list. I have found myself in several situations of practicly being told to Run Linux. 1) MySql - My company paid them $5K support money to solve a problem we were having. After a few months their best advice was to switch to running RedHat Linux. Since Redhat paid them lots of money to make sure things were right, they felt our problem would magicaly go away or at least they could use their big money backers to help solve it. (We switched to 4.11 w/linux threads) Hoping to try FreeBSD 6 soon. 2) Zeus web servers/load balancers. Sold for linux or freeBSD or Solaris. However I was told that it was "designed for linux" and that would provide the best performance. 3) Network Appliance. Who I seriously had tech support people say, FreeBSD? I have never heard of that distro of Linux before. They bascicly told me FreeBSD's NFS support was greatly wanting and if we wanted any more improvment, to switch to linux. > 1) SMP scalability. 4-way boxes are relatively common, and hardware > > with higher CPU counts is only going to get more and more common. > I'm no industry expert, but 5 years from now will my clients be > considering buying 32 and 64 way boxes? Possibly. Will FreeBSD be > in a positiion to compete favorably vs. the alternatives on such > hardware? We use almost all Opteron Servers. As such, it is getting harder and harder to not have at least a dual core cpu and now to also have the apperance of 4 cpu's. > 2) RAID controller support. This is a huge one that affects me > directly even today. Lack of in OS management tools for RAID > controllers. I have some options if I can pick the hardware, but if > a client brings me something and says this is the hardware you have > to deal with a lot of times putting FBSD on it means living without > management tools for the RAID controller in the OS. What good is > hot-swappable drives if I have to take down the OS to rebuild the > array? Yes I have run into this as well. I use Infortrend (as it has out of band management) and 3-ware. Some Adaptec management tools worked back in 4.11 but I do not know if they will still work with 4.11 emulation. > 3) Lack of direction in the project. Oh my, I miss Jordan Hubbard. He was a great spokes-person / representative for FreeBSD. Well both he and Mike Smith gave a great front and nice face to FreeBSD. They, managed to give it more of a cult of personality. People like associating Linux with Linus Torvalds. People have a really hard time associating something to an entity like the FreeBSD foundation. I have always found Open Source people don't care much for headless corporations or foundations. FreeBSD needs that back to help give it a Someone as well as a Something to rally around. > The FreeBSD project has lost it's focus. 10 years ago there was a > clear direction and purpose to the OS. It was targetted at > high-performance network server apps on x86 and alpha hardware. Now > days I'm not so sure. Is FBSD targetted at network servers, at > desktops, at embedded devices? What architectures do we target? > Looking at the website I see alpha, amd64, ARM, i386, ia64, MIPS, > pc98, ppc, sparc64, sun4v, and xbox. I know this is a volunteer > project, I know you really can't keep people from tinkering with what > > they want to tinker with, but xbox? It seems to me to be a waste of > resources to concentrate on anything besides i386/AMD64.....there's > plent of market share to be captured right there. I look at that > list and see a future for AMD64. (Yes, I wouldn't be at all > surprised if sparc went away) ARM isn't going away, but is FreeBSD > really concerned with the embedded market? > > FreeBSD does not have the support or the financial backing to be all > things to all people. It can't compete across the board with linux, > so why try? Even if FBSD got to the point where it was as flexible > as linux, HI, I'm a hard real time OS, and I'm a terrific desktop OS, > > and I make a great platform for apache, and I scale really well on > 1024-way clusters, it would end up being linux.....fragmented and > hacky and patched and ugly. > > This is a rant, and I've purposely posted it here and not forwarded > it > anyone who matters because it's not going to make any difference > anyways. Feel free to prove me wrong, or to flame me. It's slow at > work and I could use the diversion. > > If you *do* decide to flame me please take a moment to grep for > josh@tcbug.org through the ports tree, or look for PR's with my name > on them, or browse through the questions@ mailing list archives > looking for responses from me. I have, and do, contribute to > FreeBSD, which I feel gives me the right to complain a bit. I fully > intend to ride the FBSD boat as long as possible, I just can't help > but wonder if the slow leaks I see now are serious. 4) Lack of File Journaling. If it were not for the work done by Pawel Jakub and his Journaling Patches recently, I would be running Linux for a growing number of servers right now. I can only hope it gets included into the OS soon so that OS partitions can be journaled as well. 5) My personal Pet Peeve. I miss, when apache (as an example) would get installed in /usr/local/apache. And all its configs and includes were there with it. Much like the /opt concept. If its not part of the OS, keep it seperate! There are so many ports I cannot use becouse it makes tracking updates and such across many servers much more difficult. I don't have the street cred that you have, but I have always been a supporter and heavy user (I run a very large site based 99% on freeBSD) and I would give more if I could. I often check the donations page to see if there is something needed I could justify to by bossees we should donate. (IE something that is needed that would benefit us) I will add however, that I have been looking more at various Linux's lately out of need and I have found them wanting in many ways for things I enjoy with FreeBSD. (Ability to boot off of a USB attached CD is a big one) I have stated or offered my view on the above vent. Some will call it ranting. Others will hopefully call it constructive criticism. What is used by FreeBSD to drive a direction or need these days? How can someone who is not a programmer really contribute to the faceless entity that is FreeBSD of late? As an example, if I knew I could help get better SMP performance work done by someone, but they needed hardware, I know I could get my bosses to donate some. But sadly bosses like some sort of proof they arn't just sending things or money off and not get something to show for it. Anyway, that's my rambling 2 cent addition. Flame away. That always wins people over. Nicole > -- > Thanks, > > Josh Paetzel > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-chat@freebsd.org mailing list > http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-chat > To unsubscribe, send any mail to > "freebsd-chat-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" >
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