Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 02:12:51 +0200 (MET DST) From: Sascha Schumann <sas@schell.de> To: Peter Mutsaers <plm@xs4all.nl> Cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD or LINUX??? - Which one should I choose? Message-ID: <Pine.LNX.4.00.9807261214020.589-100000@guerilla.foo.bar> In-Reply-To: <873ebqfinz.fsf@muon.xs4all.nl>
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On 25 Jul 1998, Peter Mutsaers wrote:
> >> On Fri, 24 Jul 1998 22:22:40 +0200 (MET DST), Sascha Schumann
> >> <sas@schell.de> said:
[..]
>
> Maybe, but from my experience, FreeBSD (even -current) is more stable
> than Linux.
I'm running FreeBSD-stable (2.2.7) now for four days and it crashed three
times on me. The first time, I copied a 2MB file to a clean ext2fs
partition - the system hang (I could still switch between terminals),
but the partition was mixed up - lots of errors while running e2fsck. The
second time happened while hammering the FreeBSD machine with lots of web
request. The system froze (=totally dead) after ~2M requests. The third
time was again disk related, "Freeing free block" and system reboot within
15 seconds while installing a new kernel image.
My own Linux installation here crashed twice - in about 3 years. The first
time was while running Quake with wrong settings and the second time, it
was a known KFM bug which I "tested" out...
> >> - Linux scheduling algorithm is poor on high system load
> >> (THUS - to run an internet server I'd prefer FreeBSD!)
>
> SS> Which of the scheduling algorithms do you mean? There are
> SS> actually three I remember now (rr, fifo, other). And there is
> SS> Linux-rt (realtime support). Does FreeBSD have this?
>
> This is really true, and one of the reasons I'm annoyed right now. I
> ran FreeBSD, now use Linux and am upset about the (relative of course,
> Windows is much worse of course) poorer scheduling I experience.
Can you prove this with some numbers?
> Also FreeBSD's filesystem is much better. I've got both UDMA IDE and
> SCSI disks, and on both bonnie shows FreeBSD has much better
> performance and lower CPU usage during heavy disk I/O, and also during
> simple sequential read.
>
> Somehow my UDMA IDE controller isn't even recognized in Linux
> (including in 2.1.110, 2.0.35) so I cannot use DMA in Linux, whereas I
> can in FreeBSD. I was surprised, because Linux has the name of
> supporting more hardware. Apparently this is not always true.
Just do hdparm -d 1 /dev/hd? and your UDMA will work. If you are
lurking on linux kernel so hard you have probably seen the messages about
UDMA support in the last 24 hours...
>
> SS> And dont't forget: Linux supports SMP hardware since somewhere
> SS> in 1.3.x days. FreeBSD does not. I read sth that FreeBSD 3.0
> SS> might support it...
>
> 3.0 has been supporting it for a long time. In the Linux world, being
> much less conservative (or more careless) 3.0 would have been the
> stable production release already.
You know it probably, but you don't name it: New features go into the dev
kernels (e.g. 1.3.x, 2.1.x) are tested there and if they prove
stable/bugfree they make it into stable releases. I don't know why anyone
could call this behavior less conservative (it makes sure everything
works!!) or more careless (I always thought that would include doing
something dangerous...)
> >> * The Linux development model is more liberal, the more restrictive
> >> FreeBSD model guarantees uniform source code and better stability.
>
> SS> Don't think so. Linux development is discussed by many people
> SS> on the linux-kernel list, but the actual decisions are done by
> SS> a few ones. All patches to the official kernel go through
> SS> Linus' hands - he accepts or rejects.
>
> Not true anymore. Alan Cox puts together the stable releases now. He
> has been criticized a few times for putting new functionality in 2.0.x
> causing instability, while 2.0.x should only get bug fixes and new
> stuff should go in 2.1.x. But: it takes too long for 2.1.x to settle
> (because of the chaotic development; I monitor linux-kernel list
> closely) so there was a strong push to port back some important things
> (such as FAT32 support) to 2.0.x.
Again, this is intended behavior. I don't want to wait months or years
until I get a new full stable kernel with all new features. If the feature
is there and has proven to be stable why shouldn't I be able to use it?
Joe User wants new features but he doesn't want to risk anything by using
the development kernel. I can't see anything wrong with it. Only big fat
companies use the 'release seldom' paradigm.
I don't want to blame FreeBSD here for anything. I'm *very* new to it. I'm
Linux biased. I'm open to new things - but not to Linux bashing.
> SS> I installed FreeBSD some days ago on one of my machines and I found it
> SS> first a little bit confusing... I searched for the /usr/src/sys tree a
> SS> little bit too long ;)
>
> SS> BTW, is there some "nicer" interface for configuring the kernel? While
> SS> compiling the kernel first, I got some undefined references to
> SS> __isa_devtab_cam which were solved with hacking around a little bit
> SS> (#define _ISA_DEVTAB_CAM_NOT_EXTERN)
>
> I must say that editing a config file may look less nice than Linux's
> 'menuconfig' or xconfig, but after a while it gets really tedious to
> look through all the menues and tweaking a config file is clearly
> easier (which is possible for the Linux kernel too, b.t.w.)
And I do it, from time to time. But to have these options available on
FreeBSD would possibly be a big win.
Bye,
Sascha
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