FreeBSD at 30 years old

Gosh! That’s quite old B)

As we know, Sony’s Playstations 3, 4 and 5 all run a FreeBSD. Additionally, FreeBSD is the OS for many routers, NAS servers, and other important things, or so I’m informed.

UNIX was originally delevoped at Bell Labs to make writing code for the PDP-11 easier. Widespead external use came with Version 6. There were lots of forks, and you can draw a really cool diagram of how all differet OSes relate to Unix, and each other.

NetBSD and FreeBSD are forks of the 386BSD OS, which happened because the latter stopped being worked on by its original developers. OpenBSD forked off NetBSD by Theo de Raadt because he wanted to be more of an arse than they’d let him. FreeBSD has a few forks optimised for easy desktop use.

Why FreeBSD is not Linux

Okay, linux kernels are not based off of a Unix or BSD; they are Unix-like, and promise some level of compatibility. Their Unix-y-ness comes from the userland programs, provided by GNU (GNU is Not Unix). So it’s a linux kernel/GNU programs providing a Unix OS experience to userland. Great. Now I understand the Stallman copypasta >:(

But BSDs have a BSD userland and BSD kernel, and do quite a few things differently to Linux/GNU. e.g.: - FreeBSD Jails allow efficient virtualisation with little overhead, and is more secure than what Unix originally offered which was filesystem only - FreeBSD also has a different virtual machine manager called bhyve which is much faster than the linux one, apparently.

playstations rely heavily on virtualisation; hence a BSD was a natural choice.

OpenZFS and NAS

FreeBSD is very often used in NAS (network attached storage) systems. Recent news is that the main commercial provider of OSs for such systems are moving away from a FreeBSD based OS towards a Linux/GNU one. Apparently this is bad because of performance reasons, and ZFS?

ZFS is very well supported on FreeBSD, which makes it a good choice if you care about that. Okay. Ah, it can do an awful lot of fancy stuff natively.

Desktop

It’s a pain to get your desktop set up with FreeBSD, about as bad as for linux. So just use a dist that does it for you. Desktop user experience is basically identical between the two, save pkg and ports vs apt and pacman and so on.

If you’re a developer, the author says FreeBSD is as easy to support as Linux, probably.

One very nice benefit of FreeBSD is that there is no czar/beneficient dictator for life, so it’s, in theory, a lot more democratic and easier to get involved, and from what people tell me this is the case. The downside is no amusing rants from your project leader (@Linus).

My takeaways: