Negative Review of FreeBSD 5.4
Neal E. Westfall
nwestfal at dslextreme.com
Thu Jun 2 10:48:03 PDT 2005
>> Anybody have any thoughts on this review?
>>
>> http://os.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=05/05/24/2153257&tid=8
>
> I suggest you provide your thoughts first.
Well, as I run FreeBSD on older 32-bit hardware, I have not seen some of
the problems the author mentions, so my thoughts on the article will be
somewhat limited. The impression the author gives is that the 4.X branch
was more stable, but it doesn't appear that the author has actually used
the 4.X branch. It probably isn't really a fair comparison anyway, as the
4.X branch doesn't support the hardware he was trying to use.
I would have liked to see how a major linux distribution or two would have
fared on the same hardware. I don't think that the reviewer really did
extensive enough testing to be able to render a fair review, as he was
using some pretty bleading edge hardware, and it is not clear from the
review whether linux would have fared much better.
Then again, as a FreeBSD user myself for a good 15 years or so, I am
probably a little biased towards FreeBSD. Maybe linux is rock-solid on a
64-bit platform. It appears to be pretty stable at my jobsite, where we
run 64-bit Linux on two Altix servers, but they do freeze up every once in
a while, maybe once every 2-3 months, requiring a hardware reset.
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