Venting my frustration with FreeBSD
Nick Hibma
nick at van-laarhoven.org
Tue Dec 5 12:17:43 PST 2006
> 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?
People have been working on this for years. It's a difficult thing to
get right. Sun has been spending a *LOT* of time doing this for Solaris,
and I bet that even Linux isn't there yet.
> 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! Well said. Actually, user front-end support for hardware is
lacking in general. WiFi network handling, USB devices appearing and
disappearing (stop pointing at me!), RAID controllers, environment stuff
like fans, temperature sensors, I2C busses, etc.
> 3) Lack of direction in the project.
Sort of true. I like monopolies for this reason.
> days I'm not so sure. Is FBSD targetted at network servers, at
> desktops, at embedded devices? What architectures do we target?
Network devices nowadays become more and more based on architectures
like Xscale and MIPS. Perhaps you've seen recent articles on
TheRegister.co.uk about small desktop boxes with VGA and USB, non-i386
based systems running Linux. I'm working on an embedded system which is
AMD Geode with special hardware and very useful when you want 3 wifi
cards + 2 ethernet interfaces plus a modem in a box.
The things that I like FreeBSD for is the sometimes incredible stuff
that appears in the sources:
- GEOM based RAID filesystems. See Engelschalls 15 step process of
converting a *running* system to a mirrored root filesystem with just
one reboot for downtime.
- Network related improvements. BSD still shows the way in many ways
(IPSec for one).
- The source quality is much,much,much better than in other OSes. Check
out the USB drivers for one. We support 80% of the devices, with about
25% of the code (most of it was not written by me).
Nick
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