General questions regarding FreeBSD 10

[Teske, Devin]

On Sep 27, 2013, at 10:47 AM, Nikolas Britton wrote:

> General questions regarding FreeBSD 10:
> 
> 1. Did virtualization containers (VPS) make it into FreeBSD 10? The
> documentation I’ve read implies that you can have nested containers, with
> little to no performance penalty, is this correct? How is networking
> handled inside these containers?
> 

I don't think they made it into 10. I think they are still in the projects/ tree...

Last 2 posts on the topic that I've seen (Sep. 23, 2013):
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2013-September/043429.html
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2013-September/043442.html



> 2. I'm assuming jails still exist in FreeBSD (I haven’t used BSD in a long
> time), how do they relate, or fit in, with VPS and Bhyve offerings?
> 

Yes. Changed slightly -- you configure jails in /etc/jail.conf now.

Jails are enhanced by VPS and Bhyve offerings (which, the best of my knowledge,
require jails).

[skipping questions I can't answer]

> 6. How stable is FreeBSD's ZFS implementation, relative to Solaris? What
> zpool version is in FreeBSD 10? Is LZ4 the default compression mode?
> 

At $work we're actively deploying ZFS into production. It's very stable from
our testing over several years. Mileage seems to depend on configuration
complexity, but overall is extremely stable.

The default zpool version is 28, but if you do a "zpool upgrade ..." you'll then
jump to the new 5000 version introduces "zfs feature flags".



> 8. Has ports management gotten any better, specifically upgrading ports?
> Can applications be self contained, like on the Mac, yet? Any work on
> rollback with ZFS?
> 

For better ports management, you could look into poudriere. There's a tutorial
on bsdnow.tv

The idea is that you'll use poudriere to intelligently manage the ports you want
to roll binary packages. Then on 10 with the new `pkg' framework (formerly known
as PkgNg) those binary packages are intelligently applied.

As for self-contained packages... I believe you want what is known as PBIs.
However, I think only PC-BSD offers PBIs -- I don't think they are offered in
FreeBSD 10 by default (maybe there's a way though).

I assume what you mean by "rollback with ZFS" is... "boot loader integration with
BEs so you can boot to a previous snapshot".

Look for that in 10.1.




> 9. I recall device support being a large hurtle for me in the past. How far
> behind is driver development relative to Linux, for server equipment? Has
> there been any community interest in porting FreeBSD (world) to Linux
> (kernel)?
> 

Driver support is improving. There's AMD KMS and many more new drivers.

Knowing what kind of hardware you use would help answer the question better.
We've been very happy with LSI MegaRAID/SAS support, Broadcom 10G iSCSI
support, QLogic 8G FC support, and many many more.

As for FreeBSD-world with Linux-kernel... that sounds like the exact opposite
of the Debian kFreeBSD project (FreeBSD-kernel, Linux-world).

I don't suppose there's much demand in that. People that want such a thing
seem to be quite happy with ArchLinux -- which uses a BSD-style init framework.

There's also ArchBSD and ArchHurd.




> 10. How is the Java ecosystem on FreeBSD?
> 

Well, daiblo-jdk is dead, long live OpenJDK?
Seems to be the motions around here at $work.





> I haven’t used FreeBSD in ages. However, VPS, with ZFS, has me really
> excited;

Even more exciting, throw in VIMAGE, Geom Multipath, NETGRAPH, and sysutils/zxfer.

The possibilities are limitless as you bolt on more-and-more ^_^



> I don’t enjoy Solaris, and Enterprise Linux is still stuck in
> 2009, with kernel 2.6.32. I can’t find any modern linux distributions that
> are as reliable as I remember FreeBSD was. It’s really sad. Thanks!

Come on back to FreeBSD. ;) you're always welcome!

We won't discuss why you left in the first place ;)
-- 
Devin

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