How is BSD?

Also can this operating system be used as a server or a cloud computing lets say theoretically 40 thin clients connected through ssh to a single computer with 64 cores and 128 threaded acting as a remote connection to the thin clients. Will BSD be able to handle more high end system configurations like the example above?

File: WIN_20160813_02_18_45_Pro.jpg (61KB, 640x480px) Image search: [Google]

61KB, 640x480px

Also i have seen a BSD thread in a while so fill that in here too.

>>56981512

Easily. If you're just getting into BSD I highly recommend you check out the BSD Now podcast by Allan Jude and Kris Moore. They're great for BSD users of all experience levels and IIRC both guys are developers of FreeBSD.

To give you an idea of how capable BSD is of handling heavy traffic:

- Netflix recently (relatively) implemented it to serve their content:
>The OpenConnect appliance that Netflix uses to stream movies to its customers is based on FreeBSD. Netflix has made extensive contributions to the codebase and works to maintain a zero delta from mainline FreeBSD. Netflix OpenConnect appliances are responsible for delivering more than 32% of all Internet traffic in North America.

- Sony's PlayStation 4 runs a modified version of FreeBSD

- WhatsApp uses it to run their service
>When WhatsApp needed a platform that would be able to handle more than 1 million concurrent TCP connections per server, they chose FreeBSD. They then proceeded to scale past 2.5 million connections per server.

Try TempleOS. It's the truly patrician choice.

>>56981438
I can't speak for BSD, but I can speak for FreeBSD as I use it as my daily driver on both my desktop and laptop. I myself am developing the FreeBSD kernel, so I can answer some of the internals if you wish to know them aswell.

If you've used Linux and OSX, it should feel familiar to you on the surface. There are some major differences under the hood, though. Regarding GUIs, it should run all the famous DEs you've been running on Linux. Gnome3, MATE, Xfce, KDE(only 4 as of now), Cinnamon and so on. It also runs all the X11 WMs. Wayland isn't officially supported as of now, though. One DE exclusively developed for FreeBSD and PC-BSD is Lumina. Though still in early development, it seems to be making great headway. What you might run into problems with is wlan drivers. I personally recommend picking up one of those USB adapters that are officially supported if your chipset isn't.

I recommend UFS2 if you're running a low memory SSD, and ZFS is you have >1TB of space. Virtualization is becoming a lot better, I am personally working on this and bhyve is getting support for things that don't even exist in other hypervisors.

I'll be happy to answer more questions should you have them.

>>56982562
Have you seen any issues running typical applications because you're using BSD? Like Chromium or GIMP? Do applications need to be ported to BSD one by one or can a lot of them built for Linux work out of the box on BSD

>>56983005
FreeBSD has ports, these are applications like you mentioned, GIMP, Chromium and what not. There are native applications for FreeBSD, however if one is lacking, we do have a Linux emulation layer in place which translates the DOS calling convention used by Linux to the UNIX calling convention used by FreeBSD. It also maps the syscall numbers. It's called Linuxulator. We don't use GNU make though, we use BSDmake, so you will have to install gmake in order to build some of the software meant to be built with GNU make.

>>56982562
Interesting , How is BSD dealing with Security wise like for example if a person would try to act as a maintenance client and try to copy over the same MAC and IP address that is assigned to the Maintenance user , is there some BSD software out there that will lock up the system if suspicious activity occur on the PC like disabling cores and lowering the clock speed or killing multible connections between thin clients?

>>56983090
FreeBSD employs the MAC framework for it's main security feature(Mandatory Access Control). It's similar to ACLs, except it's mandatory. There are a number of MACs supported, biba, RBAC, MLS and what not. A criticism of security is lack of ASLR. There is an ASR patch in the works though, that you can apply if you wish. The issue you mentioned cannot be handled as a client, however software does exist to handle it if you are operating as a router(see pfSense). Another nice thing is if you need containerization of your software. Jails are basically what Docker should have been. They're easy to operate and they provide a good level of "security" in a sense that if your application does get pwned, the rest of your system won't. Another absolutely beautiful concept in FreeBSD is capsicum. It's the first actual sandboxing mechanism that limits the process' rights in terms of it's file descriptors and actually inherits it onto the children. There is no chance, should a process do an exec, for it to drop out of that sandbox. This is analogous to seccomp on Linux and pledge of OpenBSD, it is just, objectively, more secure. It can be difficult to apply to software sometimes, as it does need to be designed with capsicum in mind.

>>56981512
To answer this aswell, FreeBSD in fact outperforms Linux in terms of concurrent connections. We employ a syscall called kqueue which is a mechanism similar to epoll. To compare the two on a basic level, kqueue requires 1 syscall for the same functionality that epoll requires 3 syscalls for. Syscalls are also a major bottleneck for these kind of things. Another interesting comparison is sk_buff in netdevice.h on Linux and mbuf on FreeBSD. Should you send an ACK on Linux, you need 4KB of memory, on FreeBSD you only need around 100-200 bytes. This is due to FreeBSD having a layered implementation of the networking stack, and Linux doesn't. It does have it disadvantages, mainly cache misses, however that is negligible, as most of the thrashing problems on Linux come from lack of RAM at many concurrent connections. We also have a virtualized networking stack with no global state.

>>56981438
I have it on a server. If you want it as a daily driver make sure your hardware is supported though

>>56981896

BSD Now has been a boring shitfest since the writer left last year.

>>56983090
FreeBSD in particular is very behind in the area of security, while OpenBSD excels at it.

>>56983423
Source?

>>56983431
portsnap and common knowledge of OpenBSD

>>56983431
What he's referring to is the lack of ChaCha20 and instead use of RC4. This is bad practice indeed, we do need developers to get this done. Also the lack of ASLR is no excuse, but is being worked on. What he didn't say though is that the OpenBSD ASLR is just an implementation to be there, it's not good, and it's definitely not a secure one. See the PaX developer who coined the term ASLR and implemented it on Linux discuss this. OpenBSD also has no MAC employed inside it, which is also a major security flaw. While their low level protection is for the most part good, they do suffer performance issues, namely their kernel is one big lock in terms of SMP.

NetBSD-current has support for Nouveau

>>56983402
I've only just started listening to it. Started at episode 1. Currently at 10 I think.

Another good podcast is Garbage. It's by two OpenBSD devs.

>>56982562
When are the freaking Linux 4.7 drivers coming for freebsd. I'm literally just waiting on that to switch over since I have a r9 380

>>56981438
>How is BSD?
If you aren't running a server I don't recommend it

>>56981438
>>56981512

BSD is dead since decades ago newfag. You probably meant FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, or other. Those are different OSes, not distros.

>>56984620
>You probably meant FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DragonflyBSD, or other
Which people refer to collectively as "BSD"

>>56984992
>>56984620
this.
>>56983912
How long has it been since the devs left?

>>56985186
I know Allan still runs the show at BSDNow. I speak to him quite often and he's there to stay.

>>56985418
oh ok , does he haveothers that collab with him with the patches

>>56985874
Devs do appear on BSDNow every now and then. Not every week, but they do every so often. The nice thing is that they prefer to get all of the BSDs on there, not just one. It can be nice to keep track of what's happening in each.

>>56985917
ok I'll follow up on that

>>56985935
dragonflydigest is a pretty good thing, too. It has a great list of articles about all the BSDs and other technologies too. You can learn a lot about Unix history there.

>>56986107
Ah yes! Thank you for this. I had completely forgotten to mention it. As a sidenote, DragonflyBSD is a cool OS in it's own respect aswell. HammerFS is quite interesting.