From owner-freebsd-questions Sun Jul 26 17:14:25 1998 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA02041 for freebsd-questions-outgoing; Sun, 26 Jul 1998 17:14:25 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from www.schell.de (root@[195.20.238.2]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA02016 for ; Sun, 26 Jul 1998 17:14:12 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from sas@schell.de) Received: from guerilla.foo.bar (root@hennen30.iserlohn.netsurf.de [194.195.194.222]) by www.schell.de (8.8.5/8.8.5) with ESMTP id CAA07078; Mon, 27 Jul 1998 02:13:42 +0200 Received: from localhost (root@localhost [127.0.0.1]) by guerilla.foo.bar (8.9.0/8.9.0) with SMTP id CAA06266; Mon, 27 Jul 1998 02:12:51 +0200 Date: Mon, 27 Jul 1998 02:12:51 +0200 (MET DST) From: Sascha Schumann Reply-To: sas@schell.de To: Peter Mutsaers cc: freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: FreeBSD or LINUX??? - Which one should I choose? In-Reply-To: <873ebqfinz.fsf@muon.xs4all.nl> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On 25 Jul 1998, Peter Mutsaers wrote: > >> On Fri, 24 Jul 1998 22:22:40 +0200 (MET DST), Sascha Schumann > >> said: [..] > > Maybe, but from my experience, FreeBSD (even -current) is more stable > than Linux. I'm running FreeBSD-stable (2.2.7) now for four days and it crashed three times on me. The first time, I copied a 2MB file to a clean ext2fs partition - the system hang (I could still switch between terminals), but the partition was mixed up - lots of errors while running e2fsck. The second time happened while hammering the FreeBSD machine with lots of web request. The system froze (=totally dead) after ~2M requests. The third time was again disk related, "Freeing free block" and system reboot within 15 seconds while installing a new kernel image. My own Linux installation here crashed twice - in about 3 years. The first time was while running Quake with wrong settings and the second time, it was a known KFM bug which I "tested" out... > >> - Linux scheduling algorithm is poor on high system load > >> (THUS - to run an internet server I'd prefer FreeBSD!) > > SS> Which of the scheduling algorithms do you mean? There are > SS> actually three I remember now (rr, fifo, other). And there is > SS> Linux-rt (realtime support). Does FreeBSD have this? > > This is really true, and one of the reasons I'm annoyed right now. I > ran FreeBSD, now use Linux and am upset about the (relative of course, > Windows is much worse of course) poorer scheduling I experience. Can you prove this with some numbers? > Also FreeBSD's filesystem is much better. I've got both UDMA IDE and > SCSI disks, and on both bonnie shows FreeBSD has much better > performance and lower CPU usage during heavy disk I/O, and also during > simple sequential read. > > Somehow my UDMA IDE controller isn't even recognized in Linux > (including in 2.1.110, 2.0.35) so I cannot use DMA in Linux, whereas I > can in FreeBSD. I was surprised, because Linux has the name of > supporting more hardware. Apparently this is not always true. Just do hdparm -d 1 /dev/hd? and your UDMA will work. If you are lurking on linux kernel so hard you have probably seen the messages about UDMA support in the last 24 hours... > > SS> And dont't forget: Linux supports SMP hardware since somewhere > SS> in 1.3.x days. FreeBSD does not. I read sth that FreeBSD 3.0 > SS> might support it... > > 3.0 has been supporting it for a long time. In the Linux world, being > much less conservative (or more careless) 3.0 would have been the > stable production release already. You know it probably, but you don't name it: New features go into the dev kernels (e.g. 1.3.x, 2.1.x) are tested there and if they prove stable/bugfree they make it into stable releases. I don't know why anyone could call this behavior less conservative (it makes sure everything works!!) or more careless (I always thought that would include doing something dangerous...) > >> * The Linux development model is more liberal, the more restrictive > >> FreeBSD model guarantees uniform source code and better stability. > > SS> Don't think so. Linux development is discussed by many people > SS> on the linux-kernel list, but the actual decisions are done by > SS> a few ones. All patches to the official kernel go through > SS> Linus' hands - he accepts or rejects. > > Not true anymore. Alan Cox puts together the stable releases now. He > has been criticized a few times for putting new functionality in 2.0.x > causing instability, while 2.0.x should only get bug fixes and new > stuff should go in 2.1.x. But: it takes too long for 2.1.x to settle > (because of the chaotic development; I monitor linux-kernel list > closely) so there was a strong push to port back some important things > (such as FAT32 support) to 2.0.x. Again, this is intended behavior. I don't want to wait months or years until I get a new full stable kernel with all new features. If the feature is there and has proven to be stable why shouldn't I be able to use it? Joe User wants new features but he doesn't want to risk anything by using the development kernel. I can't see anything wrong with it. Only big fat companies use the 'release seldom' paradigm. I don't want to blame FreeBSD here for anything. I'm *very* new to it. I'm Linux biased. I'm open to new things - but not to Linux bashing. > SS> I installed FreeBSD some days ago on one of my machines and I found it > SS> first a little bit confusing... I searched for the /usr/src/sys tree a > SS> little bit too long ;) > > SS> BTW, is there some "nicer" interface for configuring the kernel? While > SS> compiling the kernel first, I got some undefined references to > SS> __isa_devtab_cam which were solved with hacking around a little bit > SS> (#define _ISA_DEVTAB_CAM_NOT_EXTERN) > > I must say that editing a config file may look less nice than Linux's > 'menuconfig' or xconfig, but after a while it gets really tedious to > look through all the menues and tweaking a config file is clearly > easier (which is possible for the Linux kernel too, b.t.w.) And I do it, from time to time. But to have these options available on FreeBSD would possibly be a big win. Bye, Sascha To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message