Date: Mon, 4 Dec 2006 14:43:15 -0600 From: Josh Paetzel <josh@tcbug.org> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Venting my frustration with FreeBSD Message-ID: <200612041443.15154.josh@tcbug.org>
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10 years ago I thought it would be fun to upgrade my 486 from DOS 6.22 to windows 95. It took me about two weeks to realize what a horrible mistake I had made, and my general dissatisfaction led me to seek out a non-MS alternative. I talked to some friends and mentioned that it would be sort of fun to learn a unix of some sort. One of them recommended FreeBSD and about a week later I had a set of CDs from Walnut Creek in my hand containing FreeBSD 2.1.5. I've been using FBSD ever since on my desktop and have even managed to make a living at administrating FBSD boxes for others. I've run into other OS's over the years. IRIX, Solaris, several linux distros, and am always glad when I can get away from them and back to FreeBSD. :) This email was sort of prompted by the news that the friend who showed me the wonders of FreeBSD has started migrating everything he runs to linux. I won't get into his reasoning, it's not really relevent to what I'm going on about. I started thinking about what would force *me* into the corner of having to move to a different OS and came up with a short list. 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? 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? 3) Lack of direction in the project. The FreeBSD project has lost it's focus. 10 years ago there was a clear direction and purpose to the OS. It was targetted at high-performance network server apps on x86 and alpha hardware. Now days I'm not so sure. Is FBSD targetted at network servers, at desktops, at embedded devices? What architectures do we target? Looking at the website I see alpha, amd64, ARM, i386, ia64, MIPS, pc98, ppc, sparc64, sun4v, and xbox. I know this is a volunteer project, I know you really can't keep people from tinkering with what they want to tinker with, but xbox? It seems to me to be a waste of resources to concentrate on anything besides i386/AMD64.....there's plent of market share to be captured right there. I look at that list and see a future for AMD64. (Yes, I wouldn't be at all surprised if sparc went away) ARM isn't going away, but is FreeBSD really concerned with the embedded market? FreeBSD does not have the support or the financial backing to be all things to all people. It can't compete across the board with linux, so why try? Even if FBSD got to the point where it was as flexible as linux, HI, I'm a hard real time OS, and I'm a terrific desktop OS, and I make a great platform for apache, and I scale really well on 1024-way clusters, it would end up being linux.....fragmented and hacky and patched and ugly. This is a rant, and I've purposely posted it here and not forwarded it anyone who matters because it's not going to make any difference anyways. Feel free to prove me wrong, or to flame me. It's slow at work and I could use the diversion. If you *do* decide to flame me please take a moment to grep for josh@tcbug.org through the ports tree, or look for PR's with my name on them, or browse through the questions@ mailing list archives looking for responses from me. I have, and do, contribute to FreeBSD, which I feel gives me the right to complain a bit. I fully intend to ride the FBSD boat as long as possible, I just can't help but wonder if the slow leaks I see now are serious. -- Thanks, Josh Paetzel
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