Pros/Cons of running *BSD

[TheMagicM]

Some guy is telling me to run straight unix if I want to run a MySQL server or FreeBSD/OpenBSD... sup with that?  I'm running SuSE 9.2 now... any pros/cons on FreeBSD vs. Linux?

[adolescent]

"straight" Unix?  SCO?

You won't find any performance difference running mySQL on BSD versus Linux versus Unix.  I prefer Linux because there are plenty of freely availalbe distributions to choose from, and many are very mature and full featured.

[Failure]

The lines between "straight UNIX", Linux, and the BSDs are getting pretty blurred these days.  Generally, proponents of the BSDs and proprietary UNIX systems tout stability compared to Windows and, yes, Linux.

Back in the day there was only one UNIX.  Then AT&T got a bit restrictive with their licensing, and you had the BSD and System V split.  That's it.  That's how all this BSD vs Linux/UNIX stuff got started.  The differences are mostly subtle...names for the kernels, a number of system calls, locations of init scripts, etc.  They are really the same thing, at the core.

So on x86 you really have about three choices before you:

* Solaris x86 ("real" UNIX, mix of BSD and sysv, mostly sysv)
* Linux, take your practical/evangelical pick of distro
* BSD

With Solaris you'll find the hardware support is utter crap compared to Linux and BSD.  But it'll run and run and run.  Linux has far, far better hardware support.  And it'll run and run and run.  BSD has support in between.  And it'll run and run and run.

Don't buy into the "X is more stable than Y" argument.  True, you often find Solaris and BSD machines with ridiculous uptimes.  But do you think those boxes are fully patched?  I happen to make rounds to a lot of datacenters with Solaris installations, these guys are still running 6 and 7 in some cases, and haven't had security updates in who knows how long.  And those crazy uptimes will go away whenever you patch a Sun box, since the recommendation is to *reboot* into single-user mode to apply most patches.  Not just init 1 and back up, but all the way down and back up again.

Just my two cents.  I find Linux to be plenty stable.

[the_leander]

I used to run an MP3 jukebox with NetBSD, the thing would just keep on ticking, the only thing that killed it was the hard disks and motherboard dying of old age, sadly, as it was a custom build by a mate of a mate, I had to use something else for its replacement. But yes, once going, doing what you need it to, it will in theory just keep on going until the hardware it runs on dies out, or you get rooted because you have an uptime of several years and never patched anything, though beyond patching of the kernel, you shouldn't need to reboot for patching.

An absolutely superb OS for backroom operations, though I've not tried it as a desktop.

[Floid]

I have no idea what this mythical "straight" UNIX is (a Bell Labs tape on a PDP-11?), but if there's a kernel of truth to it, MySQL did/does 'assume' Linux, in the 'all the world's a VAX' sense, and there used to be some minor glitches there.

I'm not even sure if that applies anymore, and I've yet to become a database wonk myself.  People certainly run it, on all three BSDs.  The word from the horse's mouth might be a help.

As to selecting the 'right' BSD in this day and age... There should really be a 'product matrix' for this.  Hopefully I've got the following right:

NetBSD 2: BGL SMP, high-performance threading, fairly minimalist, "everything you could need" in pkgsrc, portable.  No linuxpluginwrapper, so use a Linux browser if you want Flash for desktop purposes.  Unsure as to 3D direct-rendering support, might exist for everything !nVidia.  Maybe a little shaky from the bump to 2.0, likely to keep doing whatever they've been doing as they always have.

OpenBSD: BGL SMP, fairly minimalist, secure, great for bastion hosts, firewalls, certain services.  Looks like performance for some workloads may be a concern, if you actually care that much.

FreeBSD 5: SMPng, high-performance threading, buzzword-compliant security (ACLs, TrustedBSD?), "everything you could need" in ports.  Still a bit warty from the whole 5.x adventure, may be continuing to improve in -STABLE.  Hanging out with DragonFly people gives you too many things to be afraid of.

DragonFly: LWKT, LWT someday?, libthr-like threading as of this week.  Infinite promise, while my current experience suggests you may wish to hold off 'production' use unless you know what you're getting into.  The next -RELEASE (1.1?) smells like it'll be a stable starting point when it arrives, so if you're not already a BSD nut, get on the bus then.  (...If you are already a BSD nut, drag out some spare hardware and help shake it down!)

Linux:  Looks good on paper.  There is probably some specific kernel point release that, coupled with some specific distro, does what you want.

I'm at a loss to tell people where to start right now; each and every distro *will* do the job, while the caveats present no clear winner.  (...and Linux sure *looks* like it's hit an island of stability right now, with Debian and Ubuntu seeming the moment's safe bets, but people who use it keep running to me with 2.6 horror stories...)

If you provide some sense of your mentality, astrological sign, and the lay of the lines on your palm, I might be able to peer into the crystal ball and make a guess as to which will be right for you.  Otherwise, there's always the argument for picking something and sticking with it until you find enough reasons not to... which is how everyone else gets along, whether they realize it or not.

[mikeymike]

I've got used to FreeBSD now (I think :-)).  Kernel reconfigs are far easier than any system of doing it that I've seen on Linux.  I've managed to figure out the best ways of getting software to install, which is something that always tripped me up on previous attempts with FreeBSD/Linux.

The first company I had a 'real' (read: computer) job at used FreeBSD almost exclusively for server-end stuff (their live systems being mostly web/db serving).  One of my friends works at Earthlink, where allegedly they use FreeBSD at least a hell of a lot.

At the end of the day, I think it comes down to which you're comfortable with.  For me that turned out to be which I could recompile the kernel to get the hardware support I wanted, and whose package manager system I figured out first.  I doubt you're going to see much performance difference, though I'm sure there'll be a few OS 'versus' benchmarks on the Intenet.

I agree with Failure about the stability argument.  Every major OS available nowadays can be rock-solid stable given that decent, working hardware is available for it (well, with the exception of WinME :-)).

My advice is, try the ones you can get hold of and see.  Re: Linux distributions, I would ask around which is more suited to server-side stuff.

[Failure]

Thread resurrection...I read this article today, explains some issues you may have with MySQL on FreeBSD along with notes on several other *NIX platforms.  Since the whole point seems to be picking a platform to run MySQL on, I figured this would be relevant info.

http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=04/12/27/1238216

It would be nice if the results were posted, but that's in the next article apparently.

[Floid]

Since I went through the trouble of digging up the MySQL results, here's the second part of that article with the pretty graphs.

I'm not surprised to see software that's mostly profiled on Linux working best on Linux; on top of this, FreeBSD 5.3 hasn't been very 'profiled' at all -- they've been too busy making the code work to check the theory in practice.  (This is a simplification, I'm sure individual developers are trying to pay attention, and I haven't been watching the development lists closely... but over the past couple years, Linux development has seemed much more 'benchmark-focused.'*)  The hope is that post-5.3, enough of the grunt work will be over with to actually take a look at what's working and smooth out the bumps.  NetBSD's SMP pessimism is a bit more interesting, and there are probably a couple variables at play there, too,

(Also note that, whatever the comments say, the 5.3 kernel does come built 'for 486' by default, not 386 -- which was said to impart some major performance concerns -- though that's a matter of kernel configuration, not CFLAGS.  I'd also wonder about the state of SMPng locking for particular disk and network devices used on the testbed, but hey, that's a real-world concern, too.)


*This can be good or bad -- it seems more scientific, but we know how much fun the GPU vendors have.  The 'problem' I've seen with Linux is that, every couple months, a new corner case comes into vogue, someone posts a bunch of benchmarks, a massive patchset appears to correct them, it gets committed, and suddenly 5 other corner cases break.  BSDs usually *try* to be more austere, and thus less of a moving target -- but all this business about FreeBSD 5 lacking a -STABLE until 5.3, and NetBSD murmuring 'oops, next time, let's open the patch branch immediately' means things haven't been all that much different lately.

[Floid]

Aha, NetBSD SMP results explained.