Maturity of 5.x branch, speed of development compared to Linux
4. FreeBSD 5.0 has come out, and while this was mostly a "preview" of sorts, many were unhappy with the instability and slowness the 5.0 release offered compared with the 4.x branch. With Linux getting many advances in its kernel due to help from engineers working at big commercial companies like IBM, Red Hat and SGI, how do you feel your roadmap is holding up against the competition? Do you believe that a (mostly) commercial engineering-free project can pull out advancements faster than the Solaris or Linux teams can today?
While a lot more development money may be going into Linux right now,
FreeBSD is helped by the 20+ years of development and maturity that the
BSD base brings. Companies like NAI Labs also greatly help out by
funding projects in the enterprise, stability, and security spaces, so
FreeBSD keeps on advancing and setting the bar for others to follow.
Wes Peters: It's hard to understand how they could be unhappy with something they
had been warned about for months before the release.
It's not clear that Linux and FreeBSD are in competition with each
other, other than in editorial opinion pages. We have clear evidence
that in many cases they are complimentary to each other, and numerous
clear cases of cooperation, especially in the application world.
It's also important to note that development of FreeBSD isn't driven by
sales, it is driven by what the FreeBSD developers want it to be.
There is an assumption in your question that the influx of paid
development has been good for Linux; I know many long-time Linux
developers who feel this is most emphatically not the case. Paid Linux
developers are paid to develop what their employers want, not what is
best for the Linux system at this moment in time. The involvement of
so many different entities is pulling Linux in many directions, it
remains to be seen if the commercial success will make it a better
system.
This certainly happens to some extent in the FreeBSD world; some of my
own contributions to FreeBSD are for features my employer(s) have
requested. The difference is on the emphasis.
Greg 'groggy' Lehey: While we expected this, I haven't heard any concrete reports. We
warned people about this issue, so it's hard to understand why they
should be disappointed, unless they didn't want to believe us.
I personally also think the slowness and instability are exaggerated.
I've been using both release 4 and release 5 on my personal desktop
systems for a couple of years now, and I don't notice significant
differences in stability or performance.
M. Warner Losh : I've done benchmarks that show that 5 is slower than 4 in a number of
areas, but the biggest one is gcc. gcc 3.2 is a lot slower than 2.95,
but it produces better code more of the time. That's one area where
the system will feel slower to developers. Interactive performance is
about the same on my laptop booted 4 as it is in 5.
Some people that are trying 5.0-current will notice things are slower
because more debug options are turned on by default. We tried to
clear most of them for the release, but maybe one or two snuchk
through.
Greg 'groggy' Lehey: Until recently my day job was working on Linux with one of those [commercial]
companies, and I spent a lot of time looking in the Linux kernel.
Yes, it's getting better, but I think it will be some time yet before
it overtakes FreeBSD. I'm certainly very happy that I no longer have
to work on Linux.
[Do you believe that a (mostly) commercial engineering-free project can pull out advancements faster than the Solaris or Linux teams can today?]
No. Agreed, that's a distinct disadvantage.
M. Warner Losh : It makes things riskier in a lot of ways. There's a lot more chance
and projects go awry for the strangest of reasons. When there's money
involved, the project will get done, but the quality may or may not be
high. Such is the nature of the power relationship between employer
and employee, and work for open source is no different than work for
other areas. When it is done because of the passion, it generally
turns out better, people tweak it more, but it has a higher risk of
not being finished. And timeline tend to be more predictible in
compesnated realm than in the uncomensated. So having big money
behind you is a mixed blessing.
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Scott Long: The major focus for FreeBSD 5.x has been reworking the SMP capabilities
of the system. This task has been huge and is largely the cause for the
delays that 5.0 experienced. However, as more subsystems and drivers
are converted to use it, we feel that the result will be faster and more
scalable than what is available from Linux. There are also two related
projects that will provide vastly improved threading support to
applications, and will hopefully be another reason for people to look at
FreeBSD.
