[ale] BSD and Linux

[jj at spiderentertainment.com]

Thank you very much, you have substracted a few things from my list. :)

Marek

Chris Ricker wrote:

> Since there's a lot of FUD flying around, I'll chime in ;-)
>
> You can currently choose from four *BSDs and a bazillion Linuxes.  The
> BSDs are:
>
> *BSDi : commercial, closed-source variant.  This one is fairly slow in
> development (they're just now adding Linux compatibility layers as a
> beta-level option, for example), and mainly used by people who don't
> want to use SCO but have to have a commercial Unix for x86.
>
> *NetBSD : focuses on portability.  And that's the only place I've ever
> seen it used in real life (versus someone just installing it to play
> with)--if you've got some obscure architecture, chances are NetBSD has
> been ported to it and you can get some use out of that otherwise-junk
> hardware.
>
> *FreeBSD : focuses on performance on x86 (and, lately, Alpha) platforms.
> Much of the internet runs on FreeBSD, including many high-load sites such
> as ftp.cdrom.com.
>
> *OpenBSD : focuses on security.  It's also much more widely ported than
> FreeBSD, though not as much as NetBSD.  Performance-wise, it's more
> comparable with NetBSD than FreeBSD.
>
> Despite the different interests and goals of the four groups, there is a
> lot of cross-talk between them and sharing of code and ideas.  Even BSDi
> ocassionally gives source to the others....  And, for that matter, there's
> even sharing between the Linux and BSD worlds....
>
> Now, for differences between them and Linux:
>
> * The BSDs are a lot more coherent than Linux.  When I log into my FreeBSD
> box at home, I know it'll feel just like the OpenBSD one down the hall at
> work. That's certainly not true of the Debian box on my desk at school
> compared with the Bastille Linux box at home.  That's good or bad, depending
> on your viewpoint.
>
> * The BSDs, as the name would suggest, all use BSD-style inits (though when
> / if Debian/FreeBSD ships, that might change ;-).  Most Linux distributions
> use SysV.
>
> * BSD tools tend not to be as friendly as Gnu tools.  Things like the -v
> option to see what the command is doing (think cp -Rv, for example) often
> aren't implemented in the BSD tools, and they also tend to be much fussier
> about syntax (rm foo -rf works with Gnu rm, not with BSD rm)
>
> * Performance-wise, there's, for the most part, not much one way or the
> other.  UFS is slower than ext2 (BSD advocates will, of course, tell you
> that ext2 is faster at the expense of risking corruption, but that's an
> argument for another day), but soft-updates largely closes the gap.
> Advocates for both sides will tell you their network stack is faster, but
> you'll almost never find either one backing that up with benchmarks (for the
> simple reason that there aren't any definitive benchmarks supporting their
> prejudice ;-)
>
> * Driver-wise, the world generally belongs to Linux.  There are notable
> exceptions, however.  BSD USB support is further along than Linux, for
> example.
>
> * The one big difference, performance-wise:  if you run SMP or want high
> performance out of your non-Intel box, you're much better off with Linux.
> FreeBSD's SMP status is basically a release behind Linux (the latest 3.4-RC
> of FreeBSD looks about like Linux 2.0 in terms of global locking), and
> Linux/Alpha is similarly ahead of FreeBSD/Alpha (but then, it should be as
> it's been under development longer).
>
> * Obviously, there's the difference in Gnu and BSD licensing.
>
> * Similarly, there's a difference in developmental philosophies.  Linux is
> organized chaos (though the kernel development at least is actually much
> more organized than most people think), while the BSDs have scheduled
> releases, develop userland and kernels in sync (versus the separate
> development of kernel and glibc, for example, in Linux), etc.
>
> I tend to prefer Linux, but that's mostly for non-technical / semi-technical
> reasons (I like SysV better, prefer GPL to Berkeley licensing, and prefer
> the feel of Debian or RH Linux to that of BSD).  I've got Linux, OpenBSD,
> and FreeBSD in use in various places....
>
> later,
> chris
>
> --
> Chris Ricker                                            kaboom at gatech.edu
>                                                chris.ricker at m.cc.utah.edu
>
> --
> To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" in message body.

--
To unsubscribe: mail majordomo at ale.org with "unsubscribe ale" in message body.