Amazon isn't even on FreeBSD sponsors [1]. And Google only sponsored $9K last year. Apple isn't there. Edit: And Credit to Microsoft being at least on the list! And forgot to mention Meta / Facebook missing from it as well.
I would have expect them to sponsor FreeBSD and OpenBSD annually by default given they use and continue to benefits the work out of both.
[1] https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/?donationYea...
First, it presents the snapshot of donations within a given year to the Foundation. The history of donations is not represented by definition.
Second, it does not present contributed development. Those are typically summarily available on the release notes of each release [1].
It's also now a first-class supported cross-compilation target, including when linking libc, so you can do stuff like `zig cc -o hello hello.c -target riscv64-freebsd`.
And then of course if you have any C/C++ dependencies, you can fetch and build them with the zig build system, so it should be possible to easily cross-compile even quite complex projects for FreeBSD now.
Hopefully that helps more projects decide to add FreeBSD support and respective testing to their CI!
> Starting in the first week of 2024, the FreeBSD boot process suddenly got about 3x slower. I started bisecting commits, and tracked it down to... a commit which increased the root disk size from 5 GB to 6 GB. Why? Well, I reached out to some of my friends at Amazon, and it turned out that the answer was somewhere between "magic" and "you really don't want to know"; but the important part for me was that increasing the root disk size to 8 GB restored performance to earlier levels.
(I'm currently using 1GB snapshots, because my actual disk image is a tiny fraction of that size. But if bumping that to 2GB or 4GB would make it faster, that's a small price to pay.)
Do you have any other wisdom regarding mysterious reasons for fast or slow booting? EC2's boot process is deeply opaque, and any insight at all is better than nothing.
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon_s3/
I do not know if this has anything to do with the cliff that you saw.
But yes, I built a lot of AMIs. And launched new EC2 instances for each of them -- it wasn't just a matter of rebooting since the first time an AMI launches there's different behaviour (both from FreeBSD, e.g. growing the root disk, and from EC2, e.g. disk caching).
you can find the project laptop here https://github.com/FreeBSDFoundation/proj-laptop
Current practice is to put a meta tag with your encoding, use a Unicode BOM, or less favorably, send the charset attribute in the Content-type header.
I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.
Its software catalog is also much bigger. It's a viable modern desktop daily driver and I can't say that for the other two.
As to why not Linux? I don't want Linux. It's too bogged down by corporate interests.
A few companies do. Skype and Netflix did but hardly use it now (at least Skype left it, not sure about Netflix but I never hear about it from bsd devs). Ix systems and netgate do but they're tiny.. No, it's not influenced in a trivial way and certainly not by apple.
This is a huge difference to Linux where the vast majority of kernel commits come from big tech and have nothing to do with things end users care about. Also there's nothing in the FreeBSD world like the Linux Foundation which is basically a corporate lobby group.
I understand the former. But with how Apple operates, it's really hard to believe they'd pull downstream from something they don't have some kind of soft power over. They do still pull downstream AFAIK? Maybe that's changed?
>Ix systems
I did some reading and saw a FreeBSD contributor ended up going to Apple until 2013 before he founded this company. https://www.ixsystems.com/clients/ Apple is listed here. Six degrees of separation and all, but probably not a coincidence. Nothing wrong with that, business is a social structure. This is how they work. We make and keep friends, even if only professionally. Backchannels are where real deals are made. But this to me is not nothing. No corporate influence means there's a lot of nice things you don't get. You just can't afford the manpower. It looks more like 9 Front than a BSD that has some serious billion-dollar problems under its belt.
That sounds harsh, not a judgement. Just very deep skepticism of the assertion of no influence. I'm realizing there's not a lot that can be done to sway that intentionally.
> This is a huge difference to Linux
This I'm well aware of. I just like having a perspective across the fence. These days they're starting to get a little too aggressive for my tastes. FreeBSD seems fine in comparison.
Apple doesn't merge often. They basically haven't merged kernel tcp since 2002. When I started using OSX in 2011, they hadn't merged userland for several years, and when I stopped in 2019, they had only merged once.
They famously stopped picking up bash when upstream changed the license, and most of the FreeBSD userland doesn't change that frequently, so most things you wouldn't notice a difference. cal(1) started highlighting the current day at some point, tar probably grew new compresion arguments, etc.
Apple certainly was a major contributor/driving force/etc of LLVM for a while, not sure if they still are? And LLVM was adopted by FreeBSD, so maybe that's where this idea is coming from?
Partially, but after seeing the Jordan Hubbard connection, there's a lot of layers to this. May have reinforced my biases, but it's definitely non-trivial according to my hippie-tier anarchist baseline. Oops. Worst case scenario of answering your own question.
But your reply does give me actually contradicting evidence. It wouldn't surprise me that distance has grown to the point of total atrophy, given the general trajectory Apple has been on since 2012 or so. This is why I ask these questions, because the people on the ground give the most informative answers.
As Ptahhotep advises circa ~2300BCE:
> Fine words are more sought after than greenstone, but can be found with the women at the grindstone.
The only thing I've ever heard from FreeBSD-land, not paying attention to users, but the maintainers and the tools. Apple comes up. In the same manner that RedHat and others come up for Linux. How to explain? It's an abstract pattern. Transparent, understandable.
I mentioned somewhere about the connection through ix systems. And honestly to project, if I was a maintainer of something used between Netflix and Apple, I'd prioritize Apple. Apple has outlived IBM. If you know your history, you know how serious that is. If you've got authority over something as large as FreeBSD? Yeah, you don't ignore that kind of actual power especially when it's personal. Like I say, all based on guesses. But some things are hard to mistake.
As far as "power" is concerned... speaking as release engineer, I don't give special treatment to anyone; nor have I even been asked to. If anyone has a special relationship it's Netflix but if anything that's the opposite way around: "Can you please throw 10% of all Internet traffic at this TCP stack patch and let us know if anything breaks" is a thing. They're incredibly helpful with Q/A.
Apple has no influence over the FreeBSD project.
> I know the kernels are different and obviously only part of the userspace is the same, but is FreeBSD actually far enough away from Apple to say it's not bogged down by corporate interests?
Yes.
OS-X (now macOS) is based on XNU[0], which itself has roots in the Mach[1] microkernel. The Unix user-space programs distributed with OS-X/macOS are those found in FreeBSD distributions AFAIK. This is also conformant with FreeBSD licenses for same.
So there is no "soft power" Apple has over FreeBSD. And FreeBSD is not "Apple's shadow in FOSS".
> I don't imagine it's the same as Linux at all, but it exists in a non-trivial way, no?
No. It does not.
EDIT: Just in case you'd like to verify any of the above yourself, see here[2].
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XNU
FreeBSD has better ZFS support than Linux, because it doesn't have the licensing issues.
My experience with FreeBSD is that it provides a nice balance of the concerns OpenBSD and NetBSD specifically address. Historically, FreeBSD prioritized Intel CPU's (where NetBSD had greater portability) and had solid security (where OpenBSD had more of a focus on it).
The FreeBSD ZFS support really is a game changer. I believe Nvidia only recently has had native FreeBSD drivers - for a long time FreeBSD's kernel Linux support was required.
> I'm genuinely actually curious. FreeBSD exists in kind of a shadow realm for me where I've never been quite able to pin down the soul that keeps it chugging, but I know it exists somewhere in there.
Again, for me, FreeBSD has proven to be a nice blend of the features other BSD's provide as well as being incredibly stable on the h/w platforms I tend to use.
All of the BSDs tend to have a lot less churn, for better and worse; so IMHO, they make a nicer platform to integrate on.
Could you do that work with Linux? Probably --- but nobody who does is talking about it as much.
This kind of high throughput service has been a FreeBSD niche since forever too. Walnut Creek CDROM, Inc ran what was reportedly the world's busiest ftp site, ftp.cdrom.com on FreeBSD in the early days of the internet.
Yahoo ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2004-2011) WhatsApp ran on FreeBSD (I worked there 2011-2019) Both were leaving FreeBSD when I left, but sadly, I didn't leave to work somewhere else with FreeBSD :p
ZFS was not leveraged that much but it saved our beacon once when a table in the production database was accidentally dropped and we could instantly rollback to the previous zfs snapshot (there was a tiny bit of data loss as a result but this did not matter too much for this application - uptime was more important). ZFS was also used for backups I believe.
A few times I used dtrace in production to troubleshoot.
When we introduced Linux to our fleet of FreeBSD servers, every team picked a different distro organically so it was a bit of a zoo. With FreeBSD on the server you only have the one variant.
I still use and like both, but I must say I really like that FreeBSD is a kernel+OS integrated together.
I would love to know who is using FreeBSD in EC2.
It's a small price to pay and it stops me having to install less stable operating systems.
I don't say this to besmirch FreeBSD, FWIW. I think it's very important that Linux is not the only game in town.
tiffanyh•13h ago
Don’t know how he manages all of this + Tarsnap.
cperciva•13h ago
To be fair, some of the time I spent on this came away from Tarsnap. But less than you might imagine.
Alupis•12h ago
When it comes to drywall, always hire a professional. Learn from other's mistakes... it's not as easy as you think and it won't turn out well.
cperciva•12h ago
bluGill•10h ago
jonhohle•8h ago
firesteelrain•1h ago
firesteelrain•1h ago
AlienRobot•11h ago
The other day I had the opportunity to get a 10% discount on a fridge if I could pay the whole thing in one payment. If I didn't have the money I wouldn't get the discount, so in a way being poor means everything is more expensive.
naikrovek•11h ago
All poor people know this in their bones because they face this every day of their lives.
phonon•10h ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boots_theory