On Thu, May 06, 2021 at 01:22:06AM +0100, Mark Rousell wrote:
> On 05/05/2021 23:13, Konstantin Olchanski wrote:
> >
> > Things seem to be much quieter and event-less in the BSD and Debian (& co) camps.
> 
> I greatly fear that the BSDs are gradually losing the battle to keep up
> with Linux in terms of newer features and support for certain classes of
> hardware.
>

In a sense, that battle was lost years ago, when linux implemented
a better TCP/IP stack and when SGI extended Linux to work
well of 1000-CPU NUMA machines.

And yet, the BSDs are still here.

>
> It saddens me to note that both iXsystems (TrueNAS, previously
> FreeNAS) and Netgate (pfSense) are looking towards Linux, not BSD, for
> their next generation of larger-scaling, higher-throughput systems.
>

For these applications, most important is performance of ZFS+NFS/Samba+TCP/IP.

ZFS being an OS into itself, is reported to work well inside BSD kernels,
but is not as happy inside the linux kernel, the ZFS and Linux tend to fight
over data caching, i/o scheduling, etc

So whale fights elephant, better ZFS on BSD, better networking on Linux, and
who knows how it comes out.

>
> In the case of iXsystems, the new TrueNAS Scale is Linux based. And in the
> case of Netgate, their new TNSR product is based on Linux. Eventually it
> seems likely that both companies might well want to rationalise on one
> underlying OS.
> 

Those are also business decisions, not purely technical. I can see how they gain
by standardizing everything on Linux, especially when anything embedded,
anything SoC is "linux first". If they want to run the same code scaling
from "Raspberry PI NAS" to "big iron NAS", Linux would be the way to go.

>
> And FreeBSD itself has recently experienced the Netgate-related
> Wireguard incident.
> 

Nobody is safe from such things. Strength of a project is in how well they can survive/recover.

>
> As for Debian, they certainly had what one might call an 'event' with
> the decision to choose SystemD. ;-)
> 

At least in Debian it is all above board, with voting, public discussion, and all.

-- 
Konstantin Olchanski
Data Acquisition Systems: The Bytes Must Flow!
Email: olchansk-at-triumf-dot-ca
Snail mail: 4004 Wesbrook Mall, TRIUMF, Vancouver, B.C., V6T 2A3, Canada