A lot of that reads to me like reasons why I should run BSD on a PC – give vendors more reason to support more options, support endeavors towards stability by avoiding the bleeding edge, a better manual and less blog spam when I’m searching for support… the benefits just keep on coming!
I had so little money in undergrad that the only computer I had was a dumpster rescue pentium II with not enough RAM. Even by 2006 standards, it was a pretty crappy machine. I think xubuntu had just come out and it ran…barely ok. Decided to give FreeBSD a shot since I had used it before and worked really well. I wound up using it the entire school year. Even somehow managed to compile Eclipse on it for a class I needed.
Kinda reminds me of why I went with Slackware Linux… I had a Pentium 1 with 96 MB of ram in 2004. Tried Mandrake Linux, found it was unusable, tried ZipSlack found it was fine and soon went with the full slack and it worked beautifully. Been loyal since then.
I used BSD later and see a lot of similarities with my slackware, but bsd has a lot of little differences that nevertheless clashed with my habits.
I had a 386SX with 5MB of memory (it was a weird motherboard, but it was free from work) when I first ran Slackware (not long after 1.0, tho I don’t remember exactly what version it was). It ran pretty good, and I was impressed. Then I loaded NetBSD, which was much closer to the OSes I was using in school, and it ran better. I’ve been running a BSD someplace in the house ever since.
I literally just finished deploying HardenedBSD 14-STABLE on a brand new Dell Precision 7680. It’s an Intel Raptor Lake laptop with a discrete NVIDIA GPU, Intel wireless, 64GB RAM, 1TB NVMe. The ONLY thing that isn’t working is the trackpad. I’m assuming that’s because the vendor IDs haven’t been updated in the kernel. I’m assuming that’s an easy fix.
I don’t think the default scheduler has been taught the concept of P/E cores. I know there has been talk on various mailing lists about the subject, but I’m unaware of any tangible movement. For now, I’ve disabled the E cores.
I would be interested in learning about the security aspects of P/E aware scheduling. I could envision a scenario where explicit_bzero might take longer on one core versus another. But I’m wholly ignorant of both the inner workings of the default scheduler and of the underlying CPU model.
I would definitely volunteer as a guinea pig to help test patches to teach the scheduler the concept of P/E core types.
Improved scheduler performance, including the ability to more appropriately spread load on a mixture of slow and fast cores (e.g. big.LITTLE Arm CPUs).
Not sure if its only ARM related or more ‘generic’ but I think its a good place to start if FreeBSD has ‘zero’ hybrid CPU awareness (IMHO).
The idea behind this post was that BSDs are not for everyone. If you accept certain problems (which I tried to explain). you may find a great OS and community. I certainly did. I tried to write “why you should run BSD on a PC” first, as those two texts were to be be one bigger unit on my site (vide homepage) leading to “choosing which BSD to run”. But, well, life - it turned out crap so I deleted it for now and published this one first :)
Thank you for writing it :) I’ve been a fan of OpenBSD since about 6.7 (had only used FreeBSD before then) and love the sane defaults, great documentation and overall simplicity of how everything just works (tm).
I just got OpenBSD running on my RPi4. Pretty excited to take it for a spin and experience all the lackluster hardware/software support firsthand ;D
I’ve heard good things about the documentation but I actually found the docs surprisingly not straightforward. Once I hooked up all the hardware correctly, however, the install process completed without any issue.
Changing GNU/Linux distribution can be done on a whim, as underneath all of that you’ve got the same basic operating systems.
Depends. If you switch from Linux Mint to Debian and then to Ubuntu - yes - it really does not bring a lot of difference as all of them are Debian based. Migrate from Ubuntu to RHEL and may things are different … but migrate to Void Linux with MUSL instead of LIBC and it gets a whole different story … depending on the software You use of course.
All BSD are much less popular than BSD/Linux.
I assume You meant GNU/Linux here … or by BSD/Linux You mean Chimeira Linux? :)
As an example, my laptop has an NVIDIA card hardwired to HDMI-out, so if I want to use an external monitor, I need to use this card.
Same problem on ThinkPad W520 - really idiotic decisions by hardware vendors IMHO.
but migrate to Void Linux with MUSL instead of LIBC and it gets a whole different story
Well, the author was very careful to defend from your argument by writing it as GNU/Linux.
I know that Void is still GNU/Linux, but if a distro gets rid from glibc I already consider it half less GNU than the rest
Btw, I never heard about Chimera Linux! That’s awesome.
Reminds me of these old Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, which were the opposite (Debian userland with a FreeBSD kernel)
Just read it on my PC (X230) running OpenBSD :) Pretty well-informed post, but I would have preferred a tone of like “stuff to watch out for before you run a BSD”, but still promoting an open mind towards this family of OSes. There are a bunch of differences to be aware of when you run one of the BSDs but some of those differences are quite sensible or for very good reasons, and quite many of them are big upsides IMO.
Heh, to be fair a couple of years ago, pandemic days, I used OpenBSD on an old Thinkpad.
And both installation and daily maintenance were less work than with most GNU/Linux distros.
Have there been any attempts to build a BSD operating system on a Linux kernel? It wouldn’t be exactly the same, but you might get more hardware support out of the box.
I’m also curious about BSD on framework laptops, I feel like that could be a good device to rally around due to it’s replaceable and hackable nature
A lot of that reads to me like reasons why I should run BSD on a PC – give vendors more reason to support more options, support endeavors towards stability by avoiding the bleeding edge, a better manual and less blog spam when I’m searching for support… the benefits just keep on coming!
I had so little money in undergrad that the only computer I had was a dumpster rescue pentium II with not enough RAM. Even by 2006 standards, it was a pretty crappy machine. I think xubuntu had just come out and it ran…barely ok. Decided to give FreeBSD a shot since I had used it before and worked really well. I wound up using it the entire school year. Even somehow managed to compile Eclipse on it for a class I needed.
BSD on PCs kick ass.
Kinda reminds me of why I went with Slackware Linux… I had a Pentium 1 with 96 MB of ram in 2004. Tried Mandrake Linux, found it was unusable, tried ZipSlack found it was fine and soon went with the full slack and it worked beautifully. Been loyal since then.
I used BSD later and see a lot of similarities with my slackware, but bsd has a lot of little differences that nevertheless clashed with my habits.
I had a 386SX with 5MB of memory (it was a weird motherboard, but it was free from work) when I first ran Slackware (not long after 1.0, tho I don’t remember exactly what version it was). It ran pretty good, and I was impressed. Then I loaded NetBSD, which was much closer to the OSes I was using in school, and it ran better. I’ve been running a BSD someplace in the house ever since.
The article reads to me like satire for why one /should/ use BSD on PC. maybe a satire tag is warranted?
Good post overall! I enjoy both FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
I literally just finished deploying HardenedBSD 14-STABLE on a brand new Dell Precision 7680. It’s an Intel Raptor Lake laptop with a discrete NVIDIA GPU, Intel wireless, 64GB RAM, 1TB NVMe. The ONLY thing that isn’t working is the trackpad. I’m assuming that’s because the vendor IDs haven’t been updated in the kernel. I’m assuming that’s an easy fix.
Everything else is working beautifully.
For info on the hardware, here’s the hardware probe output: https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=4987815b22
How does FreeBSD scheduler works on that Intel performance/efficiency cores hybrid CPU?
I don’t think the default scheduler has been taught the concept of P/E cores. I know there has been talk on various mailing lists about the subject, but I’m unaware of any tangible movement. For now, I’ve disabled the E cores.
I would be interested in learning about the security aspects of P/E aware scheduling. I could envision a scenario where
explicit_bzeromight take longer on one core versus another. But I’m wholly ignorant of both the inner workings of the default scheduler and of the underlying CPU model.I would definitely volunteer as a guinea pig to help test patches to teach the scheduler the concept of P/E core types.
Intel and ‘Security’ are two opposite sides but NetBSD team implemented scheduler for ‘hybrid’ CPUs in 10.0:
Not sure if its only ARM related or more ‘generic’ but I think its a good place to start if FreeBSD has ‘zero’ hybrid CPU awareness (IMHO).
So…the trackpad isn’t the ONLY thing not working.
author here: woah, fame!
The idea behind this post was that BSDs are not for everyone. If you accept certain problems (which I tried to explain). you may find a great OS and community. I certainly did. I tried to write “why you should run BSD on a PC” first, as those two texts were to be be one bigger unit on my site (vide homepage) leading to “choosing which BSD to run”. But, well, life - it turned out crap so I deleted it for now and published this one first :)
Thank you for writing it :) I’ve been a fan of OpenBSD since about 6.7 (had only used FreeBSD before then) and love the sane defaults, great documentation and overall simplicity of how everything just works (tm).
I just got OpenBSD running on my RPi4. Pretty excited to take it for a spin and experience all the lackluster hardware/software support firsthand ;D
I’ve heard good things about the documentation but I actually found the docs surprisingly not straightforward. Once I hooked up all the hardware correctly, however, the install process completed without any issue.
No i namowil :) [Polish]
Depends. If you switch from Linux Mint to Debian and then to Ubuntu - yes - it really does not bring a lot of difference as all of them are Debian based. Migrate from Ubuntu to RHEL and may things are different … but migrate to Void Linux with MUSL instead of LIBC and it gets a whole different story … depending on the software You use of course.
I assume You meant GNU/Linux here … or by BSD/Linux You mean Chimeira Linux? :)
Same problem on ThinkPad W520 - really idiotic decisions by hardware vendors IMHO.
Well, the author was very careful to defend from your argument by writing it as GNU/Linux.
I know that Void is still GNU/Linux, but if a distro gets rid from glibc I already consider it half less GNU than the rest
Btw, I never heard about Chimera Linux! That’s awesome.
Reminds me of these old Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, which were the opposite (Debian userland with a FreeBSD kernel)
Just read it on my PC (X230) running OpenBSD :) Pretty well-informed post, but I would have preferred a tone of like “stuff to watch out for before you run a BSD”, but still promoting an open mind towards this family of OSes. There are a bunch of differences to be aware of when you run one of the BSDs but some of those differences are quite sensible or for very good reasons, and quite many of them are big upsides IMO.
Typo or fallacy?
Sounds like a plus to me.
Typo :)
Heh, to be fair a couple of years ago, pandemic days, I used OpenBSD on an old Thinkpad. And both installation and daily maintenance were less work than with most GNU/Linux distros.
Have there been any attempts to build a BSD operating system on a Linux kernel? It wouldn’t be exactly the same, but you might get more hardware support out of the box.
I’m also curious about BSD on framework laptops, I feel like that could be a good device to rally around due to it’s replaceable and hackable nature