I wish FreeBSD was more popular. I run it on my personal servers for more than a decade non-stop. I do have currently one FreeBSD at home which works as my NAS/backup server/whatever I need it to do plus two remote machines (mail/www/db/ns running in jails). About a year ago I migrated one FreeBSD to OpenBSD because it's just an advanced router.<p>I took conservative approach and I always run -RELEASE version, not even -STABLE. I'm glad Klara is evaluating -CURRENT branch, good read.<p>Btw, once - several years ago I bought an new system and network card was not supported in the -RELEASE branch, so I took the driver from -CURRENT, compiled and loaded as kernel module. Worked flawlessly :)
For me it's daily driver. Though not current but release.Just updated to 13.1-RELEASE yesterday.<p>For who isn't into FreeBSD, release is like debian stable and current is the upcoming dev release. Like debian sid but not rolling
Doesn't the notion of using anything "bleeding edge" sort of go against the <i>fundamental law</i> of production? Doesn't development sound like a much better fit for getting to know Current and the future of FreeBSD? I wouldn't speak for anyone else, but my ideal production environment is one where no one even thinks about the operating system, because it wasn't broken before, still isn't broken, and is expected to keep on not being broken; it just does its thing. Because whatever production is doing that is critical, it isn't <i>system operating</i>, it is something else, some big data manipulation, database something, or application crunching or generating something or people using the systems to produce. Maybe others have been more fortunate, but I've never had much success fixing something that isn't broken.<p>What is the downside to using Stable, or maybe even... Stable <i>from two whole number versions ago?</i> Honestly, adding features to production is, as a grey beard once said to me, paraphrasing, <i>as useless as nailing jelly to a bull</i>, or something along those lines.
I once broke FreeBSD Current.
I was porting a zfs on linux commit to allow mounting filesystems in parallel, instead of copying the zfs-on-linux code I decided to read it and write it by hand. I didn’t test the patch… it was merged and was quickly reverted because it broke the boot sequence for many people.<p>great learning experience!
Starting around 6.x, -CURRENT got ridiculously reliable (the infamously problematic 5.x release series informed the releng process a lot).<p>By late 00s, if you were running FreeBSD and pushing it to its limits in terms of performance or features, you'd probably be running current and have at least one committer or active contributor on the team, upstreaming as many business-specific improvements as possible while keeping track of incoming commit stream.
I used FreeBSD for about a decade and lately use Linux which has honestly just been a docker host for me. Does anyone on FreeBSD miss docker? Are jails a close subsitute?
Does Docker run as well on the BSDs as it does on Linux? and those Docker-ecosystem tools like the ones that scan your docker images for size optimizations?<p>The infra my projects work on are all heavily based on docker so that’s a hard requirement.
The title this HN is post wrong, it should be "Evaluating FreeBSD CURRENT for Production Use" as used in the original article.<p>The capitalization is important, since it makes it very clear it's talking about the CURRENT branch.