On Wed, 15 Jul 2020, Judah Richardson wrote:
FreeBSD advantages:
1. Much better 3rd party package support (including recent Firefox
releases
2. Much larger userbase
3. Much better documentation of the OS itself (documentation of Illumos
itself is relatively lacking; Solaris docs remain the best resource)
It is true that Solaris OS documentation is still quite applicable to
Illumos so it is not correct to say that FreeBSD provides better
documentation of the OS itself, although the FreeBSD Handbook is quite
nice and a good model to follow.
If one is still willing to purchase printed books, there are Solaris
OS books which are exceedingly good and useful which describe the
operating system architecture and system programming. I own every
edition of the excellent BSD/FreeBSD books by McKusick (and others)
and parts of the latest edition are even applicable to Illumos since
they discuss ZFS implementation, which was derived from
OpenSolaris/Illumos.
The Illumos manual pages are exceedingly good, and the FreeBSD manual
pages are also tip-top as compared with Linux manual pages which are
often/usually incomplete or not accurate for the OS they are delivered
with. If one knows how to use manual pages, then it is rare to need
to turn to "Google" to learn how to do something under Illumos or
FreeBSD, but this is the common way to solve problems for Linux. It
does not take long to learn that Illumos and FreeBSD are good examples
of consistently "coherent" systems but Linux distributions are more a
form of babble and chaos.
It is said that FreeBSD requires less memory to run than Illumos,
which is partially true, but ZFS is better integrated into Illumos
than it is into FreeBSD and the quality of the integration most
significantly applies to memory allocation so on a larger system
Illumos becomes more memory efficient. In Illumos, ZFS is well
integrated with the kernel memory allocation but in FreeBSD, ZFS may
require setting tuning parameters because kernel memory and ZFS memory
do not naturally "ebb and flow" (naturally sharing resources) as they
do in Illumos. FreeBSD's ZFS is about be replaced with one which is
re-based on the OpenZFS which is itself re-based on ZOL (ZFS on Linux)
so it is likely there will be new pains in the short term.
It should be said that Illumos and FreeBSD are not at all hostile to
each other and in fact there is a lot of code sharing and
co-contribution going on.
Bob
--
Bob Friesenhahn
[email protected], http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/
GraphicsMagick Maintainer, http://www.GraphicsMagick.org/
Public Key, http://www.simplesystems.org/users/bfriesen/public-key.txt
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