On Wed, Jul 15, 2020 at 8:33 AM Bob Friesenhahn < [email protected]> wrote:
> 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 "Quite applicable" != complete coverage. FreeBSD's handbook & wiki combined provide the latter for FreeBSD. Now, to be fair, FreeBSD has existed for longer and has had more time and manpower to get that done. But the gap does currently exist. The documentation problem I've found with Illumos is Illumos and Solaris functionality, while similar, is not always the same. Moreover, it is often not very obvious when reading Solaris documentation what might apply to/work with Illumos and what won't, and there's often no easily determined corresponding Illumos documentation to fill that gap, either. It's not enough to just have something written down somewhere; the scope and applicability of that something, as well as its relation to the larger body of Solaris documentation, must be clearly defined. Otherwise you risk confusing and frustrating users. > 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 Yes, I'm aware of that problem on Linux, and it's a very serious one. I just haven't mentioned it in this thread because OP has indicated he's migrating from Linux anyway and specifically asked for a FreeBSD vs. Illumos comparison. The "vs." there implies he's intending to choose one over the other; clearly it does not imply the projects are adversarial or should be seen as such, and I hope my comments don't seem to imply that. In a perfect world, OP would move forward with both, (attempt to) integrate both into his workflow, and then find out pitfalls and advantages specific to his use case that way :) . 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, I have not found this to be the case. While that may be something subjective and specific to myself, I do believe it's an objective fact that man page examples aren't always exhaustive, and so Googling is often necessary if you're trying to do something man page examples don't explicitly cover. 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. > True. > > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > openindiana-discuss mailing list > [email protected] > https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss > _______________________________________________ openindiana-discuss mailing list [email protected] https://openindiana.org/mailman/listinfo/openindiana-discuss
