Boston Linux & Unix (BLU) Home | Calendar | Mail Lists | List Archives | Desktop SIG | Hardware Hacking SIG
Wiki | Flickr | PicasaWeb | Video | Maps & Directions | Installfests | Keysignings
Linux Cafe | Meeting Notes | Blog | Linux Links | Bling | About BLU

BLU Discuss list archive


[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

Linux vs FreeBSD, and other *NIXes



So does anyone have *recent* facts or anecdotes about the technical merits 
of one over the other?

Historically, FreeBSD has had a more secure and debugged TCP/IP stack, but 
I haven't heard that claim in a while.

This is really a scaled-down "cathedral and bazaar" experiment, as linux 
is developed by thousands with very little official oversite, while BSD is 
guarded by a smaller group.




In line with some other discussions on this list. from a 
performance/scalability/reliability perspective, the areas that 
differentiate *NIXes the most are:
- Scheduling
- Memory management
- Filesystem scheme (when to write, how much to read, etc)

One of the reasons Sun did so well in the past is that they had excellent 
scheduling schemes.  In fact, it was replaceable, so you could change the 
scheduling scheme to suit your purposes.  As I understand it, Linux's 
scheduler is one of it's weaknesses, and a reason it benefits so much from 
multiprocessors.  Dunno about FreeBSD.

AIX played freakish games with memory management.  The upside is that
memory management is very efficient and usually sucessful.  The downside
is that memory is constantly borrowed from disk cache to heap to shared
libraries so it's hard to know exactly how much memory is actually free.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
DK KD  "That venture capitalists are willing to take any level of
DKK D  risk, even a modest one, after all that has happened in the
DK KD  ecommerce sector, is inspiring.  They might almost be
DDDD   capable of becoming Red Sox fans"               -Keith Regan





BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups
BLU is a member of BostonUserGroups
We also thank MIT for the use of their facilities.

Valid HTML 4.01! Valid CSS!



Boston Linux & Unix / webmaster@blu.org