I think people are looking for new alternatives to tinker with. Linux is becoming new Windows and BSDs new Linux. I dunno what is Windows becoming, but it ain't good.
Generally people get more excited any time a major release of anything comes out. But FWIW HN has always had favorable front paging for anything related to FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Not disagreeing, but if the release was a few months ago, then the poster is quite correct - there is a recent "surge" of FreeBSD related posts. And these are not quite ... how shall I word it somewhat nicely ... not quite as fascinating to, say, a wider linux community as such. With that I don't mean "because we use linux, we are snobs", but that what the FreeBSD guys talk about, seems a little bit ... outdated. The heavy use of shell scripts for instance in this post here - I never understood that focus on shell scripts in general, including on Linux. I transitioned into using ruby (or python, but mostly ruby) to replace all shell script needs a long time ago. Every time I am assumed to have to write a shell script I wonder why I would want to cripple myself when I can use a better programming language instead. Many of these shown "innovations" are also not really groundbreaking. To me it seems as if there is a distinct lack of FreeBSD users out there compared to Linux users. As a consequence Linux simply has a lot more information and news (a lot of which is also low quality of course; I am not saying it is all pancakes and sunflowers in the Linux ecosystem either).
No conspiracy, I think it just happens. One person posts something, maybe someone else reads it and gets into a rabbit hole on a topic, or maybe someone sees an opportunity to throw more conversation pieces at something hot.
When this settles down, I look forward to all of jail/iojail, Sylve, Bastille, Bhyve documenting this in a mutually consistent manner. As it stands, I have managed to completely knot my brain over the abstractions, what is happening. It's me, not the systems, but I think there is a little bit of "meh, I understand it, so it must be obvious to anyone smart" going on, and alas, I am not smart, and I get confused easily.
I'm in bastille atm, but have been in all of them and TrueNAS core. and libvirt over on the other unix.
Honestly, best thing I did was ditch all that and just read the handbook, specificially chapter 17 [1]. All of my jails are now set up manually, initially using /etc/jail.conf, and now individual jail configs in /etc/jail.conf.d/.
I still use vm-bhyve [2] for my Bhyve virtual machines, but that's been rock solid for me for years.
Bhyve bridges are inefficient: every packet traverses NIC → CPU → bridge → VM, adding unnecessary copies that kill throughput. Switching to SR-IOV eliminated that overhead and I saturated the 10 GbE link.
I do not see how that follows. Memory bandwidth is measured in the hundreds of Gb/s. You can issue tens of unnecessary full memory copies before you bottleneck at a paltry 10 Gb/s.
It is much more likely there is something else terribly wrong in a network stack if it can not even drive a measly 10 Gb/s.
People found this worked in the past and it gets copied around. There is no reason to disable some of this. Bridge will automatically disable LRO and find the common set of other offloads. TSO is not useful for a bridged guest.
Why sudden surge of FreeBSD-related posts?
Did anything special or new happened on FreeBSD land?
I think people are looking for new alternatives to tinker with. Linux is becoming new Windows and BSDs new Linux. I dunno what is Windows becoming, but it ain't good.
15.0 was released a couple months ago, hence the title.
We have three (including this) FreeBSD posts in the past two days.
Back to FreeBSD: Part 1 (hypha.pub) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108989
Linuxulator on FreeBSD Feels Like Magic (hayzam.com) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47113527
Generally people get more excited any time a major release of anything comes out. But FWIW HN has always had favorable front paging for anything related to FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
Not disagreeing, but if the release was a few months ago, then the poster is quite correct - there is a recent "surge" of FreeBSD related posts. And these are not quite ... how shall I word it somewhat nicely ... not quite as fascinating to, say, a wider linux community as such. With that I don't mean "because we use linux, we are snobs", but that what the FreeBSD guys talk about, seems a little bit ... outdated. The heavy use of shell scripts for instance in this post here - I never understood that focus on shell scripts in general, including on Linux. I transitioned into using ruby (or python, but mostly ruby) to replace all shell script needs a long time ago. Every time I am assumed to have to write a shell script I wonder why I would want to cripple myself when I can use a better programming language instead. Many of these shown "innovations" are also not really groundbreaking. To me it seems as if there is a distinct lack of FreeBSD users out there compared to Linux users. As a consequence Linux simply has a lot more information and news (a lot of which is also low quality of course; I am not saying it is all pancakes and sunflowers in the Linux ecosystem either).
No conspiracy, I think it just happens. One person posts something, maybe someone else reads it and gets into a rabbit hole on a topic, or maybe someone sees an opportunity to throw more conversation pieces at something hot.
I was wondering the same.
When this settles down, I look forward to all of jail/iojail, Sylve, Bastille, Bhyve documenting this in a mutually consistent manner. As it stands, I have managed to completely knot my brain over the abstractions, what is happening. It's me, not the systems, but I think there is a little bit of "meh, I understand it, so it must be obvious to anyone smart" going on, and alas, I am not smart, and I get confused easily.
I'm in bastille atm, but have been in all of them and TrueNAS core. and libvirt over on the other unix.
Honestly, best thing I did was ditch all that and just read the handbook, specificially chapter 17 [1]. All of my jails are now set up manually, initially using /etc/jail.conf, and now individual jail configs in /etc/jail.conf.d/.
I still use vm-bhyve [2] for my Bhyve virtual machines, but that's been rock solid for me for years.
[1] https://docs.freebsd.org/en/books/handbook/jails/
[2] https://github.com/freebsd/vm-bhyve
Bhyve bridges are inefficient: every packet traverses NIC → CPU → bridge → VM, adding unnecessary copies that kill throughput. Switching to SR-IOV eliminated that overhead and I saturated the 10 GbE link.
I do not see how that follows. Memory bandwidth is measured in the hundreds of Gb/s. You can issue tens of unnecessary full memory copies before you bottleneck at a paltry 10 Gb/s.
It is much more likely there is something else terribly wrong in a network stack if it can not even drive a measly 10 Gb/s.
That assumes memory bandwidth is the issue, and not latency and/or CPU.
It would benefit from a batching mechanism.
You used the new optimized bridges on FreeBSD 15?
The bridge driver gained features (vlan filtering) not performance.
On Linux?
> -tso4 -tso6 -vlanhwfilter -vlanmtu -vlanhwtso -vlanhwtag -vlanhwcsum -lro
Whys the author disabling tso and lro? Whats the motivation?
I'm not familiar with the other flags.
People found this worked in the past and it gets copied around. There is no reason to disable some of this. Bridge will automatically disable LRO and find the common set of other offloads. TSO is not useful for a bridged guest.
Looks like TSO does not support VLAN. Not sure about lro.
LRO because the bridge has to forward the real frames. TSO because it’s fairly useless now.
I for one welcome and applaud any progress on the bsd front,and this seems to be huge.