Technological advantages over Linux

[Valeri Galtsev]

On 2020-02-14 08:16, Victor Sudakov wrote:
> Ottavio Caruso via freebsd-questions wrote:
>> On Fri, 14 Feb 2020 at 12:16, Victor Sudakov <vas at sibptus.ru> wrote:
>>>
>>> Dear Colleagues,
>>>
>>> Not to start a flame war. A purely technical question: what
>>> technological advantages does the modern FreeBSD have over modern Linux?
>>
>> Sorry, but I find this sort of a chalk vs cheese kind of comparison.
> 
> Of course not. When deciding what to use in the next project, you have
> to advocate your choice in front of your superiors and colleagues, and
> your presentation should be well backed up with technical arguments.
> 
> When I advocate FreeBSD over Windows, for example, there are some very
> clear and easily defendable technical and economical advantages (open
> source, absence of viruses, BSD license - just to name a few). It is not
> so easy with FreeBSD vs Linux.
> 
> For example, the absence of Docker (or analogous technology) for FreeBSD
> is a huge disadvantage. We need to name really superiour features to
> make up for this shortage.
> 

In my book docker is really a disadvantage, not advantage, compared to 
FreeBSD jails. Namely:

1. docker carries pretty much whole system for one instance of what you 
run in docker (that is, you have to patch all those instances of docker 
you run), whereas whole bunch of jails can run under single instance of 
base system; hence only one base system to update/patch

2. [correct me someone if I'm wrong, I'm not a Docker expert): docker 
has system whose components are read-write inside of its instance, hence 
it is more vulnerable to malicious changes from inside running docker 
instance, whereas base system stuff is (nullfs) read-only mounted in 
case of FreeBSD jail, so at least changes to that from inside jail can 
not be made by malicious attempts.

Of course, "market drives", and of course as it is in case of consumer 
product market, ignorant in its mass consumer base drives market 
offerings towards poorer solutions. Non-Microsoft mass Operating System 
customer being mostly Linux, much less footprint for anything else, 
drives forward Linux based solutions [especially commercial ones]. 
Hence, if your superiors have a goal to be more independent of experts 
like you, but prefer to have employee base easily replaced (by more 
average though still decent sysadmins), if advised genuinely, they will 
lean towards Linux based anything.

Just my two cents.

Valeri



> 
>> You start making comparisons, then you have to list all possible Linux
>> distros, etc, you know the drill.
> 
> In fact, there is quite a limited number of Linux distros to be
> considered for use in production, maybe 3-4, and they are not that
> different in their capabilities. Other distros are too exotic or geeky.
> 

-- 
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Valeri Galtsev
Sr System Administrator
Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics
Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics
University of Chicago
Phone: 773-702-4247
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