My favorite part of running a FreeBSD cluster was that you almost never had to reboot it. The kernel rarely changed -- most kernel settings could be changed on the fly with a config file, and most everything else ran in userspace. We had boxes with uptimes over 700 days.

Nowadays that matters a lot less, since you most likely have redundant hardware. But back then (in the 90s), hardware was expensive and more often than not you had one big beefy box running your entire website, so reboots mattered.

I miss running FreeBSD. But for a long time you couldn't run it in EC2, and I never ran it as a home server, because at home I'm more interested in experimental things that usually show up on Linux first.

But it was great what I was running enterprise on-prem hardware.

I really wanted to like FreeBSD. ZFS is cool, jails are cool, pkg has such a wide variety of packages that it's comparable to Arch.

In a world before Docker and btrfs, this would be enough to make installing FreeBSD worthwhile. I tried it anyway, for a home server, and it was mostly painful.

Jails are tricky and require third-party (?) tools and scripts to manage them effectively. And they don't give you much that Docker doesn't already. And, although it's not as bad as Arch, FreeBSD does update quickly and if you aren't frequently updating your server you can be left behind; it's not noticeable until you try to update and a bunch of packages break, or your jails are no longer running the same major version as their host and that causes subtle bugs.

I recently replaced my FreeBSD home server with a basic Debian machine running a docker-compose cluster, and it's so much simpler. I wanted to like FreeBSD. At its core, it's probably a better-designed system. But it requires too much additional knowledge and maintenance for something that Linux and Docker do just as well.

FreeBSD is great, if your hardware is supported. And unfortunately, that's a giant IF.

I wanted to try jails on a 2011 HP DL380 G7, which is enterprise level hardware. I had to jump through several hoops to even get off the ground. Apparently FreeBSD didn't come with power management out of the box. So I had to learn about powerd, Intel Speedstep, and CPU C-states (but hey, it comes with a mail server pre-installed). And even then I was having issues. So I gave up and installed Alpine Linux, which worked perfectly with no extra config. I learned LXD instead.

Since then, I've replaced that behemoth of a server with a couple low power, tiny desktops running Debian (bookworm has LXD in the default repos now). I didn't actually look, but I'm fairly certain FreeBSD wasn't going to play nice with Intel's QuickSync and GPU passthrough to jails like Debian/LXD does.

Anyways, that's always been my biggest hurdle with FreeBSD. I do like the cohesiveness of all their tooling though.

I want articles to get to the point quickly. I don’t want them to start with “What is FreeBSD?” I know people do it for Google SEO, but it’s messed up, please stop it.

So FreeBSD supposedly has full Linux kernel emulation or something to that effect. To the point where you can run Debian in a jail without virtualization? I am wondering if it is possible to rig up Docker to work in that?

Because I really adore jails but I agree that the tooling around them makes a mess of config and such. (I have been using ezjail which I'm told is now deprecated)

With so much of my world buying into the Docker cargo cult it would be nice if I could play along and I'm wondering if Linux-in-a-jail is a possible answer.

I evaluated using FreeBSD for a project. The biggest challenge for me was I couldn't figure a way to fit modern DevOps into FreeBsd. OCI compliant containers are not supported. The best way I could come up with for a minimum blue-green deployment strategy was writing a ton of scripts myself. I can not imagine running a fleet of FreeBSD servers where a team of developers deploy 10+ times a week to a swarm of containers running micro services.

What solutions do other practitioners use with FreeBSD? Or do you abandon modern DevOps practices entirely and hold a meeting to determine partition sizes, provision servers to individual services running on specific named computers and plan for a software upgrade for weeks in advance of a deployment?

I used FreeBSD till early 2000's, when Linux had become a better choice.

I've installed Chromium on FreeBSD 12 and it was impossible to enable to antialised fonts, no matter what I had tried. Generally, it is worse as a desktop system than more even obscure OpenBSD.

this mostly seems like cheerleading for ZFS? how about ASLR support, the amazing pf tables firewall, dtrace awesomeness, cool things to do with jails, or bhyve virtualization?

granted ZFS is a big flex on the BSD official site as well since its effectively the only way the OS can do things like raid10 with dedup. instead of porting XFS or BTRFS the BSD devs chose to keep developing a fork of Oracle/Sun's commercial product.

The FreeBSD Handbook

tl;dr:

1. ZFS 2. pkg 3. unclear

... profit?