
Intel to more actively engage with FreeBSD Foundation and make $250K donation - sydney6
https://twitter.com/michaeldexter/status/840423816249589760
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inopinatus
"Feedback from our customers that they want broader and timelier support".

Absent volume, you and I don't get to be direct customers of Intel. I wonder
who they meant. My first guess was Sony or Nintendo, since both have recent
consoles with FreeBSD-derived OS, but fact checking indicated that neither
have an Intel CPU.

Maybe at the behest of Apple, or the router/NAS/appliance manufacturers, many
of whom run a FreeBSD-derived OS. Or perhaps it was simply effective lobbying
by the FreeBSD project / foundation.

This is all speculation so if anyone knows who really prompted this I'd be
interested to hear it.

(edit: grammar & fact check)

~~~
ksec
I have the exact question in mind. Who, Why, and Now?

Sony - If Intel wants the next PS5 CPU to be from Intel. But Intel lacking any
decent GPU, and their reluctance to low margin business may suggest otherwise.

Yahoo - some have suggested, but as much as I want to believe it is true, last
time I heard they have been switching to Linux since Marissa arrival. Most of
their BSD people has since left.

Netflix - FreeBSD usage is limited to their own CDN Appliance, which as the
name implies, working like a appliance and needs not much tweaking. Their
main, encoding and core Network is on AWS with Linux. And if Netflix is that
much a big customer for Intel?

Router / NAS / Appliance? Gosh they have been here for more then a decade and
only now Intel decide to listen to them? One reason could be they are
switching to ARM + Linux. For them to stay on x86 they will have to better
support for FreeBSD, but I still think this is a weak argument.

Apple - Despite OSX's close relationship with the BSD community. Apple doesn't
use any FreeBSD on their Cloud Servers. And Airport uses NetBSD which is
something different enough.

May be it is Whatsapp?

~~~
floatboth
> working like a appliance and needs not much tweaking

Uh, excuse me? They literally rewrote the whole sendfile system call to make
it faster (and to make it possible to add in-kernel TLS for, well, sending
files over TLS). I'm sure they would welcome, say, driver improvements for the
Intel 10/40Gb Ethernet cards.

~~~
ksec
Sorry I dont mean they are not contributing. But not actively developing it,
by that i mean compared to other companies on Linux. And the Sendfile(2) sys
call was, 24 months ago?

Also not saying Netflix dont love more improvement on FreeBSD. I bet they do!.
But they don't seem to be key customer for Intel to do this.

~~~
kev009
I have insider knowledge of most large FreeBSD shops and I have to be careful
to not overshare so I will use my current employer, which has publicly
disclosed 10^4 machine count in shareholder earnings reports and technical
talks. Using that public data, you would be able to extrapolate gross annual
revenue of intel SKUs (CPU, chipset, NIC, SSD) is on order of 10^7 dollars/yr
all running FreeBSD. This is just at my small 500 person company. There are
several users with 10^5 machine count, and you can't forget about !US. I hope
that helps put things into perspective.

~~~
ksec
Thanks, nice to know there are lots and rather large usage of FreeBSD
companies sticking around.

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julian_1
Please use the funds to implement support for the last two generations of
Intel integrated graphics chipsets.

Currently, FreeBSD supports neither Broadwell or Skylake and they're probably
the most common chipsets used in laptops. source
[https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics](https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics)

I would be running FreeBSD on my Dells right now if I could.

~~~
loeg
Matt Macy and company have basically added enough Linux API support to FreeBSD
to run minimally ported Linux i915 drivers on FreeBSD. That work is here:
[https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-
graphics/comm...](https://github.com/FreeBSDDesktop/freebsd-base-
graphics/commits/drm-next-4.7) It more or less works on new Intel hardware
today (same hardware as Linux 4.7, but more bugs).

What's left for out of the box support, you ask?

* Committing the needed "linuxkpi" additions. This is complicated by the fact that some of Macy's work just imported GPL2 code rather than recreating it BSD-licensed. Hans Petter Selasky has been doing a lot of work lately to fix this gap.

* Fixing remaining bugs/incompatibilities in the linuxkpi that result in artifacts and crashes.

And the further concern is, how do we keep from falling so far behind again?
Matt's vision has two pieces:

* We bring down our driver diff to almost nothing and expand the linuxkpi as needed by newer versions of the graphics drivers. This would make bringing in newer versions of the i915/radeon/amdgpu drivers less painful.

* We move the graphics drivers and linuxkpi (or portions of it) to the ports tree. FreeBSD's release cycle is far too slow to wait for a release to support new graphics hardware. On the other hand, stable branches get new ports on a regular basis.

~~~
yjftsjthsd-h
Does putting graphics drivers in the ports tree also help the licensing
situation, by keeping GPL out of the core system?

~~~
kryptiskt
That's not a problem, Intel releases the driver source under a BSD license.

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kev009
Netflix has done phenomenal vendor management here. Intel is a big ship with
slow feeeback loops but they were able to connect the dots and hopefully we
will see Intel working in earnest to support the long standing and rapidly
growing segment of FreeBSD revenue.

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agapon
I wish AMD payed any attention to FreeBSD at all.

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seibelj
Idea for anyone who wants to make it:

Make a website where any person or company can donate a fixed amount (one-
time, periodically) that gets donated to open source. The website integrates
with or links to as many open source projects as possible. Perhaps the website
donates to each project once a month, pooling all the money together, to keep
from having lots of transaction fees.

To be more advanced, write a tool that scans all code bases and automatically
tells you what open source products you use. So if I work for a company, I run
the tool against all of our repositories, it determines which products we use,
and it syncs with the website. Then, say we donate $100 a month, it gets split
between all of them automatically in some sort of proportion.

Then github open source projects can sign up with the website and become
automatically tracked with the tool, so if someone or a company uses them they
can get paid.

I simply do not have the time to pursue this, but if I had the time I would. I
believe it will vastly improve the open source community and help finance it.

~~~
cperciva
_To be more advanced, write a tool that scans all code bases and automatically
tells you what open source products you use. So if I work for a company, I run
the tool against all of our repositories, it determines which products we use,
and it syncs with the website. Then, say we donate $100 a month, it gets split
between all of them automatically in some sort of proportion._

Deciding how to split the money is the hard part here. How do you decide what
each product is "worth"? Is left-pad worth as much as Apache? Probably not --
so do you say that money gets divided in proportion to lines of code? But then
you reward people for writing crappy code; why write a 1000-line program if
you can write a 10,000-line program and get more money? And how do you account
for different levels of usage? If I have a three-line Ruby script in my
repository because I didn't want to spend five minutes to rewrite it as a
shell script, and I run it once a month, do you count me as "using" Ruby?

Now, a tool which enumerates all the open source code you're using could be
useful. And maybe you could encourage users to make donations, and to tell you
the relative value they get out of each tool. And maybe you could then suggest
values based on how much other users say a particular tool is worth to them.
But you're not going to get any sensible values from an automatic process;
you'll need human valuation at some point in the process.

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snnn
BTW, Microsoft is also a major supportor of Freebsd foundation.

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keeler
This comes at an interesting time when Microsoft has recently announced server
designs on ARM architecture.

~~~
kev009
MS is a big supporter of FreeBSD and has done some high quality work in
supporting HyperV/Azure. ARM and users like Cavium are also supporters and
have done a lot of enablement work.

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faragon
Well, one-time 250.000 USD donation for a company like Intel, is quite small,
in my opinion, considering most FreeBSD servers are running Intel CPUs.

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microcolonel
Given the broad use of OpenSSH in business, it is shocking how little money
OpenBSD gets.

~~~
X86BSD
I have complained on bsd related threads before how the industry as a whole
should be appalled and embarrassed to their core for using core tools, utils
like OpenSSH and not giving a damn penny in return to fund its development.
Everyone uses OpenSSH. Everyone. It's a core part of almost the entire
internet now. The openbsd foundation should be awash in so much cash as to be
embarrassed because of it but they are not and I find it absolutely
unacceptable, corporate America should be ashamed.

