

FreeBSD Quarterly Status Report, January-March 2014 - bado
http://www.freebsd.org/news/status/report-2014-01-2014-03.html

======
Touche
FreeBSD is a fantastic operating system and this report highlights why.
Documentation is something the team takes very seriously; as important as the
code itself, so if you're impressed by this high-quality report you'll be even
more impressed by how easy it is to find your way around FreeBSD because of
the documentation.

~~~
0161
I too noticed the quality of the report. I know what it is and what it is for
as soon as I start reading. Well laid out, succinct, contact details and
further links for each item.

It's all very encouraging.

------
hf
Enticing; depth and vision. Coherence is always tricky, but, to my mind, they
pull it off.

To be quite honest: Debian/kFreeBSD is still _my_ version of FreeBSD, but
that's just laziness.

------
0161
This report has only made me want to try FreeBSD even more at some point.

Some highlights for me were:

\- FreeBSD on Chromebook \- Chromium port \- Improved Wine port

~~~
danford
I love FreeBSD and was planning on switching some servers from Linux but found
that it consumed about 25% more power than my Linux boxes (even after
extensive power management tweaks) and in the end didn't have much advantage.

It's not hard to install freeBSD in a VM, set up ssh, run it headless, and ssh
in. I suggest you give it a go. It's a great learning experience.

~~~
networked
>I love FreeBSD and was planning on switching some servers from Linux but
found that it consumed about 25% more power than my Linux boxes

Wow, I wouldn't have thought there would be such a dramatic difference in
power consumption on anything but portable hardware. Did you try to measure
the CPU and I/O usage on your servers and compare them between Linux and
FreeBSD? I wonder if FreeBSD's greater power draw was due to its ACPI
implementation or if the average system load was also higher (ZFS?).

~~~
danford
I wasn't using zfs at the time and I didn't do much comparison with CPU and
IO, I used a wattage meter. I followed the FreeBSD guide
([http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ac...](http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/acpi-
overview.html)) and tried just about everything. My Linux box was running at
about 9watts (idle) and freeBSD started out at around 18, but I got it down to
about 12watts after making a lot of optimizations.

I think most of the difference is because FreeBSD is using older more stable
software, and the Ubuntu server was running some of the latest software.

~~~
takeda
Do you remember which FreeBSD version and which Linux kernel version was it?

Linux had tickless kernel + CPU scaling for a while. FreeBSD is lagging in
this aspect.

~~~
profquail
The FreeBSD kernel is tickless as of FreeBSD 10:

[http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/09/20/freebsd-10s-new-
techno...](http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/09/20/freebsd-10s-new-technologies-
and-features/)

~~~
takeda
Yes, exactly, it only has it for couple of months, that's why I asked about
version.

