That article is still fairly good of a read, with a couple things slightly out of date, which I will note here simply for pedantry or anyone interested.
BSD no longer uses CVS; FreeBSD specifically has moved to SVN for their primary revision control system, and CVS and related tools (such as csup) are deprecated and in some cases disabled. Along with that, linux kernel is now in git, not bitkeeper.
While source is still the "base" method of installing and updating a FreeBSD system, and it will certainly always be available; now, binary base system and add-on utilities are becoming more popular. Specifically, `freebsd-update` can be used to update the base system's binaries and source. `pkg-ng` adds `apt-get` like binary package management.
ZFS is definitely one of the major things that has FreeBSD on all of my systems. I even run ZFS on single drive laptops:
pool: zroot
state: ONLINE
scan: none requested
config:
NAME STATE READ WRITE CKSUM
zroot ONLINE 0 0 0
ada0p3 ONLINE 0 0 0
errors: No known data errors
I run btrfs on my main arch installation. Have for ~6 months. If you get the fsck.btrfs tool (it is upstream) you eliminiate the only real showstopper with btrfs on Linux.
You get the online compression (meaning you use less space and read and write faster on mechanical storage because you have less to read / write at a time), you get the snapshots, you get subvolumes, checksums, etc.
I follow the btrfs development because I'd love to have at least the features of ZFS on Linux. However I would not dare (yet) to use it as a replacement for my current home fileserver (which owns ALL my data).
I'm amazed at how generally unreliable drives are at retrieving stored data with ZFS checksums in place to highlight the problem - it seems that on average every TB of storages has a problem with a block every half-year or so.
Jails. Recently I have configured a dedicated server to run nginx + php-fpm in jail: an entire jail consists of two static executable files, a few config files, and a few logs. There's nothing to pwn there, even if there's unpatched stack vulnerability somewhere. Jails are a very impressive security feature of FreeBSD.
My trepidation with LXC would be from a documentation POV... Jails are very much known quantities, while LXC is newer, not known for great docs, and thus is probably easier to screw up.
First, keep in mind that BSD is an operating system in the same way that Latin is a language: they each live on only in their descendants. Latin became French, Spanish, Italian, and a few others, and BSD became NetBSD, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Dragonfly BSD. There are different pros and cons to using a BSD operating system, depending on which one you choose. But the common themes are increased security and stability.
For a better answer, the websites of the 4 BSD projects give details on their focuses and strengths.
Actually, I'd say English claims the title of being the truest descendant of Latin. English not only directly uses descendants of Latin vocabulary, it also uses plenty of words from the other Latin descendants. It's kind of like a C++ diamond inheritance pattern.
English actually comes from West Germanic (not Latin). But you're right; there are lots of shared words between Latin and English, and this is mostly due to the historical relationship between England and France.
For anyone interested in high throughput/low latency networking, netmap ( http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/netmap/ ) looks really exciting in combination with a userspace TCP stack (e.g. unetstack). Pity I have no applications that could use it, would love to experiment.
Not sure I see why you would want to use it with a userspace network stack, I am sure at that point kernel networking is going to be faster. Netmap seems more useful for bridging, logging and UDP applications to me...
Localizing packet processing significantly improves cache performance, in addition to avoiding copies and context switches. Receiving data from a socket almost always necessitates it being copied from a SKB to userspace memory, and prior to that from the driver's rx ring to a SKB. Grep for all references to 'cache' in http://lwn.net/Articles/169961/ which is Van Jacobsen's earlier work on a system of comparable design. Another (insanely more complex) implementation is http://www.openonload.org/
"Please note that precompiled third-party packages are not available for 9.1-RELEASE at the time of release. See the Availability section below for further details."
"With the exception of systems relating to the building and testing of packages, all FreeBSD.org infrastructure has now been brought back online. A full audit of the third party package build infrastructure code ("pointyhat") and package testing infrastructure ("redports") continues, and neither system will be brought back online until audits are complete."
I use FreeBSD on my servers, most of them with ZFS. I wish there was some facility (like in Solaris) than as soon as a harddisk in a mirrorset fails, a spare is automatically swapped in. I will probably have to write that myself ;-)
Not necessarily :-) There's a ZFS fault management daemon up and coming in version 10. Look at the very bottom for the link to the source code in this page: http://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD10
Although my research in this case only consists of a quick google search, I can't seem to find any information on the Capsicum (sandboxing) project. I think I read somewhere that they were going to be publishing a userspace library / make the feature non-experimental etc in 9.1. However, I see no mention of it at all in the release notes. Does any one know what the state of that project is?
Tilaa (http://tilaa.nl) is my go-to for a few reasons. It's not as popular/well known as it ought to be, at least in English.
There's also ARP Networks (http://www.arpnetworks.com), which seems to have a good reputation, and RootBSD (https://www.rootbsd.net), which seems expensive for what you get. I haven't personally tried either.
I can give a huge thumbs up for ARPnet. They are based in downtown LA (and peer @ 1 Wilshire and I think they also are part of the Any2Net exchange from CoreSite), they also fully support IPv6 on VPC's as well as managed servers.
I've had both from them and have found support to be excellent. Honestly can't say enough good things about these guys.
I don't have the energy to type up a big long thing. Been with them over a year no problems encountered in that time, network seems stable and performant, they do not appear to oversell. If you have specific questions I'll try to answer them.
Which version of ZFS does 9.1 implement (could not find any info on that) ? Want to replace OpenIndiana b151 with FreeBSD 9.1 and reconnect my ZFS storage...
I'm running FreeBSD-CURRENT on a Thinkpad X220 and have no issues with any of the built-in peripherals. This laptop has an i5-2540M. The e1000 Ethernet is supported by the em(4) driver and I have a "Centrino Ultimate-N 6300" supported by iwn(4). The Intel GPU support was merged back to stable/9 in time for 9.1.
Right now suspend / resume is non-functional from a user's perspective: that is, suspend works, and I can resume, but the screen does not turn back on. I hope that this can be fixed for 9.2.
I have no idea. zfs on linux [1] is a different approach: It's a kernel module, out of the official tree (due to the license issues).
FUSE should work as well, I .. just didn't try. So ZFS for me is now a ~normal~ kernel filesystem, with some caveats about the external dependency and ignoring the big 'solaris layer' it needs to provide before zfs even starts.
What are the advantages/differences of using bsd over any other linux distro?
Edit: For anyone interested, I actually Googled the question and found a pretty interesting article: http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/01