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Why I run FreeBSD for my home servers (2024)

(aumont.fr)
187 points psxuaw | 13 comments | 31 Mar 25 12:59 UTC | HN request time: 1.455s | source | bottom
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asveikau ◴[31 Mar 25 16:22 UTC] No.43536779[source]▶
ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me. I have a machine with a zfs pool running samba and nfsd.

Philosophically I tend to prefer *BSDs over Linux. I have a few FreeBSD machines, one OpenBSD, and one Linux.

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0x457 ◴[31 Mar 25 17:15 UTC] No.43537356[source]▶
> ZFS is probably the biggest reason for me.

Maybe in the past there was an argument for that, but ever since FreeBSD started using OpenZFS implementation...what's the difference?

My ideal OS would be something like NixOS, but on FreeBSD and with better language than Nix.

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bluGill ◴[31 Mar 25 20:39 UTC] No.43539695[source]▶
ZFS is a first class part of FreeBSD. you can use it on linux, but it will always have some rough edges. How rough it open to question though, for some it works well.
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1. tomxor ◴[31 Mar 25 22:16 UTC] No.43540561[source]▶
Used ZFS on Debian in production for 8 years, yet to experience rough edges but always interested to learn.
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2. turtledragonfly ◴[31 Mar 25 22:38 UTC] No.43540716[source]▶
Do you use ZFS for root, on Debian? (enabling "boot environments")

I've recently switched my FreeBSD setups to use that scheme, and it's been nice. Would be interested to hear if it's similarly straightforward on Debian (my second-favorite OS :)

Obviously requires support in the bootcode; I'm not sure of the state of that for Linux.

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3. Numerlor ◴[31 Mar 25 22:54 UTC] No.43540870[source]▶
I've been running zfs on root on my Debian home server, only the install was a tiny bit more involved but it was done in maybe half an hour going off of the guide and trying to understand everything it was doing with 0 experience (... And then did it again after I broke networking after an hour lol)
4. tomxor ◴[01 Apr 25 00:06 UTC] No.43541407[source]▶
No, to be fair I use it for everything except root (which I prefer to backup as IaC, not that I wouldn't use ZFS, it's just not default so requires more effort). I use ZFS datasets to back everything except the OS, including DBs which has been the most satisfying aspect of using ZFS (being able to snapshot live DBs together with all other relevant state rather than a as a separate replication process).

While I can't comment on using it for root, I can say for other use, the only annoyance I have is compiling the kernel module on every single update. This is automatically handled by APT, but for very small servers it can be slow... at most ~15 mins. Could be solved with private distribution for a large fleet but I can't be bother with that stuff. Hoping at some point Debian will relax their strict "to the letter of the GPL" attitude at some point like they did with install media drivers. But it's not the worst experience, at least installing is automated.

5. asveikau ◴[01 Apr 25 00:55 UTC] No.43541720[source]▶
I have never had a good experience with out of tree kernel modules on linux, so I am skeptical of this report. Usually for Linux Debian is my distro of choice.
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6. free652 ◴[01 Apr 25 01:54 UTC] No.43542038[source]▶
zfsbootmenu https://docs.zfsbootmenu.org/en/v3.0.x/

Also nice way to recover zfs if anything goes wrong. yea, it's a linux image for just booting. But you put it as an EFI image, and works great.

7. SoftTalker ◴[01 Apr 25 03:28 UTC] No.43542536[source]▶
My experience with ZFS (over 10 years ago now) was awful. Still have a bad taste in my mouth though no doubt it's much improved today.
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8. zie ◴[01 Apr 25 05:16 UTC] No.43543082[source]▶
Sounds like maybe you were holding it wrong? This is year 20 for ZFS in production.

Though Linux support a decade ago with ZFS was pretty rough around the edges. That's not true anymore for many distros of Linux.

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9. SoftTalker ◴[01 Apr 25 15:51 UTC] No.43548257{3}[source]▶
I didn't run it. But several times a year there were multi-day outages for "rebuilds" and at one point Oracle consultants were involved to get it back on its feet.
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10. tomxor ◴[01 Apr 25 16:13 UTC] No.43548516{4}[source]▶
If that's Oracle's ZFS then it's not really comparable, it's essentially a very old closed fork. So on top of using a languishing outdated version you have another reliability problem (Oracle). It's a little bit like comparing OracleDB to MariaDB.

Most people use Open ZFS which is from the Illumos project, which was basically the escape hatch that the engineers who wrote ZFS used when Oracle tried to close source Solaris after the Sun acquisition. There are decades of improvements in all of the OSS versions that comprise Illumos (which Oracle has denied themselves by attempting to close source it, since they cannot feed off of downstream OSS code). i.e most of the people who wrote ZFS immediately left Oracle and worked on Open ZFS.

Open ZFS is for both FreeBSD and Linux, and is what most people are referring to when discussing ZFS. I've never used Oracle ZFS and never will.

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11. tomxor ◴[01 Apr 25 16:50 UTC] No.43548951[source]▶
I have little experience with kernel modules. ZFS is the only one I have long term experience with on Debian.

The only issue I've had with the kernel module aspect is VPS configuration, I use Linode and they used to automatically set everything to use the hypervisor kernel, but the kernel module is obviously built against the versions installed on your OS and these will probably be different.

All you have to do is make sure the boot configuration is set to use GRUB if using a VPS. Linode seem to have switched to this by default for Debian now.

12. zie ◴[01 Apr 25 17:08 UTC] No.43549162{5}[source]▶
Agreed on the larger picture. Oracle ZFS is calcified ZFS. Their last stable release it looks like was in January of 2023.

OpenZFS released 2.3.1 a few weeks ago: https://github.com/openzfs/zfs/releases It has direct support for FreeBSD and Linux.

macOS, Windows and other ports work great, but are not (yet) upstream: https://openzfs.org/wiki/Distributions

13. 0x457 ◴[03 Apr 25 20:19 UTC] No.43574855[source]▶
Well, rough edges:

- bootloader (when root is on ZFS)*

- ARC vs kernel page cache and OOM Killer

That's all in my opinion.

*: Relative to FreeBSD, but that's because bootloader in FreeBSD is part of the base system and in linux it could be one of many.