Both FreeBSD & Linux are reliable and Servers running either software often stay up for years. But disk I/O of linux is non-synchronous by default which corrupts filesystem after system crash.
Freebsd’s disk I/O is high performance for transactions based applications for example databases. It is observerd that under heavy network load, the network performance of linux is 20-30% below of Freebsd under same hardware.
Being open source Linux allows anyone to change security code due to which code is modified rapidly and there is no formal code review policy. On other hand FreeBSD security components are checked for errors. Freebsd includes very robust packet filtering firewall system. Linux ext2/ext3 has several new journaling filesystems which fix data loss due to system crash. While FreeBSD uses UFS(Unix File System) which is more complex than ext2/ext3. UFS has many flags to use for performance and security for example schg flag does not allow to change file & directory unless you remove it.
Device Driver support of Freebsd is better than Linux. FreeBSD boot loader allows to load drivers at boot-time. Some time it becomes very difficult for linux users to use vendor’s drivers. Freebsd can run programs compiled for linux, SCO Unix and BSD systems. But Linux can only run binaries that are compiled for linux. Freebsd has many GBs of free packages to install via ports (Package management system of Freebsd). Linux has also free available software but Linux has not a central location like ports collection. of Freebsd.
Several organizations give professional support for both Freebsd & Linux. All the major Linux vendors offer some level of support, and several offer full 24/7 service. There are many forums where Linux questions are answered for free.
Both FreeBSD & Linux can be installed on as many systems as you like for no additional cost. Both Linux & Freebsd’s total cost of ownership is very low.
So if you are planning to deploy a transactional applications then for the best performance Deploy FreeBSD for example Email services & Database applications.
Please give your opinion, reviews & comments to select between 2 open source Operating systems FreeBsd & Linux so that we may focus to post more information about OS you like.
Comments
voretaq7
September 15th
Rising to the defense of the penguins! How uncharacteristic of me!
I can’t really say anything good about the various incarnations of the ext filesystem (I really, honestly, truly think it’s crap), but I’d be shocked if it’s truly a fully asynchronous filesystem. I have found it to be much more susceptible to data corruption than UFS, but that’s subjective — I’d love to see empirical studies on it.
I will note that ext2/ext3 support file attribute flags (e.g. schg and it’s little brother uchg), though I’ve not got much experience with them on Linux.
“Device Driver support of Freebsd is better than Linux.” — Linux has a slightly broader range of supported hardware (Comparing FreeBSD 7 and recent RedHat Enterprise releases) and FreeBSD support for cool new toys can often lag behind Linux as hardware vendors will often write tools and drivers for Linux first.
FreeBSD has always done well in this regard (”Everything I need works”), but Linux is still ahead of us here. Just think of it as an opportunity for the FreeBSD Foundation to do more outreach to hardware vendors.
ferrisoxide
September 15th
Hey.. thanks for the overview.
I’ve been looking for a new OS, now that Apple has pretty well abandoned PPC and have been tossing between Linux (Yellow Dog) and FreeBSD to keep my old hardwire alive.
Based on what you’re saying, I think I’ll definitely be giving FreeBSD a go – it’s closer to OS X than Linux.
Cheers
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