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FreeBSD won me over about 12 years ago when I was looking for a stable OS for a small dynamic DNS home server. OpenBSD kernel panicked on my AMD K6-2 machine, and I'd just been screwed by a Mandrake Linux upgrade that left my system unusable, so I installed FreeBSD 4.7 and slogged through a month of "help, this isn't Linux".

It's impressive how both the feature set and community have grown since then and hard to imagine the OS now giant-locked or without ULE, ZFS, DTrace, PF, and a host of other things both homegrown and imported. I'm particularly excited to see BHyVe mature so there is a native VM option besides VirtualBox when I need more than a Jail.

FreeBSD still struggles in some scenarios, especially desktop use and availability of BSD VPS hosting that would let people cheaply experiment with the OS like they can with Linux on Linode or DigitalOcean. I have a FreeBSD desktop and a VPS running in prgmr.com's Xen environment, but both took quite a bit of effort to set up:

https://cooltrainer.org/a-freebsd-desktop-howto/

http://wiki.prgmr.com/mediawiki/index.php/FreeBSD_as_a_DomU

Happy birthday, FreeBSD!

3 comments

Most people don't seem to be aware that there is a well supported FreeBSD image supported for EC2 these days:

https://aws.amazon.com/marketplace/pp/B00KSS55FY?sr=0-5&qid=...

GCE can also run FreeBSD fine if you don't mind messing with KVM images yourself (a quick search should show some threads on how to get started). Many other providers would probably maintain support for this as well if more people spoke about their interests. It's not hard to support on KVM based systems so it's a matter of winning new customers not technical limitations.

Of course, it's worth pointing out that it's also easy (and cheap!) to rent hardware at places like Softlayer and Rackspace. Both of these provide support for FreeBSD on the metal. You could then run Jails (very mature and easy to use) or Bhyve (less mature but the guest support is growing at a reasonable pace) on top of this if you need to partition resources.

EDIT:

I should also note that I saw this company recently. It's a nice and cheap way to get a FreeBSD setup: https://www.vultr.com

I'm familiar with the AWS images but at the time I was looking for hosting Amazon charged more for running HVM than for PV images. I can't find anything about that now on their instance types page, so maybe it's no longer an issue.

Amazon charged more for running HVM than for PV images

The issue was that older instance types (now known as "Previous Generation instances") didn't support HVM for "unix" images, so FreeBSD had to pretend to be Windows -- which meant that you had to pay for a Windows license you weren't using.

All of the instance types introduced since 2010 have supported HVM "unix" instances, and as of a few months ago all of the older instance types have been officially deprecated.

It's no longer an extra charge (partly why I linked to that page which shows the costs).

http://bigv.io/ (bytemark) support FreeBSD no problems at all.

Edit: you just select "none" as the OS and point it at a FreeBSD 10 amd64 image URL as the CD image and it'll install fine and use virtio drivers for network/storage. Very reliable as well.

The only caveat with FreeBSD's implementation of PF is that it's now effectively been forked but hasn't been appropriately renamed. They're still using OpenBSD 4.6 and earlier configuration syntax, and have added some non-portable SMP functionality. FreeBSD PF and OpenBSD PF will be unlikely to share much if any code moving forward.