Re: Any serious production servers yet?

[Jason Watson <jwatson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Jun 3, 2006, at 1:49 PM, Danial Thom wrote:

> Many, many large network appliances (load
> balancers, bandwidth managers, firewalls,
> security filters) are based on linux or BSD. The
> reason is that CISCOs and "mega-gigabit routers"
> have no extra CPU power to do things like
> filtering and shaping at a very high level. I've
> made myself many millons of $$ selling a few
> thousand network devices, which is more than
> you'll ever make having a really cool desktop OS,
> even if its better than anything else out there.
> Designing a product for fun is one thing, but if
> you want to get funding you have to produce
> something that's useful for the corporate world,
> not for a bunch of pimply-faced college kids. The
> reality of the corporate world is that even if
> DFLY is the best damned OS ever written, they
> will use windows or linux, because you can't
> staff a support center with DFLY experts. Its
> simply never going to happen. You can however get
> in as a server platform, because only a couple of
> guys have to know what they're doing.

When Cisco wants to move billions and billions of packets, they use  
IOS, the latest version of which is based on QNX... not Linux, Not  
BSD. Maybe you just missed the news.
http://www.qnx.com/news/pr_1074_4.html

> Unix as a desktop box is not even an
> afterthought. 'BSDs niche is as a network server.
> Period.

I have used a Mac, and I MUST say, it makes a descent workstation.  
Darwin ports is much better than that apt/fink thing if you ask me. I  
would also go so far as to say that Mac OSX doesn't make a very good  
server out of the box, unless you buy the server edition, and then  
things start to get distinctly confusing when you try to move out  
side of apple's box.
'BSDs niche is where ever the person leading the fork wants to take  
it. There are enough projects out there that people could, say, not  
work on one where they disagree with the leader.

> You might think its a waste of time to optimize
> networking, but it seems to me you're wasting
> your time entirely if your goal is to be a little
> faster than LINUX as a desktop box. Who cares?
> FreeBSD with 1 processor is faster than linux
> with 2, but no-one used FreeBSD anyway. Nobody
> wants to use 'BSD as a desktop machine, except
> for a handful of people with a lot more time on
> their hands than the rest of us. People want to
> use 'BSD as network servers. People in the real
> world that is. Maybe thats why your not with
> FreeBSD anymore; your refusal to modernize your
> ideas to what's going on in the real world, and
> your complete lack of understanding where the
> dollars are to fund your efforts?

"It is our belief that the correct choice of features and algorithms  
can yield the potential for excellent scalability, robustness, and  
debuggability in a number of broad system categories. Not just for  
SMP or NUMA, but for everything from a single-node UP system to a  
massively clustered system. We believe that a fairly simple but wide- 
ranging set of goals will lay the groundwork for future  
growth." (http://www.dragonflybsd.org/)

no where does it say that the target for DragonFly BSD is aimed only  
at Workstations or desktops. No where does it say that DragonFly BSD  
is going to be the fastest OS on the planet. It doesn't even claim  
that DragonFly BSD will be the most feature complete OS on the  
planet. It says that the goal is "laying the groundwork for future  
growth." Matt has specifically said that he doesn't want to try to  
wring out every last possible drop of performance at the cost of  
giving up this goal, which is very consistent with the projects  
stated goals.

My real question is: Why are you, Danial Thom, interested in DFBSD at  
all?

Jason Watson.

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