Linux vs FreeBSD, and other *NIXes

[david at thekramers.net (David Kramer)]

So does anyone have *recent* facts or anecdotes about the technical merits 
of one over the other?

Historically, FreeBSD has had a more secure and debugged TCP/IP stack, but 
I haven't heard that claim in a while.

This is really a scaled-down "cathedral and bazaar" experiment, as linux 
is developed by thousands with very little official oversite, while BSD is 
guarded by a smaller group.




In line with some other discussions on this list. from a 
performance/scalability/reliability perspective, the areas that 
differentiate *NIXes the most are:
- Scheduling
- Memory management
- Filesystem scheme (when to write, how much to read, etc)

One of the reasons Sun did so well in the past is that they had excellent 
scheduling schemes.  In fact, it was replaceable, so you could change the 
scheduling scheme to suit your purposes.  As I understand it, Linux's 
scheduler is one of it's weaknesses, and a reason it benefits so much from 
multiprocessors.  Dunno about FreeBSD.

AIX played freakish games with memory management.  The upside is that
memory management is very efficient and usually sucessful.  The downside
is that memory is constantly borrowed from disk cache to heap to shared
libraries so it's hard to know exactly how much memory is actually free.

-------------------------------------------------------------------
DDDD   David Kramer                           http://thekramers.net
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