Why We Run FreeBSD-current At Netflix – Drew Gallatin
Why We Run FreeBSD-current At Netflix – Drew Gallatin
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40096774
https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/
https://papers.freebsd.org/author/drew-gallatin/
https://openfest.org/
From PDF slides at https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/OpenFest2023.pdf :
Netflix formerly ran FreeBSD-stable
- "Merge [Netflix'] FreeBSD from FreeBSD-stable every few weeks."
- "Moved to a new -stable branch every few years"
-- "This sometimes took months" - "Upstreaming patches required porting them to -current"
Now, Netflix runs FreeBSD-current
- "Merge upstream from FreeBSD-current every 3 weeks"
-- "We notice & resolve new upstream bugs that impact us immediately"
-- "Much easier to upstream code and collaborate with upstream developers"
Netflix FreeBSD Performance Milestones
- "2017 -- First 100 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2020 -- First 200 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2021 -- First 400 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2022 -- First 800 Gb/s CDN server"
- "2023 -- First 100 Gb/s CDN server consuming only 100W of power"
Watch the video to check out the story of the Magical Mystery Merge!
Thanks to abhinavk for suggesting this very fun video!
I hope everyone gets the servers they want!
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Comments
This is amazing. FreeBSD is running super stable for me so I can understand you're running the current branche. To me it's like Debian in terms of stability but more current.
FreeBSD has been around forever. Was popular long before Linux.
The early history of BSD and Linux is a fascinating and intricate topic, but [...]
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
according to Wiki FreeBSD started 2 years after Linux.....
I'll continue what I started to write above (and was a reaction to what @Joseph said):
@someTom , where exactly do they say that FreeBSD started two years after Linux? This seems to me to be false
(FreeBSD was more usable earlier than Linux, but they were both still very much niche-OSes)
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)
What wiki? That is just not correct.
Also, FreeBSD is based on the original BSD that had it's first release in 1977 so trying to make it sound like Linux has been around longer then BSD is just absurd.
Well, what wiki could it possibly be....
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FreeBSD
Initial release 1 November 1993; 30 years ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
Initial release September 17, 1991; 32 years ago
So "initial release" for Linux is 0.02 but for FreeBSD it's 1.0.
You have to love wikipedia sometimes.
In my comment above, I pointed out that v1 of the Linux kernel appeared in the first quarter of 1994
The fewest of the few were using Linux before v1 of the kernel
"A single swap file or partition may be up to 128 MB in size. [...] [I]f you need 256 MB of swap, you can create two 128-MB swap partitions." (M. Welsh & L. Kaufman, Running Linux, 2e, 1996, p. 49)