1) SMP scalability. 4-way boxes are relatively common, and hardware with higher CPU counts is only going to get more and more common. I'm no industry expert, but 5 years from now will my clients be considering buying 32 and 64 way boxes? Possibly. Will FreeBSD be in a positiion to compete favorably vs. the alternatives on such hardware?
People have been working on this for years. It's a difficult thing to get right. Sun has been spending a *LOT* of time doing this for Solaris, and I bet that even Linux isn't there yet.
2) RAID controller support. This is a huge one that affects me directly even today. Lack of in OS management tools for RAID controllers. I have some options if I can pick the hardware, but if a client brings me something and says this is the hardware you have to deal with a lot of times putting FBSD on it means living without management tools for the RAID controller in the OS. What good is hot-swappable drives if I have to take down the OS to rebuild the array?
YES! Well said. Actually, user front-end support for hardware is lacking in general. WiFi network handling, USB devices appearing and disappearing (stop pointing at me!), RAID controllers, environment stuff like fans, temperature sensors, I2C busses, etc.
3) Lack of direction in the project.
Sort of true. I like monopolies for this reason.
days I'm not so sure. Is FBSD targetted at network servers, at desktops, at embedded devices? What architectures do we target?
Network devices nowadays become more and more based on architectures like Xscale and MIPS. Perhaps you've seen recent articles on TheRegister.co.uk about small desktop boxes with VGA and USB, non-i386 based systems running Linux. I'm working on an embedded system which is AMD Geode with special hardware and very useful when you want 3 wifi cards + 2 ethernet interfaces plus a modem in a box.
The things that I like FreeBSD for is the sometimes incredible stuff that appears in the sources:
- GEOM based RAID filesystems. See Engelschalls 15 step process of converting a *running* system to a mirrored root filesystem with just one reboot for downtime.
- Network related improvements. BSD still shows the way in many ways (IPSec for one).
- The source quality is much,much,much better than in other OSes. Check out the USB drivers for one. We support 80% of the devices, with about 25% of the code (most of it was not written by me).
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