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Jeremy Baron:
> Also, what do you lose with FreeBSD?
 
> so far I can think of:
> * zfs dedupe

ZFS version 28, including dedup, was integrated into FreeBSD head 
(9-CURRENT) in February.  I imagine it will make it back into 8.x 
eventually, but although dedup is nice on paper, I'm not sure it's 
actually very useful. You need so much memory to cache the DDT (since 
putting it on disk kills performance) that it's usually cheaper to just 
buy more storage.

It's also unlikely that we would ever migrate the /home NFS server to 
FreeBSD (at least in the near-term future), since it lacks the HA 
clustering and volume management that Solaris has.  (This is an example 
of an area where Linux *does* have an advantage over FreeBSD.)

It's *also* unlikely that we would ever put /home on ZFS, whatever OS we 
used.  I don't mind ZFS for root, and I use it at home (on both FreeBSD 
and Solaris) without problems, but we've had some unfortunate issues 
with it at the TS that have made me a bit wary.

> * there's no longer a single "goto" company to get support from
> (guessing...) so you lose that annual cost but it may be non trivial to find
> the right hacker to find/fix a problem in an emergency. of course much of
> that support is likely to come for free (a guess)

This is true, and is something that came up the last time we discussed 
this internally.  I'm not too worried about this; the login server 
environment doesn't really tax the OS, and I can't think of many (any?) 
problems we've had there that would require vendor support.  

There are places like iXsystems <http://www.ixsystems.com/bsdsupport> 
which offer third-party support for FreeBSD.  I don't have any 
experience with that, or any idea how it compares price-wise.

> * you're still a different platform from the rest of wikimedia (basically
> the foundation) and so lose economy of scale

Not sure what economies we could gain here.  The Toolserver is 
completely separate from Wikimedia's infrastructure (except that we use 
the same colo), and both of us prefer it that way.  IOW, even if we 
used Linux, TS systems could not become just another Wikimedia server.

> * you mentioned SGE would still be available but it may be unmaintained
> (last I checked its enwp article, it said oracle was close sourcing it) just
> to keep in mind, I wouldn't stay just for SGE

SGE is dead on every platform, including Solaris.  The replacement is
either Oracle Grid Engine (which costs money), or one of the various 
forks of the open-source SGE (which should work on both FreeBSD and 
Solaris).  We're still using SGE because I want to see which (if any) 
fork gains acceptable before switching.

> things you lose with linux vs. FreeBSD:
> * zfs is gone and (assuming lvm2 + traditional RAID vs. zfs) generally thin
> storage provisioning and snapshotting is much more limited and wasteful and
> fragile/more room for error. also most storage expansions will end up w/
> transition periods that have *no* redundancy.

ZFS snapshots are nice, but OTOH ZFS can't remove storage from a pool or 
do any kind of online relayout, both of which are standard features in 
VxVM (and I assume in Linux LVM as well, although I have no experience 
of it.)

In any case we don't store data on login servers.

> * zones/jails

Linux has lxc and OpenVZ, which are both very similar to zones, as well 
as Xen or KVM for full virtualisation.

> I haven't kept up with the status in the last ~8 months but debian-kfreebsd
> may have matured enough to warrant a look. (See #debian-kbsd on oftc)

Never really saw the point of that.  If you want Linux, use Linux.  (I 
guess at the moment it's the only way for Linux users to get a useful 
ZFS?)

        - river.
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