Tag: FreeBSD

When using FreeBSD, the most common method for virtualization and process isolation are jails. Introduced with FreeBSD 4.0 in March of 2000, they predate the closest Linux equivalent, cgroups (and, by extension, Docker), by nearly a decade.

A core part of any virtualization technology is its interaction with the networking infrastructure. In this regard, I’ve found much of the available documentation lacking, often deferring to third party tools which are no longer maintained. As such, I’ve had to scrape multiple sources and reverse engineer system programs to figure out how it’s put together.

On my home server, I use FreeBSD. While FreeBSD beat Linux to the containers by nearly a decade (comparing jails to cgroups), I have to acknowledge that cgroups are the superior design. Whereas jails are a bunch of hacks piled on top of chroot, cgroups are a much cleaner abstraction of the kernel’s namespaces. But even beyond the elegance of the design, software like Docker makes it much easier to run your tools in containers, even if the offloading of sysadmin responsibilities it encourages triggers my OCD.

On my home server, I use FreeBSD. Sadly, the BSD’s have been falling behind Linux in the past decade but they still appeal to many people and even have a few tricks left in them. Most notably, as Linux has been struggling with next generation file systems for a few years now, FreeBSD has integrated ZFS for over a decade.

While modern Linux distros become ever-more complex interplays of components, the BSD’s have remained relatively simple. Custom installation (by hand or script) is trivial when the system is distributed as a tarball or two versus a constellation of packages numbering in the thousands. Just boot into the live CD, format the file systems, unpack the tarballs, install the boot loader, and reboot into your new system.