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0 pointsredserk2mo ago0 comments

Whether an appliance OS uses SystemD or not is as silly of a concern as “does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie”

What about performance characteristics? Recoverability of workloads?

I’m interested in a FreeBSD base OS because it seems ZFS is better integrated and ZFS has a lot of incredibly useful tools that come with it. If Bhyve is at least nearly as performant as KVM, I’d be hard pressed not to give it a whirl.

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6 comments · 2 top-level

hedora2mo ago· 4 in thread

It's not silly at all.

I've been repeatedly burned by systemd, both on machines I've administered and on appliances. In every situation, the right fix was either "switch distros" or "burn developer-months of work in a fire drill".

In fact, I just decided to go with FreeBSD instead of proxmox specifically because proxmox requires systemd. The last N systemd machines I've had the misfortune to touch were broken due to various systemd related issues. (For large values of N.)

I assume that means anything built on top of it is flaky + not stable enough for production use.

pdntspa2mo ago

I have never really understood the systemd hate. It sure as hell beat the sorcery that was managing init.d scripts for everything.

I managed the distro upgrade on hundreds of remotely-managed nodes, porting our kiosk appliance from a pre-systemd debian to a post-systemd debian, and out of all the headaches we suffered systemd was not one of them, short of a few quirks we caught in our development process. It pretty much just worked and the services it provided made that upgrade so much easier.

Curious how you got burned, I hear a lot of complaining but haven't seen a lot of evidence

fouc2mo ago

I don't understand the init.d script hate ;)

redserkOP2mo ago

It absolutely is silly. I’ve been responsible for managing low-thousands of Linux servers with systemd and it’s standardized a lot of things that otherwise would’ve been a lot of bespoke scripts.

arch1e2mo ago

Yeah, I’m kind of in the same camp. I never really had issues with systemd either. It mostly just works, even if it’s a bit heavy.

For me, moving to FreeBSD wasn’t about escaping systemd, it was more about the overall system design and how cohesive everything feels. That said, I’ve tried to keep Sylve neutral on that front. I don’t really position it as “systemd vs not”, just focus on what it actually does well.

It’s still early and not as feature complete as Proxmox yet, but I think it already stands on its own as a solid option.

gerdesj2mo ago

“does the lead developer prefer cheddar or brie” Quite right but given I live in Somerset (UK) I can have both: Cheddar is in Somerset and where the eponymous cheese originated and quite a lot of brie is produced here too - it's not the French original effort but rather good.

I have quite a lot of customers that we have migrated from VMware to Proxmox. Some of them are rocking zfs instead of vmfs. Mostly these are Dell servers. Proxmox with zfs seems to be more aggressive about disc failure warnings, which I think is helpful.

Pick what OS works for you.

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