Why We Run FreeBSD current at Netflix - Drew Gallatin

[@MaestroCipher]

A heartfelt thanks to Drew and the Netflix team for your incredible contributions and groundbreaking improvements to the FreeBSD OS. Your hard work and dedication are truly inspiring!

[@LuizPessol]

very good, thank you for sharing this presentation.

[@Shahriyarj]

Amazing talk.

[@IVI-I]

Thanks for the detailed presentation. Compelling reasons to track current. Will need to look into the size of ARC performance hit with ZFS.

[@niacinsoupbowl]

Interesting talk, thanks.

[@Tb0ne212]

Great work! Thanks!

[@cederom]

FreeBSD 🥰🥰🥰

[@Felix-ve9hs]

Pretty amazing to think that almost all that runs on Netflix' servers is FreeBSD, Nginx and Bird.

[@petegiant]

with 10 people!

[@nxjoseph]

Nice talk.

[@petem6846]

What fascinates me as an example of how the group approaches their job is Netflix's willingness to let disks fail as opposed to investing in RAID. Focus on the customers' needs, not on sexy (expensive) technology--supports a very successful company. Lots of learning to do here.

[@billv4987]

Is it possible to watch Netflix content at 1080p using FreeBSD?

[@mzar8092]

Sure, why wouldn't it be possible?

[@billv4987]

@@mzar8092 mine gets output at 720p, but on my Windows laptop it does not get lowered to 720p.

[@ozgureren91]

@@mzar8092Please read relevant customer support page of Netflix. They support Linux “up to 720p” and does not mention FreeBSD at all.

[@DoubtingThomas333]

only if your hardware is supported by the distro itself. Otherwise lots of choppiness, dropped frames and higher than expected CPU usage.

[@Prizm44]

​@mzar8092 - Because Netflix has a stick up its ass regarding which OS/device it allows to playback a high quality stream. Even if the hardware is good enough to play 10x 4K streams at the same time.

[@faraday852]

great video, but doesn't really explain why they choose freebsd and not linux

[@Shahinc0]

he presented 04:00 UFS and ZFS file systems, in Linux can't find that Filesystems. and i think they are using for BSD license.

[@bonezed]

yes it seems like they chose FreeBSD partially due to politics, but I suspect it was also partly because FreeBSD is just different from mainstream

[@rakeshravindran3147]

It is not covered here. But years (15+) ago, FreeBSD was the (and still is in some cases) go to system when you are super concerned about low-latency network related activities. Its network stack was that much better. On top of that it had much better scheduler, if you didn’t care much for interactive applications (or a really bad scheduler if cared for interactive processes). Not just for Netflix, even for many high-frequency trading firms were on that. But Linux caught up afterwards and it is not longer a big distinguishing factor. But regardless of this, companies like Netflix saves a lot of money by running their own kernel-dev teams. For them, it is a lot of knowledge that is built up and doesn’t make any sense in switching to Linux anymore. Not to mention there is zero advantage now with Linux over BSD on the server side applications. The main take-away that you should have is that these guys are capable of making changes that a level that would benefit the company at scale and they would be choosing the system that worked best for them at any point in time. If Netflix was starting right now, who knows, may be they will use Linux (or may be they won’t considering how messy, political the Linux kernel dev landscape is now…)

[@mmyes8076]

Probably because of Cuck license (BSD)

[@intreal]

I love FreeBSD so much, and I stuck with Linux on my home server because of a single piece of software which only runs in docker.

[@stefs1]

I had that too, but for that I Just did a little bhyve vm with Linux and Docker, and that solved my problems with missing Docker.

[@libredove]

what about linuxinator and podman? maybe that could work

[@hughoxford8735]

Doesn't tracking current present a security risk?

[@AntranigVartanian]

-CURRENT is also covered by the FreeBSD security officer, if there’s a bug/vuln, it’s investigated in -CURRENT as much as in -STABLE and -RELEASE

[@MaestroCipher]

@@AntranigVartanian Good to know!