It would be interesting to read about their experiences over the last 18 years.
I recently installed FreeBSD on a home server and was very pleased both with the process and the result. Also, the documentation is just impressive (that goes, in my experience, for all the BSD systems).
I was at Y! from 2004 to 2011, when I started it was FreeBSD only except for acquisitions. When I left it was a mix of FreeBSD and RHEL, with everyone being strongly encouraged to move to RHEL.
I think the justifications were better support for running on Linux (storage drivers, Java, MySQL, oracle), better support for virtualization (although bsd jails are better than virtualization in my opinion, and a better fit for Y!), and it would be easier to support one os instead of two and acquisitions (including inktomi) really wanted to run on Linux.
The drop dead date for getting off FreeBSD kept getting pushed back, but I'd guess they've moved almost everything by now.
This could be a much longer answer, but jails have nowhere near the level of control and isolation a "real" VM does even with the relatively recent additions of things like vimage and HRL's. Jails are awesome and I have used them for many years, but they are not a replacement for a hypervisor for many(most) use cases.
That said, when a young upstart was trying to sell me on Linux superiority and described Docker to me, all I could do was snicker.
For my uses at Y!, jails were great: I was using them to setup test environments that were closer to production: each jail had software to match one of the machine types in production, but I didn't need to get a whole bunch of machines that would mostly be idle.
As I was my own jailer, lack of resource limits wasn't a real problem. I greatly benefited from the lack of performance penalties; everything ran at the same speed in or out of the jail. I had one or two systems running in VMs and they were terrible: a) things were clearly slower, b) virtual disk provisioning is terrible, c) timekeeping (hopefully things have gotten better since 2011)
If the point you're trying to make is linux users love reinventing the wheel and making it more complicated and prone to failure, there really is no need. I believe you.
lxd has absolutely no relevance to this discussion. They are not jails, they are not like jails. As noted in my OP in this thread, jails are not a replacement for hypervisors.
You need to do your research again on docker and lxd. They aren't the same thing at all.
> That's what I've been saying.
No, you've been saying Docker is so much better than jails. Either you don't know jails or docker or both, I can't tell. Just you really want Docker to be awesome.
Completely not true. Around 2008ish there was a big migration towards using RHEL. There's still some FreeBSD boxes, but the vast majority have been switched at this point to Linux.
I don't completely agree with the reasoning, but it mainly came down to driver support, maintenance cost, and debugging tools.
Note that we didn't run stock freebsd. It was a custom freebsd4 with a custom gcc 2.95 toolchain. I don't remember all the mods, but migrating from 4 to 6 was a nice undertaking, and it was done in parts. People who worked there will remember the term "4 on 6". After the migration, the kernel was 6 (and you got the latest drivers) but we were still running those weird 4 user-land binaries.
Inktomi (YST) was acquired in 2003, later Overture (YSM) and both were linux shops. YST was the biggest property by far and we didn't have any kernel developers. We were doing just fine with stock debian, then stock RHEL. (I did a few very minor patches for 32-bit, like splitting user-space/kernel to 3.5/0.5G instead of 3/1G, and some caching improvements for /proc, but I wasn't a kernel developer). Linux just worked. Drivers were available and supported for the HW we needed. Oprofile, systemtap worked fine for the most part. We later hired one kernel developer to help Mail move to linux, but we always had more freebsd kernel developers.
For freebsd you needed to write the drivers and the tools. That took time and money. The community was also smaller and it was harder to hire people with experience. Acquisitions were running on linux too.
The decision was not easy. Y! already had great freebsd engineers. By announcing that linux would be the supported platform going forward it was a given that many of them wouldn't be happy and leave. Fortunately not all of them left. For example Peter W. still works there.
In any case I don't think there was really an alternative.
Even when Rick was at Y! the push to move to linux was there. Rick had written most of the base libraries for freebsd originally (mdbm, ylock, ylock_kern, yfor, etc.), and tools like the package manager yinst and ysar, but being the great engineer he is, he ported them to linux and got the same or better performance. (In the yinst case he delegated the maintenance to a very capable engineer)
Note that Yahoo! was employing a few very bright freebsd kernel engineers but when the decision was announced that linux was the future many of them decided to leave. That made the path forward even clearer. It wasn't just a matter of integrating new acquisitions easier, and the fact that it was easier to hire people with linux experience than with freebsd experience. That was around 2008 IIRC. I left in 2010, and Rick less than a year later.
I recently installed FreeBSD on a home server and was very pleased both with the process and the result. Also, the documentation is just impressive (that goes, in my experience, for all the BSD systems).