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Linux dominates the VPS world, and for good reason. Debian, Ubuntu, Alma, and Rocky are everywhere, well-supported, and familiar. (And yes, you can run RedHat Enterprise for free under a dev license if you want to).

Linux has a number of big advantages, but it’s not the only OS on the planet. Besides Windows, there are also the BSDs: Free, Open, and Net. I won’t get into the last two, because honestly if you want to run either of those two, you’re already thoroughly immersed in the BSDverse.

But let’s talk FreeBSD for a moment. Should you run it? There are some pros and cons.

Fate Is the Hunter is a 1961 memoir by aviation writer Ernest K. Gann. It describes his years working as a pilot from the 1930s to 1950s, starting at American Airlines in Douglas DC-2s and DC-3s when civilian air transport was in its infancy, moving onto wartime flying in C-54s, C-87s, and Lockheed Lodestars, and finally at Matson Navigation's short-lived upstart airline and various post-World War II "nonscheduled" airlines in Douglas DC-4s.

This is the third part in our seven-part series on the BSD series of operating systems.FreeBSD is the most widely-used BSD operating system. It runs on amd64, 64-bit ARM (aarch64), i386, 32-bit ARM (armv6, armv7), RISC-V, and PowerPC. In earlier times, I thought of the three BSDs (DragonFly wasn’t around yet) as “NetBSD = runs on anything, OpenBSD = high security, FreeBSD = awesome on amd64”.

That’s All, Folks!

So my conclusion is that if we’re using the frontierest of all the frontier models (Fable, 5.6-Sol) you can get a passing grade. Barely.

Now granted, if you put a spotlight on me this moment and thrust a microphone into my hand and said “tell me a joke!” I couldn’t do it. But these are supposed to be ASI-threshold models, heralding a new dawn of technological progress. Yet, a nightclub comedian who may have never finished high school can outperform them in this most human metric.

Stick to code, toasters.

I’ve never been a big NetBSD guy. I played with it a long time ago (like 30 years ago) when I had a 68K Mac and wanted to run a Unix-like OS on it, and NetBSD was the only option. Since then I’ve fooled around with it once or twice, but I just never had a need that OpenBSD or Linux didn’t meet better.

But recently I saw that NetBSD 11 was released, and it included this brag:

New MICROVM kernel for x86, supporting both i386 and amd64, NetBSD 11.0 introduces a dedicated MICROVM kernel designed for extremely fast virtual machine boot, leveraging PVH boot, VirtIO MMIO, and multiple kernel optimizations, it can boot in about 10 ms on 2020-era x86 CPUs.

That certainly sounds cool! My home Proxmox runs on an i5-8250U which is a little earlier than that. It was released in 2017 Q3. So maybe it won’t be quite 10ms, but it should still be pretty fast. //

However, that live image doesn’t use MBR but rather GPT. So you’ll get this if you use the recipe on NetBSD’s MICROVM page.

...

At that point, I entered a ? and it gave a list of potential disk candidates. I don’t know why I remembered that trick of yore…must be some 30-year-old brain cell that didn’t expire when it was supposed to. Well you know what they say, cache expiry is the hardest problem in computer science.