Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux

Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by bladerunner82 on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @04:16PM (#11255783)

Throughput. The BSD networking stack has been very carefully engineered over time. Linux is OK, but nowhere near as robust. FreeBSD is legendary for load tolerance and network throughput, that on equal machines would choke a Linux server. Seen it, work(ed) with it. When we do something serious that requires heavy load and awesome throughput, we always lean on FreeBSD, never anything else. Everything else has always let us down.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by saosebastiao on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @04:32PM (#11255885)

I've seen this claim before, but I've also seen the counterclaim that Linux network stacks have since caught up and even surpassed the BSDs on throughput and latency.

Whether one or the other is truly better though might be irrelevant...either is such a monumental improvement over the windows networking stack that there are bound to be large benefits.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by detaro on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @04:35PM (#11255900)

This is an OS for the control plane for hardware switches, so its throughput is not that important. Hardware does most of the heavy lifting.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by bladerunner82 on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @04:48PM (#11255966)

I understand this, but was answering the question (in general) about why I believe BSD has better networking.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by chris_wot on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @05:18PM (#11256110)

Not that I really doubt you (the FreeBSD developers have a hard won and worthy reputation in this area!) but do you have any benchmarks that help back this claim?

I promise this isn't a question to try to make a point, I'm genuinely interested.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by Nux on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @04:35PM (#11255904)

Had mediocre network performance and increased load with freebsd on VMs (kvm), while at the same time a linux one would saturate a whole link.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by cyphar on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @05:16PM (#11256104)

Why are you trying to get network throughput on a VM? Of course it's going to be slow, but KVM probably has some passthrough optimisations for Linux guests.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by nl on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @10:56PM (#11257308)

Because that's what software defined networking is (mostly) about. In the majority of cases it's used as a way to setup a network plane for virtualized hosts.

Edit: See for example why VMWare bought Nicira: http://techcrunch.com/2012/07/23/vmware-buys-nicira-for-1-26...

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by cyphar on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:18AM (#11257753)

I'm not a BSD guy, but I can still see it's a little unfair to compare the network throughputs of Linux and *BSD as guest VMs on a Linux host running KVM. You aren't going to get good throughout in that case without hardware passthrough (even then it's still bad). End of story.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by Nux on Thursday March 10, 2016 @02:42AM (#11257810)

I get your idea, but Kvm on linux is prolly the most deployed hypervisor in the world or will be soon. If it doesn't run well on it then it won't be used. End of story.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by nl on Thursday March 10, 2016 @05:49AM (#11258408)

Sure it's unfair. But it is the current state of software.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by mixmastamyk on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @04:26PM (#11255843)

That was as true ten years ago, is it still? Have there been any recent benchmarks?

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by derefr on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @08:10PM (#11256824)

I know that a bit more recently (~4 years ago) WhatsApp emphasized that FreeBSD's networking stack was part of what allowed them to scale so cheaply. I'm sure there was a good amount of benchmarking and profiling involved in that choice, using their production workloads.

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by DevOpsTiger on Wednesday March 09, 2016 @05:48PM (#11256249)

Benchmarks please, thank you!

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Re:Microsoft will release a custom Debian Linux by davidgerard on Thursday March 10, 2016 @05:18AM (#11258293)

Got benchmark numbers on that?

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