"I would be totally on board with using FreeBSD as my primary server OS .. if it had a container engine."

FreeBSD is the original container engine - although, for the sake of completeness, we should count Solaris "zones" and call it a tie ...

I think there is a cultural and temporal connotation of Docker - and the use-cases that it typically enabled - that makes it seem very different than 'jail' but make no mistake: jail did all of those things and more, many years earlier.

The VPS, as we currently think of it, was built first[1] on top of FreeBSD and jail.

[1] JohnCompanies announced beta availability of "server instances" on 303 and cDc mailing lists in mid 2001. Someone else coined the term "VPS" a bit later ...

Being first doesn’t matter. Docker became the industry standard and jails did not.

Linux VServers came out around the same time (2001) [0], so the claim about "many years earlier" is spurious without being more specific about which things it did earlier.

[0] http://linux-vserver.org/Frequently_Asked_Questions#Is_this_...

Docker in 2020 is, for 95% of the use cases [1], nothing but a better packaging format than .tar.gz.

I'm sure you could throw away the isolation bits and it would still be as popular.

[1] Totally scientific figure, of course.

According to Wikipedia, FreeBSD jails were available in a release version in 2000. Linux had Virtuozzo in 2001, explicitly for the use case we would call VPS today. Solaris didn't have zones until 2005.

It's mainly that the Docker interface is easier to use, in fact I don't know of any Jails frontend that comes close.

Also, at this point it would need to support the same image format and be very obviously better to see wide adoption.

From what I understand, this was a question and was answered on other forums.

FreeBSD jails are supported by HashiCorp's Nomad [1], and their Consul + Vault are in FreeBSD ports

The tool mentioned in the article, Bastille, would be used to install popular software into jails.

Also ansible works well for pushing software into FreeBSD. There is even an ansible role for nginx that works with FreeBSD that's maintained by nginx team.

FreeBSD jails do not insist to have 'one service per jail', shell access is fine too. A jail is pretty well functioning 'compartment' within an OS.

Jails work very well with ZFS, one elegant feature, is that one can create a 'base jail', create a zfs snapshot with it, and then copy it over (using zfs) to any new jail created. Sort of like a base template. [2] This makes spawning new jails with base software install rather quick.

I do not know if FreeBSD has some interesting Linux features like io uring.

On the other hand, Netflix is achieving an impressive 200 Gb/s serving video traffic [3] using FreeBSD

- - - Just wanted to mention, that OpenBSD is different than FreeBSD, different kernel, many different user space programs, different team, different primary goals, different hypervisors that they have built-in, etc.

Same statement for Dragonfly BSD, same for NetBSD.

With regards to issue with OpenBSD 'on a laptop once'

I am using 5G wifi running OpenBSD 6.6 on a laptop, not using USB adapter. The driver I am using is iwn0. Works great. Perhaps we have different laptops...

[1] https://nomadproject.io/docs/drivers/external/jail-task-driv...

[2] https://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/how-to-configure-a-freebsd-jai...

[3] https://people.freebsd.org/~gallatin/talks/euro2019.pdf

I wonder if FreeBSD Jails never really caught on that much because of the name.

I'm not sure about that. Outside of tech, nobody cares what the technology is called. Inside... we've been happily freezing process groups, killing frozen children, and reaping the dead ones. Objecting to jails would be silly at this point.

What’s your laptop?

hp EliteBook 2560p. 12gb ram, 120 gb ssd.

The fact that the Docker port was allowed to die is a pretty good indicator of how little interest there is in using FreeBSD in the industry, particularly in cloud environments.

"jails" are the native solution for FreeBSD. You wouldn't set up a FreeBSD server to run docker.

Most companies would rather use Docker than jails and that alone is a reason to avoid BSD.

That's fine. I've been running various Linux distros since 1993 and FreeBSD since 1996. Each has its strengths and weaknesses.

And how can I run OCI-compliant image straight to the jail? Docker isn't just a namespaced runtime.

It's simple: You shouldn't run Docker images on FreeBSD.

Wrong answer. This means you can't run modern cloud-native apps on BSD.

Tell that to companies like Netflix: https://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=Netflix-...

Not all applications require Docker.

Last I checked, FreeBSD is only used in their CDN appliances and Netflix is deploying their services in containers on Linux.

As I said, Linux and FreeBSD have their strengths and weaknesses. I use both, and definitely wouldn't deploy certain types of applications under FreeBSD.

You are probably still right but MIT license means that you just won't see what industry uses. Industry has used free BSDs and not contributed in code or money nearly to the extent that it has for some Linux flavors.

The license has nothing to do with that. GPL2 doesn't require industry to contribute back either. I decline to speculate on why industry adopts Linux.

A bit of it had to do with the SCO lawsuits, it had a freezing effect on BSD and it's adoption numbers dropped way behind Linux after that and never really recovered.

The SCO lawsuit targeted Linux vendors:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCO%E2%80%93Linux_disputes

Earlier a USL (Unix System Lab) lawsuit went after some BSD stuff:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNIX_System_Laboratories,_Inc.....

That wasn't SCO. It was an earlier set of lawsuits by AT&T because 4.4 BSD had evolved from AT&T unix.

Your right, It's been a while and I got the two mixed up. Funny how time can play tricks on memory. It was the AT&T lawsuit. SCO was Linux. Sorry for the misinformation. IIRC Linux had come out a few years before the BSD lawsuit, but I do recall a time when they where neck and neck and BSD started dealing with the legal issues and it just seemed like Linux keep on gaining traction after that.

You might want to have a look at Bastille, a “system for automating deployment and management of containerized applications on FreeBSD”.

https://bastillebsd.org/

The FreeBSD answer to Docker is to not use it. Just go back to the old way of running services on bare metal or VMs. It's not a bad idea, but other people who worship refinement and perfection will get mad at you for it.

Given as jails started with FreeBSD, no, I would say that running services on the bare metal is not the FreeBSD answer.

If you use the built in tools, FreeBSD leans towards telling you to just install ports/pkgs and then start them jailless. Your machine becomes a pet experiment in short order.

I also find it weird that each jail has its own copy of all of userland. It's a lot easier to use macOS sandboxing, certainly it saves more disk space. And I feel like I'll forget to update them.

Yep. I’m not sure I agree about user land but jailing everything is definitely not the default. It’s there if you want it and know what you’re doing, though.

That's probably not what you are looking for, but FreeBSD has some container infrastructure around it. E.g., https://www.bsdstore.ru/en/about.html

huh, watchutalkinbout?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bhyve

That's a hypervisor. It's not the same thing as Docker. Docker is more like jails.