What is FreeBSD?

FreeBSD is our favoured operating system, and the one that runs on the majority of our dedicated servers.

FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon 64, and EM64T), Alpha/AXP, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC® architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.

FreeBSD's performance

FreeBSD provides higher performance, greater compatibility with other operating systems and less system administration.

FreeBSD's developers attacked some of the more difficult problems in operating systems design to give you these advanced features:

• A merged virtual memory and filesystem buffer cache continuously tunes the amount of memory used for programs and the disk cache. As a result, programs receive both excellent memory management and high performance disk access, and the system administrator is freed from the task of tuning cache sizes.
• Compatibility modules enable programs for other operating systems to run on FreeBSD, including programs for Linux, SCO UNIX, and System V Release 4.
• Soft Updates allows improved filesystem performance without sacrificing safety and reliability. It analyzes meta-data filesystem operations to avoid having to perform all of those operations synchronously. Instead, it maintains internal state about pending meta-data operations and uses this information to cache meta-data, rewrite meta-data operations to combine subsequent operations on the same files, and reorder meta-data operations so that they may be processed more efficiently.
• Support for IPsec and IPv6 allows improved security in networks, and support for the next-generation Internet Protocol, IPv6. The FreeBSD IPSEC implementation includes support for a broad range of accelerated crypto hardware.
• Multi-threaded SMP architecture capable of executing the kernel in parallel on multiple processors, and with kernel preemption, allowing high priority kernel tasks to preempt other kernel activity, reducing latency. This includes a multi-threaded network stack and a multi-threaded virtual memory subsystem.
• M:N threading application threading permitting threads to execute on multiple CPUs in a scaleable manner, mapping many user threads onto a small number of Kernel Schedulable Entities. By adopting the Scheduler Activation model, the threading model can be adapted to the specific requirements of a broad range of applications.
• File system snapshots, permitting administrators to take atomic file system snapshots for backup purposes using the free space in the file system, as well as facilitating background fsck, which allows the system to reach multiuser mode without waiting on file system cleanup operations following power outages.
• Netgraph pluggable network stack allows developers to dynamically and easily extend the network stack through clean layered network abstractions. Netgraph nodes can implement a broad range of new network services, including encapsulation, tunneling, encryption, and performance adaptation.
• TrustedBSD MAC Framework extensible kernel security, which allows developers to customize the operating system security model for specific environments, from creating hardening policies to deploying mandatory labeled confidentiality of integrity policies.
• GEOM pluggable storage layer, which permits new storage services to be quickly developed and cleanly integrated into the FreeBSD storage subsystem. GEOM provides a consistent and coherrent model for discovering and layering storage services, making it possible to layer services such as RAID and volume management easily.
• Kernel Queues allow programs to respond more efficiently to a variety of asynchronous events including file and socket IO, improving application and system performance.
• Accept Filters allow connection-intensive applications, such as web servers, to cleanly push part of their functionality into the operating system kernel, improving performance.

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security

FreeBSD provides many security features to protect networks and servers. The FreeBSD developers are as concerned about security as they are about performance and stability. FreeBSD includes kernel support for stateful IP firewalling, as well as other services, such as IP proxy gateways, access control lists, mandatory access control, jail-based virtual hosting, and cryptographically protected storage. These features can be used to support highly secure hosting of mutually untrusting customers or consumers, the strong partitioning of network segments, and the construction of secure pipelines for information scrubbing and information flow control. FreeBSD also includes support for encryption software, secure shells, Kerberos authentication, "virtual servers" created using jails, chroot-ing services to restrict application access to the file system, Secure RPC facilities, and access lists for services that support TCP wrappers.



Visit the official FreeBSD website.